{"id":195124,"date":"2022-04-05T17:00:53","date_gmt":"2022-04-05T21:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interiordesign.net\/?post_type=id_news&p=195124"},"modified":"2022-11-30T14:42:09","modified_gmt":"2022-11-30T19:42:09","slug":"joseph-giovannini-unveils-new-book-architecture-unbound-a-century-of-the-disruptive-avant-garde","status":"publish","type":"id_news","link":"https:\/\/interiordesign.net\/designwire\/joseph-giovannini-unveils-new-book-architecture-unbound-a-century-of-the-disruptive-avant-garde\/","title":{"rendered":"Joseph Giovannini Unveils New Book ‘Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\"Conceived
Conceived in the late \u201970\u2019s but not completed till 2008, Steinhaus was the late architect G\u00fcnther Domenig\u2019s own private educational retreat near Klagenfurt, Austria. \nImage courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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April 5, 2022<\/p>\n\n\n

Words: <\/span>Peter Webster<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Joseph Giovannini Unveils New Book ‘Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde’<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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No one raised a white flag of surrender in the contentious style wars between modernists and post-modernists in the 1980\u2019s. But in his encyclopedic new volume, Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde<\/em>, New York architect, critic, and frequent Interior Design<\/em> contributor Joseph Giovannini chronicles a stealth movement that settled the dispute when a loosely associated group of architects moved onto the next big thing: deconstructivism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1983, as if out of nowhere, a half dozen architects set sail for architecture\u2019s wilder shores. Fragmented, angular, formally complex, idea-driven designs by Zaha Hadid<\/a>, Frank Gehry, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Thomas Leeser, and the speculative Peter Eisenman shifted architecture\u2019s gears from static to dynamic: The buildings leaned, flowed, and flew. In 1997, the radical ideas gained momentum and wide acceptance when Gehry\u2019s chaotic Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, a storm of titanium splashing on the banks of the River Nervi\u00f3n in Northern Spain, opened to universal acclaim. The design, with swimming, twisting fishlike shapes, detonated the \u201cBilbao effect.\u201d Culturally ambitious cities around the world soon wanted buildings that answered to nonlinear laws of chaos science instead of platitudes of classicism or solid geometry. Out with bombast, in with energy, charge, and change.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\"The
The linen-bound cover of Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde by Joseph Giovannini (New York: Rizzoli, $50) has been designed by Pentagram\u2019s J. Abbott Miller and Yoon-Young Chai.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

This led to a Mardi Gras of formal invention on four continents during the last two decades. Fractured forms, billowing shapes, and delirious spaces in convention centers, museums, and office towers captured headlines, illustrated stamps, and populated the Internet. Architecture Unbound provides a critical voice for an avant-garde little understood as a group, explaining the \u201cwhy\u201d of all the agita. In a narrative arc suggested by the book\u2019s subtitle, Transgressive, Oblique, Aberrant, Deconstructed, Digital, Giovannini puts into perspective the renegade buildings that bent the right angle, broke the box, and escaped Euclid. Simultaneously a history, critique, and biography of a period, the 832-page book fills a critical void, landing in the field like an event. The cumulative story, based on in-person interviews with architects and visits to buildings as they opened over 35 years, is unusually up close and personal, a living history written intimately from the inside. It cannot now be duplicated: an In Memoriam lists 40 people who died since he started the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The Vitra Design Museum (1989) in Weil am Rhein, Germany, was Frank Gehry\u2019s first use of curvilinear forms. Image courtesy of Gehry Partners. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Giovannini embeds the architecture in a larger cultural history in which artists, musicians, and writers like Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, John Cage, and Virginia Woolf mingle across time and disciplines with architects. The shift in architecture from static to dynamic mirrors similar shifts in philosophy and science. First Nietzsche and then Bergson, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault lifted the philosophical anchor on reason, releasing certainty into drifts of interpretation. Scientists including Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg introduced relativity, probability, and principled uncertainty into a world that no longer seemed so solid. Cubism, futurism, suprematism, surrealism, and dada overthrew art\u2019s tradition of perspective and dissolved pictorial realism. Historically, two world wars, the Depression, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust broke the idea of history as a smooth continuum through time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"The
The central stairwell in Eric Owen Moss\u2019s Lawson-Westen house (1993) in Los Angeles is like a gyroscopic orrery connecting the main rooms. Photography by Tom Bonner.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"Lightfall
Lightfall is the torqued atrium at the center of the Herta and Paul Amir Building (2010), an addition to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel by Preston Scott Cohen. Photography by Preston Scott Cohen, INC.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

But modernists continued to maintain a belief in functionalism, that architecture was a machine for living in. By the 1960\u2019s, however, a few visionaries questioned such certainty: French architect Claude Parent and his philosophical partner, Paul Virilio, set buildings on the oblique, loosening the grip of geometry, emphasizing the physical experience of moving through spaces that pushed and tugged the body. Architects began to break up the whole into parts, exploit curves, and abandon geometrical unities. They joined forces with the computer to build extreme architecture of bewildering complexity and even wonders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That the avant-garde came in from the margins to radicalize architecture and occupy a central role in the profession is the basis of this unlikely story. But over 700 illustrations show how liberated architects initiated a new and growing branch of architectural history. Walking a thin line between order and disorder, equi\u00adlibrium and disequilibrium, plumbing the mysteries of the irrational, architects invented fresh astonishments whose function was not only to disrupt but also to fascinate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Another
Conceived in the late \u201970\u2019s but not completed till 2008, Steinhaus was the late architect G\u00fcnther Domenig\u2019s own private educational retreat near Klagenfurt, Austria. Photography by Gerald Zugmann\/Vienna.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Zaha
Zaha Hadid\u2019s unbuilt Zollhof Media Park (1989\u201393) in D\u00fcsseldorf, Germany, was captured in a multi-perspective acrylic-on-paper rendering. Image courtesy of Zaha Hadid Foundation.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Another
Another unbuilt Hadid project, a house (2010) in La Jolla, California, was imagined with an asymmetrical, gull-winged roof. \nImage courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n