Architecture: All the anniversaries we will celebrate this year

On the Mauá pier, the museum of applied sciences that started the urban regeneration process of the Maravilha Port is focused on future challenges: from climate change, to environmental degradation, to social inequalities. The horizontally oriented structure with a cantilever roof that runs along the quay and a façade punctuated by movable “fans’” recalls the archetypal shape of a ship or a bird, and seems to float on water.

The new Whitney Museum, relocated from Marcel Breuer's monolithic building on Madison Avenue in the Meatpacking District (one of the city's most dynamic regenerated neighbourhoods, also thanks to the redevelopment of the adjacent High Line as a public linear park, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and James Corner Field Operations), more than an iconic architecture, is a ‘mechanism’ serving the different functions it houses (permanent collection of modern art, events and exhibitions), and echoes in its vocabulary the pragmatism and constructive straightforwardness of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

The complex, located in the Parc de la Villette in Paris, is the latest step in the completion of the Cité de la Musique (Bernard Tschumi). Dedicated primarily to symphonic music, it houses a 2,400-seat auditorium, rehearsal rooms, administrative, commercial, educational and restaurant spaces, and stands as an imposing sculpture clad in iridescent aluminium panels, in dialogue with the surrounding pavilions.

The Mirador, included in a vast programme of redevelopment of the capital's metropolitan areas, is an emblematic intervention in the panorama of public housing in Madrid in the early 2000s. Openly breaking away from the recurring collective housing in the district, represented by anonymous courtyard buildings, MVRDV designs a 22-storey skyscraper to house 156 flats, composed of the aggregation of 9 autonomous blocks with recognisable external treatments, assembled around the empty space of the panoramic terrace on the twelfth floor which serves as a common square and visually frames the Guadarrama mountains.

The headquarters of the National Orchestra of Porto, located on a new public square in the historic Rotunda da Boavista, is characterised by a monolithic, facetted volume of white concrete, comprising an auditorium for 1. 300 seats (in the shape of a ‘shoebox’, vituperated by architects but acoustically hyper-performing, as Rem Koolhas states), a smaller, flexible performance space, ten rehearsal rooms, recording studios, a didactic area, a restaurant, a terrace, a bar, a VIP room, administrative areas and an underground car park. Corrugated glass facades at both ends open the hall to the city, which itself becomes a scenic backdrop for the performances.

Extremely long-lived, Philip Johnson (Cleveland, 1906 - New Canaan, 2005) was a true ante-litteram archistar and an undisputed protagonist of 20th century world architecture, indissolubly linking his name to the genesis and diffusion of the International Style in its very best forms (starting with Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut 1949), and then to other architectural movements, from Postmodernism to Deconstructivism. He was the first architect awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize (1979).

One of the most brilliant expressions of High Tech, the three-storey building housing the headquarters of an insurance company introduces innovative elements, paving the way for a new vocabulary that would later become recurrent in the design of work spaces: from the high-performance glass curtain wall, to the suspended floor (among the first at the time, anticipating the system solutions imposed by the introduction of IT in the office), to the green roof, to the inclusion of escalators, a swimming pool, and a restaurant to “humanise” the office environment.

In the Ramot district, the Ramot Polin residential complex recalls a beehive. The construction is an aggregation of 720 prefabricated housing units in the shape of dodecahedrons built from pentagonal concrete slabs with a load-bearing function. The original design, now heavily modified, resembled five fingers in plan, each of which comprised five or six interlocking apartment blocks with internal courtyards. Shops, schools, community services and car parks were grouped in the central area.

The complex, which houses the Mondadori headquarters, was designed by Niemeyer on the model of the Ministry of Business in Brasilia (1962-1964), with which the Segrate project shares the choice of using the portico element and the subdivision into volumes distinguished by form and function. The main body, a glass box immersed in the park designed by Pietro Porcinai and suspended from a portico with parabolic arches, is countered by smaller volumes with abstract shapes horizontally oriented that emerge from a pool of water with both aesthetic and practical functions (to collect water from the offices' air conditioning system). In the centre of the artificial lake, a giant sculpture by Arnaldo Pomodoro emerges.

The Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, considered one of the fundamental institutes of management education in India, comprises several buildings (from teaching facilities to student and faculty residences) surrounded by vegetation. Kahn conceived the project as a balanced ensemble of austerity and majesty, developed through full-bodied, exposed brick buildings (to emphasise local craftsmanship) pierced by arches and pure geometric forms.

In January 1945, John Entenza launched the experimental “Case Study House” programme on the magazine of which he was editor (Arts&Architecture): a research movement for low-cost residential models in response to the housing crisis and building boom after World War II. By fostering the link between design and serial production, the initiative lays the basis of the compositional vocabulary that characterised the most successful season of American Modernism: spatial and functional efficiency, attention to microclimatic wellbeing, distributive and formal clarity, aesthetic quality integrated with utility, and wide use of industrial materials and prefabrication as a tool that does not impede creativity and the uniqueness of living space.

The fundamental role of Robert Venturi, one of the undisputed exponents of the 20th century and one of the main figures of Postmodernism, was to push architectural thought to go beyond the “orthodoxy” (and sometimes the simplifications) of the Modern Movement and to learn “from the street” and the intrinsic complexity of the “ordinary” world (rather than from the academy): his text “Learning from Las Vegas” (Cambridge, USA 1972) provides an important key to decipher the evolution of the contemporary capitalist city (not only in America) driven by communicative symbolism and commercial dynamics. He won the Priztker Architecture Prize in 1991. 

At the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, Le Corbusier presented the Plan Voisin, an urban planning solution for the development of the centre of Paris: a model that, breaking away from the compactness of the garden-city and the deference to the historic city, envisages through widespread demolitions a high anthropic concentration in a limited series of cruciform skyscrapers spaced out and surrounded by greenery, connected by a clear linear viability where car traffic is strictly separated, even in its elevation, from pedestrian paths on the ground. The project was exhibited in the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion, designed by Le Corbusier himself as a prototype of a standardised housing cell that could be aggregated and replicated at the urban scale. After the demolition, it was rebuilt in Bologna in 1977 (Giuliano Gresleri e José Oubrerie).