Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde

In Architecture Unbound noted architecture critic JOSEPH GIOVANNINI traces our current architecture landscape to the disruptive scientific advances and transgressive and progressive art movements that roiled Europe before and after World War I, and then to the social unrest and cultural disruptions of the 1960s. Cumulative shifts across disciplines and social systems established fertile new ground for the rise of an inventive, antiauthoritarian architecture that, in the 1970s, challenged the status quo. Built manifestoes in the 1980s led to digital inventions of the 1990s, and after the turn of the millennium to climax structures that now populate world capitals competing for cultural stature on the international stage.

GiovanninI profiles the most influential practitioners and their most notable projects, including Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall, Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House, Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV Tower, and Herzog and de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing. With an irregular format designed by celebrated graphic designer Abbott Miller of Pentagram, Architecture Unbound presents a uniquely comprehensive history that chronicles an avant-garde that moves from the margins into the mainstream.