As 1990s edge us into the twenty-first century, architecture in America is an art in transition. Stylistically, technologically, and organizationally the next steps for architecture and for architects are unclear.
International Style modernism, which was supposed to be a style to end all styles, had, by the middle of the twentieth century, proved to be as vulnerable to mediocre design and economic pressure as any architecture before it. In the 1970s and 1980s a public weary of a seemingly endless procession of undistinguished and indistinguishable glass-and-steel slabs embraced what came to be known as Post-Modernism. The cynical, disillusioned overtones of Post-Modernism were largely lost in the general sight of relief as buildings once again began to sprout recognizable pediments, cornices, and decoration. The issues that Post-Modernism raised, however, especially concerning the nature of building and the relationship of structure to building materials, as well as larger issues of the fragmented nature of late twentieth-century life, led logically to Deconstructivism, which had a brief vogue at the end of the 1980s.
Stale Practice
Although there are many excellent architects still working in each of these modes - as well as some still practicing International Style - generally speaking, by the beginning of the new decade the former had gotten stale and the latter had flared and faded. The computer, the fax machine, the economics of building, and the changing demands of clients, along with the shifting boundaries between public and private sector responsibilities, all combined to create a sense of disorientation in the architectural community.
In the midst of this confusion it may pay to examine the work of three firms - Taft Architects, Adele Naude Santos, and Clark & Menefee - whose names are not yet household words but whose principles have what many architects today lack: a clear sense of direction and purpose.
Of the three, Taft Architects may be at once the best known and the most controversial. Founded in 1972 in Houston, Texas, by present partners John Casbarian, Danny Samuels, and Robert Timme, the firm was identified throughout the 1970s and 1980s with the best of witty, ironic Post-Modernism. However, according to the architects of Taft, "We never saw ourselves that way." Says Samuels, "We've always been interested in the issues we generate, and one generated by society, as opposed to the current architectural gestalt."
In formal terms those issues tend to the archetypal and abstract, leading to an architecture that is referential and suggestive, an architecture that is about architecture. In much of Taft's work a predominant concern is with distortions of the accepted - and expected - size, shape, scale, or relationship of architectural elements.
In a building for the YWCA in Houston, for example, Taft provided a generous double-doored entryway, and then dwarfed it with a huge glass transom and an arch of color created by carefully cutting square tiles into curved shapes. Similarly, the curving limestone façade at the entrance to the O'Connor house in Concan, Texas, is a massive statement of arrival and possession - which steps down immediately to become a porch
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