Language: English
In »Architecture Unbound«, noted architecture critic Joseph Giovannini traces a century of the avant-garde to transgressive and progressive art movements that roiled Europe before and after World War I, and to the social unrest and cultural disruption of the 1960s. Manifestos produced during this pivotal and fertile period opened the way to tentative forays into an inventive, anti-authoritarian architecture in the next decade. Built projects broke onto the front pages and into public awareness in the 1980s, and took digital form in the 1990s, with large-scale international projects landing on the far side of the millennium.
"With strategies of explosion, collision, and fragmentation, architects were introducing forces that dislocated architecture’s system of thought and construction predicated on gravity. Architects produced fresh astonishments, some fantastical. The buildings worked, and they worked well, but perhaps their highest and best function was to fascinate". (Joseph Giovannini: »Architecture Unbound«)
»Architecture Unbound« tracks complex historical developments and conceptual influences across the century, presenting an authoritative and illuminating history of the twentieth-century avant-garde and its evolution into digital form-making in the twenty-first century. He profiles 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 in Berlin, Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV Tower, and Herzog and de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing. He includes scores of other projects and architects who contributed to the groundswell of work that established a broadly based movement that has continued in an ongoing digital phase.