Late Modernism architecture

Late modernism is more an era than a movement: modernism’s final decades, roughly 1960-1990, when the Modern Movement’s ideas were taken to extremes. The critic Charles Jencks gave the label its theory in Late-Modern Architecture (1980), describing buildings whose structure, technology and services were overstated at the very moment modernism itself was being questioned.

You recognize it by scale and systems: curtain walls, extreme repetition, prefabricated elements, and buildings conceived as flexible frameworks with interchangeable parts. Several currents shelter under the umbrella: brutalism with its raw concrete, structuralism with its cellular repeated units, and high-tech with its exposed steel and visible services.

The Pompidou Centre in Paris (1971-1977) by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers is the textbook example, a building just as often filed under high tech. Structuralism took shape at the Otterlo congress of 1959 and produced Herman Hertzberger’s Centraal Beheer offices in Apeldoorn (1972); high-tech surfaced in the 1970s and carried the approach forward with Norman Foster and Rogers’s Lloyd’s Building in London.

The end came gradually. Jencks famously dated the death of modern architecture to July 15, 1972, when the Pruitt-Igoe housing blocks in St. Louis were demolished, and during the 1980s postmodernism replaced modernism as the principal style for institutional and corporate building. Today the era’s largest buildings are being reassessed, and many now carry heritage protection.