YEAR IN REVIEW 1998: ARCHITECTURE

Architecture With many national economies booming, the year 1997 was a good one for architecture in much of the world. It was also a year of increasing internationalism. Several of the most prominent American firms were doing as much as half their work overseas. At the same time, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York City chose 10 finalists to compete for the job of expanding its facilities, 6 of the firms were either European or East Asian. The biggest news, however, was the formal opening of two long-anticipated art museums, one in Los Angeles and the other in Bilbao, Spain. Each was designed by one of the world's most prominent architects, both winners of the Pritzker Prize. The two buildings seemed to define a watershed between an older and a newer kind of architecture. The first of the two to be completed, a branch of New York City's Guggenheim Museum, opened in October in Bilbao. The architect, Frank O. Gehry of the U.S., created an amazing swirling pile of angled and curving free forms with an exterior surface of shining titanium. It was a building that could have been designed or built only with the aid of a computer. Gehry, in fact, had been a pioneer in adapting computer programs from the world of aircraft design. (See Buildings, below). To many observers his museum seemed to be a masterpiece that might inaugurate a new era in architecture. The museum, the cost of which was paid by the people of Bilbao and its province, was also interesting as a demonstration of the way in which a star architect and attention-getting building could put a relatively little-known city on the world's cultural map. Only two months later, in December, the even larger Getty Center opened in Los Angeles. Bringing together, on a single dramatic site, most of the art-related activities funded by the bequest of wealthy oilman J. Paul Getty, it was undoubtedly the most discussed and anticipated building of its time. With a $1 billion construction budget, it was often called the architectural commission of the century. The architect was Richard Meier, also an American, who had long been known for houses in an elegant, austere Modernist style and for museums in Barcelona, Spain; Frankfurt, Ger.; and Atlanta, Ga. In some ways Meier's museum seemed as much a culmination of traditional modernism as Gehry's seemed a new departure. Its crisply cut white shapes reminded observers of the early modern architecture of the French pioneer Le Corbusier. Dispersed among gardens, courtyards, and water features, the Getty buildings also reminded one of a much older model, the villa built by the Roman Emperor Hadrian outside Rome.