100 Buildings 1900-2000, produced by The Now Institute, Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 2017
We’ve just been through the Winter Olympics and the season of entertainment awards that culminated with the Oscars. And the parade of annual awards for design of all kinds is already underway. This book takes a longer view, rounding up the best buildings of an entire century and ranking them from 1 to 100. It’s presented in an admirably concise 4″ x 10″ format, with a two-page spread for each project that includes one well-chosen black-and-white photo, an informative text of about 100 words, and a few line drawings that concisely explain a lot.
The Process
Why and how has the sponsoring Now Institute come up with a credible best-of-a-century roster? In his foreword to the book, the Pritzker Prize-winning Los Angeles architect Thom Mayne (a co-founder and director on the Institute) cites “a declining awareness of historical precedent among my students” and the desire to help fill that gap with this “reference source.” In a collaboration between the Institute and his own staff, a procedure was pursued that is systematic, yet not quite scientific.
The selections for the book were made by reaching out to a sampling of the world’s most respected architects, asking them to list “the 100 built projects essential to a young architect’s education.” Of those contacted, 58 met the request. The list includes such luminaries as Tadao Ando, Steven Holl, Richard Meier, Cesar Pelli, Zaha Hadid, Sir Richard Rogers, Moshe Safdie, Robert A.M. Stern, Robert Venturi + Denise Scott Brown, Tod Williams + Billie Tsien, and (of course) Thom Mayne. While the choice of those participating was subjective, their judgment is probably quite representative of today’s design practitioners – at least the senior ones.
The (unranked) lists submitted by all the responders are duly printed at the end of the book, so you can find out what each of them considered “essential”, if you’re up for reading some 5,800 entries. What the book compilers did was to enter the responses into a matrix and count how many times each building was listed. Et voila, the top hundred listed in order. And if you just want to know who voted for each of those, there’s a fold-out dot matrix sheet documenting that.
The Outcome
Given the time frame and make-up of the respondents, it’s not surprising that the early 20th Century Modern masters are strongly represented. Buildings by the Swiss-French LeCorbusier rank #1 and #2 – his 1931 Villa Savoye and his 1955 chapel at Ronchamp – and six more of his works made the top 100: his 1960 La Tourette monastery near Lyon (#9), his 1952 Unité d’Habitation apartment block in Marseille (#20), his 1954 Mill Owners’ Association in Ahmedabad (#76), his 1967 Centre Le Corbusier in Zurich (#96), and his one building in the U.S., the 1962 Carpenter Center at Harvard (#92).
Following closely, with six works in the book, is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose German Pavilion for the Barcelona Fair of 1929 is #3, accompanied by the 1951 Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois (#6), the 1958 Seagram Building in New York (#15), Crown Hall, 1956, at IIT in Chicago (#50), the 1930 Tugendhat House in Brno, Czech Republic (#53), and the 1968 New National Gallery in Berlin (#71).
Then, of course, there is the all-American Frank Lloyd Wright, with five entries, starting with #5, the complex of buildings he designed from1936 to 1951 for the S.C. Johnson Company in Racine, Wisconsin. His other chosen works include the 1937 Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania (#13), the 1959 Guggenheim Museum in New York (#16), the 1910 Robie House in Chicago (#31) and the 1906 Larkin Company office building in Buffalo (#80), the only one of the 100 no longer standing.
Other architects represented by more than one work include another American, Louis Kahn, with his 1965 Salk Labs in La Jolla (#7), 1972 Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth (#22), 1971 Philips Exeter Library in New Hampshire (#29), and 1962-1983 National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh (#59).
The Finnish Alvar Aalto is included for his 1948 Baker House dormitory at MIT (#54) and two of his widely admired works in Finland.
The book’s two works by the late-in-the-century design star Frank Gehry are his own 1979 house in Santa Monica (#48) and his much praised 1997 Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (#12).
The 20th Century progress of women in architecture can be measured by the three buildings out of 100 credited primarily to them: Zaha Hadid’s 1993 Vitra Fire Station in Germany (#99) and two buildings by the Brazilian Lina Bo Bardi: the 1957-68 Museu de Arte (#57) and the 1977-86 SESC Pompeia (#95), both in Saõ Paulo. Bardi’s work has only recently been accorded well-deserved recognition, and Hadid did her more significant works after the cut-off year 2000.
The selecting experts clearly had little enthusiasm for the Postmodern work so prominent late in the century. Only one work in the book illustrates the mix of Modernism with historical and vernacular references that characterized PoMo (see review of Postmodern Design Complete, by Judith Gura, in the 2/26 officeinsight). That is Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s 1964 Vanna Venturi house in the suburbs of Philadelphia (#51). Widely praised buildings by leaders of Postmodernism such as Charles Moore and Michael Graves do not appear.
There is, notably, no recognition among the 100 buildings of any in the historical styles that prevailed in the early years of the century. Participant Robert A.M. Stern, for one, included among his own 100 such eclectic landmarks as: New York’s Grand Central Terminal; Washington’s Union Station, Lincoln Memorial, and National Gallery; Chicago’s Tribune Tower; and the Pasadena City Hall.
The choosers were much more enthusiastic about works from the dawn of the Modern Movement. The anointed 100 includes 10 from the transitional period early in the century, among them Henrik Berlage’s 1903 Amsterdam Stock Exchange (#87), Greene & Greene’s 1909 Gamble House in Pasadena (#88), Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s 1909 Glasgow School of Art (#36), Otto Wagner’s 1912 Postal Savings Bank in Vienna (#25), and Antoni Gaudi’s 1912 Casa Mila in Barcelona (#63).
Geographical Distribution
All told, 32 of the chosen 100 are in the United States, almost all of them concentrated in Southern California, the Chicago area, and the Northeast. There is one work each from Canada and Mexico, three from South America. A total of 53 are located in 15 European countries (27 of those in Germany, France, and Italy), only nine in all of Asia (a serious under-representation), and one in Australia – Jorn Utzon’s truly iconic 1957-73 Sydney Opera House (#27). There are none at all in the Middle East (though I could nominate a few) or in Africa.
Despite the fine works not included, the book is an information-packed – even entertaining – hit parade of a productive century’s architecture. On these pages, I’ve identified only 34 of the 100 entries (though it may have seemed like more!). To access pertinent information on those and 66 other fascinating works deemed “essential” to our education, you may want to get the book.