Design: An a List for the Baby Boom

Prevailing fashions in architecture, being fashions, tend to change course at just the moment they become mainstream doctrine. The effect (although not the intention, usually) is to make outsiders and stylistic slow learners scramble to catch up. Thus today, as the giant architectural firms have begun routinely gussying up their new high-rise towers in pseudoantique brica-brac -- fake Corinthian columns, pediments and pyramidal tops -- the cutting edge has glided past. As postmodern cliches become ubiquitous, in other words, the movement is becoming passe.

The mid-'80s shift in the consensus among cognoscenti has just been made ^ especially clear. This is the season of "40 Under 40," architecture's cliquish, roughly once-a-decade (1941, 1966, 1976 and this year) initiation rite, in which several dozen younger Americans were declared the best and the brightest of their generation in a recent exhibition at New York City's International Design Center. Although the Architectural League of New York started the tradition, Interiors magazine was the 1986 sponsor, and Architect Andrew MacNair (who wound up on the list himself) oversaw the selection process. The last time a new 40 was named, in 1976, postmodernism was just revealing its jolly don's face to the world. The newly anointed 40 (54 men and women, in fact, eight of whom are 40 or older) tend strikingly in a different direction: stripped-down, scrupulous, refined but seldom fancy, unafraid of ornament but almost never giddy. There is an unabashedness about construction and materials, but this lightly worn constructivism is a matter of instinct, not doctrine. Much of the new generation's architecture recalls the best buildings of the 1910s and '20s, buildings on the cusp between the neoclassical and the modern -- early, excitingly unsettled modernism, before assembly-line imitation gave austerity a bad name. The work of the younger generation, then, may be backward-looking, but its inspirations are antiquity and the early 20th century, not the 18th and 19th centuries. Quaintness does not excite.

The up-and-comers' neomodern bent is ironic, given who advised MacNair in selecting the final 40: Philip Johnson and Robert A.M. Stern. Grandmaster Johnson, 80, is the most notorious ex-modernist in the world; Stern, a sort of architectural Ralph Lauren, specializes in exactly the sort of direct 19th century-style borrowing that his younger peers are eschewing. This year's "40 Under 40" honors list is the third that Stern, 47, has helped compile (and the first of the three on which he has not appeared). Being named is no guarantee of a successful career, obviously, but a remarkable number of today's most celebrated architects are 40 Under 40 alumni from 1966. They include Gunnar Birkerts, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, Hugh Hardy, William Pedersen, Hugh Newell Jacobsen, Richard Meier, Charles Moore, Giovanni Pasanella, James Stewart Polshek, Jaquelin Robertson, Der Scutt, Stern, Stanley Tigerman and Robert Venturi.