Design: An a List for the Baby Boom

(2 of 2)

The new roster is authentically eclectic. The oddities are, if nothing else, evidence of the Establishment's endearing tolerance for the quixotic. Elizabeth Diller's and Daniel Libeskind's wooden sculptures are provocative and perverse and may (possibly) be interesting art, but how much do they have to do with architecture? Lynne Breslin's dreamy, convoluted "Stargame" drawings would make good black-light posters, but is she among the several dozen most talented young American architects? At the other end of the spectrum, postmodern sweetness still has baby-boom adherents. The cupola- topped shingle-style studio that Mark Simon designed for a Long Island beachfront is something of a contortionist folly: it jams all the moves of a mansion into a building the size of a gazebo. But in its earnest eagerness to please, the little building is more cute than contentious. John Syvertsen has envisioned a Wisconsin lake cottage as a kind of friendly folk pavilion: the tin chimney, latticework and exposed Y trusses satisfy the middle-class Arcadian ideal, while the broad stairs and hipped roof make the cottage nearly grand -- rustic classical.

Mark Mack's tough, beautiful houses are rustic in more complicated, suggestive ways. The archetypes that inspire them are ancient but not quite classical, more primitive than Periclean. If Northern California had had an early civilization of master builders, one imagines, their settlements would have looked like this.

The work of Arquitectonica Alumni Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is ferociously intelligent, as well as the most neoclassical of the lot. The couple practice and build mainly in South Florida, so it is fitting that they are attracted to Mediterranean forms. Theirs is a swaggering, hard-edged classicism on the cheap. Out of stucco they make neo-Roman villas: stark, complicated buildings that recall the Viennese Adolf Loos and do not suffer in the comparison.

Steven Holl's precise, highly wrought store and apartment interiors are austere and dreamy, a combination of effects not regularly encountered outside of Japan. The attention to surface detail is almost excessive. Glass panes are sandblasted and etched with miniature geometric murals. When Holl has room to move around (for example, in his designs for a retail and residential building, as yet unbuilt, at Florida's Seaside), his work seems sublime rather than precious or cramped.

It is natural that Diane Legge Lohan, being a partner in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Chicago office, designs rather conventionally modern corporate buildings. But in her printing plant for the Boston Globe newspaper she has managed the improbable. With a long, gorgeous, barrel-vaulted main hall in particular, Lohan has again made industrial modernism beautiful -- and without a bit of frippery. W.G. Clark and Charles Menefee have accomplished their own unlikely feat with the cool, cool Middleton Inn: here are glass houses that delight as glass houses have not delighted in a generation. Overlooking a South Carolina river, the inn boasts rooms that are perfect modernist compositions: light, airy, lively, serene. Clark and Menefee's work, like most of the best work by younger Americans today, is all about restraint in the face of lush temptation and few stylistic rules. When anything goes, less is more interesting.