Design: Echoes of The Past, Visions for the Present

• Share

Are abstraction and severity coming back? Is postmodernism on the wane? Both and neither. Postmodern quotations of the past have become such an accomplished fact in design that facile bits of pseudo antiquity -- a Corinthian capital here, a granite sheathing there -- no longer seem inherently interesting or worthy. Designers must now do more. Of the best work of 1987, the echoes of the past are confident and highly refined, accommodated to idiosyncratic, richly imagined personal visions or the particular circumstances of a project.

Architect Cesar Pelli's firm is among two or three producing consistently fine, thoughtful skyscrapers. The latest are part of Pelli's $1.5 billion World Financial Center on the southern tip of Manhattan. The two handsome granite-and-glass towers, substantially completed during 1987, with their distinctive copper tops -- one a stepped pyramid, the other a dome -- give the downtown skyline a neighborly dash and civility that the mean towers of the 1970s never attempted. Pelli's designs are just dramatic enough; bombast, the besetting sin of skyscrapers, is held in check.

The tiny Princeton University site on which Architect Tod Williams was required to build hardly allowed for expressive swagger, let alone bombast. His 10,000-sq.-ft. Feinberg Hall, housing for 40 students, is a scrupulously detailed, 80-ft.-high brick tower wedged between a 1950s dormitory and a neo- Gothic building from the 1920s. With economy and formal precision, Williams has proved that a campus building can be contextual without mimicking its neighbors and dignified without being dull.

For a new subway station in Boston's 19th century Back Bay neighborhood, the firm of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood had room to soar. The 45-ft.-high wooden arches are structural but also form decorative ribs for the main, vaulted space of the station. With daylight sifting down from the clerestory windows above, the traditional grandeur of railway terminals is convincingly evoked.

Seldom has the theater of travel and technology been so extravagantly expressed, however, as in Helmut Jahn's giddy, glamorous $500 million passenger terminal for United Airlines at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. The get-a- load-of-this constructivism that Jahn has always favored -- steel beams and trusses aggressively exposed, a riot of glass -- is disciplined here by structural simplicity (the main spaces are barrel vaults) and a highly ingenious site plan. Jahn has produced an oxymoron: a fun airline terminal.

A splendid counterexample to typical modern movie theaters -- dreary shoe boxes anonymously stuck in shopping malls -- is the Lloyd Center Cinemas in Portland, Ore., designed by BOOR/A architects. The exterior is playful and polychrome; the main entrance hall is a larger-than-life glass-and-steel shed; and, for once, a virtue is made of multiplexity: the ten theaters are strung along an interior boulevard, each with its own distinct neon marquee.