Wright’s Robie House is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest buildings of the 20th century. Built for bicycle manufacturer Frederick Robie, it is one of Wright’s last and perhaps best Prairie Style houses. Brick piers and steel beams make up the framework upon which the building’s three tiers sit. The horizontality of the house is reinforced by the use of long, narrow bricks in the façade and the deep overhangs of its low-slung roof.
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Williams Tower is a highly visible building. At the time of its construction it was the tallest building in America outside of a downtown business district. The design suggests the stripped-down classicism of Bertram Goodhue’s Nebraska State Capitol.
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Pierre Koenig’s Case Study houses have become icons of modern living. Case Study #22, the Stahl House, is of steel and glass construction with a flat roof. Sited in the Hollywood Hills, the house offers dramatic views of the city. The house has been featured in numerous films, television shows, and advertisements.
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Apple SoHo is the computer company’s 32nd retail store and, at the time of its construction, the largest. The building reflects Steve Jobs’ vision to open modern, chic retail buildings. Apple SoHo is an adaptive reuse of a neoclassical post office from the 1920s. It is the interior, however, that dazzles and surprises, while it draws on a standardized assemblage of parts that are used throughout the Apple retail chain.
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The design of Hancock Towers is largely that of I.M Pei’s partner Henry Cobb. Although the building had a troubled construction history (dozens of window units cracked and some fell out during a winter storm), it is now considered one of the great skyscrapers of the late-modern period. Off-center grooves make the building’s facades distinctive; and the structure provides an elegant mirror for H. H. Richardson’s Trinity Church.
]]>The architecture firm of McKim, Mead and White designed Penn Station. Like many of the larger train terminals of this period, the building was modeled partly on the Roman bath complex. Baths were one of the few structures from the ancient world that accommodated large flows of people, an obvious requirement of the modern train terminal. There is almost nothing left of the original structure.
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Louis Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott is one of the first department stores to be built using steel frame construction. The new technology allowed for more open and more light-filled retail spaces. Sullivan’s signature detailing of geometric and botanical forms in cast iron covers the display windows at sidewalk level.
The original MOMA was a Deco Moderne building by architects Philip Goodwin and Edward Stone. Philip Johnson designed an addition with a black steel façade and created the sculpture garden in the 1960s. Recently all the interiors have been gutted and the exhibition space doubled in a much acclaimed remodeling of the complex by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi.
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The Auditorium Building is one or two structures on the list of the public’s 150 favorites by renowned American architect Louis Sullivan. (The other is Carson Pirie Scott.) It was this commission that established his international reputation and that of his partner Dankmar Adler. Originally an arts and commercial complex, the granite and limestone building is considered an important precursor to the Modern movement.
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Eero Saarinen designed Yale University’s Ingalls Ice Arena in the late 1950s. Saarinen was an alumnus of Yale and had a great patron in then-university president A. Whitney Griswold. Critical reception of the building was initially negative. The press dubbed it the “Yale Whale,” a moniker that is now generally used affectionately.
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H. H. Richardson held five of the top ten spots in 1885. He holds six of the top hundred spots in the current survey. Richard Upjohn (founding president of the American Institute of Architects) had two buildings in the top ten in 1885. He has no buildings in today's survey.
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