Architecture and Civil Engineering

▪ 2009

Introduction

Architecture

      For Notable Civil Engineering Projects in work or completed in 2008, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects (in work or completed, 2008)).

       Beijing was the centre of the world of architecture for two weeks in August 2008, when several spectacular new buildings housed the Olympic Games. People all over the world were able to witness the daring new architecture during the television coverage of the events. Most notable was the National Stadium, designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. The stadium—called the Bird's Nest because its steel beams appeared to be woven together like the twigs of a nest—held 91,000 persons and accommodated the major Olympic ceremonies as well as the track and field events. After the Games it was to be used for association football (soccer) and other sports. Another remarkable Olympic venue was the National Aquatics Centre, which was called the Water Cube. Its roof and walls were made of more than 4,000 plastic pillows that were stitched together like a quilt. The pillows resembled soap bubbles, and, like bubbles, they were translucent. During the day they allowed daylight to illuminate the swimming competitions. At night the whole building, lit from within, glowed like a huge tent in a watery aqua colour. (For photograph see Special Report.) The architect was an Australian firm called PTW.

      Not an Olympic venue but equally impressive was the new Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport. Terminal 3 was an immense building about 3.2 km (2 mi) long, with 130 ha (320 ac) of floor area. The architect was the British firm Foster + Partners. Like the Bird's Nest and the Water Cube, the terminal was designed in collaboration with Chinese architects.

      As was usually true with daring or experimental architecture, structural engineers were just as important as the architects. The international firm Arup served as engineer for all three of the Beijing buildings. Widely considered an ambitious effort by China to be viewed as a major player on the world architecture scene, the Olympic architecture was a sensational success.

Awards.

      The 2008 winner of the Pritzker Prize was French architect Jean Nouvel (Nouvel, Jean ), who was best known for having designed buildings in a diversity of styles. The Pritzker citation commended “his courageous pursuit of new ideas” and added, “His inquisitive and agile mind propels him to take risks in each of his projects, which, regardless of varying degrees of success, have greatly expanded the vocabulary of contemporary architecture.” Among Nouvel's most notable buildings were the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris; a Cultural and Conference Center in Lucerne, Switz.; the Agbar Tower (Torre Agbar), a cigar-shaped office high-rise in Barcelona; the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minn.; and the Quai Branly museum in Paris. In November 2007 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City announced plans for a 75-story tower that was to be designed by Nouvel and built on a site adjacent to the museum. In drawings the building seemed to wave back and forth as it rose to a point at the top and was to be occupied by the museum, a hotel, and condominum apartments.

      Australian architect Glenn Murcutt was the recipient of the 2009 Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the organization's highest award. Murcutt, who usually worked by himself without a staff, was known for designing modernist houses that responded to local climate conditions and were sometimes influenced by the vernacular architecture of Maori culture. Although he practiced exclusively in Australia, he taught and lectured in other countries, and his longtime interest in creating an architecture in harmony with nature had a profound impact on architects around the world. The AIA presented its 25-Year Award—given to a building that had proved its merit over time—to the Atheneum, a visitors' centre in New Harmony, Ind., that was designed by American architect Richard Meier. The AIA also announced its annual list of Honor Awards for outstanding American buildings. The best known of the 13 honourees included Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle by Weiss/Manfredi, the Shaw Center for the Arts in Louisiana by Schwartz/Silver, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., by Steven Holl, and the restoration of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles by Pfeiffer Partners.

      Álvaro Siza of Portugal received the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Although Siza was not widely known, he was much admired by other architects. Most of his work was in his native Portugal.

Notable Buildings.

      As an international economic boom came to an end in 2008, a large number of remarkable buildings were completed. Continuing a trend of recent years, most of the buildings that were interesting architecturally were built for cultural purposes, especially as art museums.

      Spanish architect Rafael Moneo designed an addition to one of the world's most famous museums, the Prado in Madrid. Tucked modestly next to a church behind the old Prado, Moneo's extension was built of red brick with bronze trim and provided space for a cafeteria, a store, cloakrooms, and an auditorium.

      In Doha, Qatar, Chinese-born American architect I.M. Pei designed a new Museum of Islamic Art. He designed a building of simple bold white shapes that heaped up to a loose pyramid. The structure was built on an artificial island about 60 m (200 ft) from shore on Doha Bay in the Persian Gulf. One critic wrote that the “colossal geometric form has an ageless quality” that was “brought to life by the play of light and shadow under the gulf's blazing sun.”

      Far to the north, in Oslo, the firm Snøhetta created an amazing building that was both an opera house and a landscape. Members of the public could walk up the building's gently sloping ramps, walls, and roofs to a plaza at the top with a fine view of the city's harbour. From across the harbour, the opera house looked rather like a big white iceberg. Inside were facilities for the Norwegian Opera and Ballet, including a horseshoe-shaped auditorium (with 1,360 seats and a rotating stage) and two smaller theatres. Snøhetta won the job of designing the opera house in a competition in which 240 architects from around the world submitted designs.

      In New York City the firm Allied Works transformed the former Huntington Hartford Museum on Columbus Circle, built in 1964 by architect Edward Durrell Stone, into a new venue for the Museum of Arts and Design (formerly the American Craft Museum). The change sparked a controversy in which some architects and others argued that Stone's original building, although long abandoned, should have been restored to its original form as an example of the romantic, Arab-influenced architecture that he admired.

      In Seattle a steep waterfront site was transformed into the Olympic Sculpture Park, which zigzagged its way down a hill to the harbour's edge and crossed above streets and a railroad line along the way. The park, which displayed works of sculpture, was designed by architects Weiss/Manfredi.

      In San Francisco a new California Academy of Sciences, sited in Golden Gate Park, debuted to replace a building that was destroyed by an earthquake in 1989. Designed by noted Italian architect Renzo Piano, the building was a science museum, with exhibits and displays of different kinds of habitats from around the world. Its most notable feature was the roof, a hilly green surface on which a variety of local California plants grew.

      A new art museum by Álvaro Siza, the Iberê Camargo Museum, opened in Porto Alegre, Braz. It was built of white concrete in a sculptured style. The building's exhibition spaces were arranged on three floors around a central atrium, and visitors walked from floor to floor on ramps in asymmetrical enclosures that projected from one side of the building.

      Among commercial buildings, the most widely noted was probably Renzo Piano's 52-story tower for the offices of the New York Times in New York City. Piano wrapped the building in a lacy screen made of thin ceramic tubes. The screen gave the tower a soft, almost misty appearance and acted as a sunshade that reduced sun glare inside the building while allowing people to look out. The ground floor included a performance hall that looked onto an interior garden.

      Another commercial building that drew considerable attention was the BMW Welt (“World”) in Munich. Designed by a firm of architects from Vienna that called itself Coop Himmelb(l)au, it was mostly a very large space for the display of BMW cars. Like the work of some other contemporary architects, this space had few straight lines or right angles but was freely formed with dramatically curving and sloping ramps, walls, and roof. Such free forms had first emerged some years earlier in the work of American architect Frank Gehry. They were made possible by advances in methods of construction and engineering and especially by new computer technology.

Exhibitions, Preservation, and News Events.

      A number of major exhibitions of architecture appeared during the year. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City presented “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling.” It covered the history of prefabricated houses. As part of the show, five complete premanufactured houses for visitors to wander through were erected adjacent to the museum.

      In 2008 the Biennale exhibition held annually in Venice was devoted to architecture. Entitled “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building,” the international exhibition included a display of thousands of architectural drawings, photos, and models. A theme addressed in many of the works was the need to conserve energy by means of so-called green architecture.

      “Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future,” at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., presented the work of one of the leading architects of the mid-20th century. Finnish-born American architect Saarinen designed such notable buildings as Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Mo. “Richard Rogers + Architects: From the House to the City” displayed the life work of the noted British architect. It opened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a building Rogers designed in 1977 when he was in partnership with Renzo Piano. At the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles was “Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner,” with photos and models of modern houses that the architect designed in the mid-20th century. He was known for creating dramatic spaceshiplike houses, many of them perched in the Hollywood hills with views out over the cityscape of Los Angeles.

      One preservation success in the growing effort to save works of the modern movement in architecture was the complete restoration of the Yale School of Art and Architecture. It was a masterpiece by the noted modernist architect Paul Rudolph, who built with rough-surfaced concrete in the architectural style sometimes called New Brutalism. The building was to be named Rudolph Hall. Several houses by Rudolph, however, were either demolished or in danger, and a Rudolph high school in Sarasota appeared to be doomed despite a major effort by preservationists. In the United Kingdom a battle rose over whether to demolish another New Brutalist structure, the Robin Hood Gardens affordable-housing complex of 1972 by noted architects Alison and Peter Smithson.

      The year also had its disappointments. After seven years nothing had yet been completed on the site of the former World Trade Center in New York City, and in New Orleans, despite many efforts, little had been done to replace the housing lost in the Hurricane Katrina floods of 2005. In Berlin a new U.S. embassy, by California architects Moore Ruble Yudell, opened in July to criticism by some Europeans that it appeared to be a security-conscious fortress.

Deaths.

       Ettore Sottsass, a major figure in Italian design, died at age 90. He created houses and interiors but was better known for the ordinary objects such as typewriters and fibreglass chairs that he designed in a bold, colourful, often witty manner. Other prominent members of the architectural community who died during the year were Julian de la Fuente, 76, for many years the chief assistant to the great architect Le Corbusier; Walter Netsch, 88, a former partner in the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and the designer of the Air Force Academy chapel in Colorado Springs, Colo.; and Ralph Rapson, 93, the dean of the University of Minnesota College of Architecture for 30 years and the architect of U.S. embassies in Denmark and Sweden.

Robert Campbell

▪ 2006

Introduction

Art museums designed by Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Renzo Piano, and others opened in several major cities. A fifth building by the late Louis Kahn won the AIA 25-year award. The architectural heritage of Louisiana and Mississippi was severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Architecture

      For Notable Civil Engineering Projects in work or completed in 2005, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).

      The year 2005 in architecture was the year of the art museum. Celebrated architects worldwide were building new museums or adding new wings to art museums. Donors, both public and private, seemed eager to lavish money on such projects, and architects sometimes felt that art museums—like cathedrals in the Middle Ages—offered the best opportunity for truly daring and original design. Many of the art museums were heralded as new cultural symbols of their respective cities. According to one architectural-magazine headline, “Museum design is … architecture's only venue for artistic growth.”

      The new de Young Museum building in San Francisco, which opened in October, was designed by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. A distinctive feature was the structure's outer surface, which consisted of copper shingles with different textures—some smooth, some rough. Over time the copper would oxidize into a variety of greens and earth tones, which would have the effect of making the building fade into its surrounding landscape of Golden Gate Park. Most of the museum was only two stories high, but it had a tower with an observatory where visitors could enjoy a view of the park, the city, and the ocean beyond.

  Herzog and de Meuron were also the architects of a major addition to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn. The architects made few changes to the original museum building, which was designed in 1971 by American designer Edward Larrabee Barnes, but the wing they added was larger than the old building. For the exterior of the building, Herzog and de Meuron—known for inventing new kinds of “skin” for their buildings—used mesh panels of aluminum that had a slightly wrinkled surface and resembled crumpled aluminum foil. The silvery panels reflected sunlight in many directions, and from the outside the new Walker wing resembled a large gift-wrapped box of no particular shape.

 The leading designer of art museums was Italian architect Renzo Piano (Piano, Renzo ). (See Biographies.) Piano created the Paul Klee Centre in Bern, Switz., for displaying the artwork of Klee, a Modernist painter. The building, which opened in June, had the appearance of three airplane hangers that sat side by side with their curved roofs forming a continuous wave shape. (See photograph on page 152.) Famed especially for his skill in handling light, Piano displayed Klee's small and delicate works beneath flat canopies of translucent cloth, which softened the illumination into a warm glow. Piano's additions to the High Museum in Atlanta also opened in 2005. They more than doubled the size of the original museum, which was designed by American architect Richard Meier. As in his celebrated Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Piano created a roof of cone-shaped light scoops that allowed only indirect northern light, not direct sunlight, into the galleries. The design Piano made for an addition to the Whitney Museum in New York City had been criticized for requiring the demolition of a historic brownstone, but a revised design he made, which saved the house, was approved by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission in May.

      Another remarkable museum that opened during the year was the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum, which was designed by Israeli American architect Moshe Safdie on a site near Jerusalem. The basic structure of the reinforced-concrete building was essentially a hollow prism about 180 m (590 ft) long. The building tunneled beneath the top of a mountain from one side to the other, and at one end visitors emerged onto a lookout platform with a spectacular view of the city.

Awards.

      The winner of the 2005 Pritzker Prize, architecture's most coveted award, was American Thom Mayne (Mayne, Thom ). (See Biographies.) Mayne had been known as an outsider who ignored fashions in architecture and designed buildings that were often rough, aggressive assemblages of concrete, steel, and glass. Among the best known were the Diamond Ranch High School and the Caltrans District 7 Headquarters, both in California, and the Wayne Lyman Morse United States Courthouse in Oregon, which was under construction. The meaning of the name of Mayne's firm, Morphosis, was “the way in which an organism develops or changes.”

      Antoine Predock received the 2006 Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects. Predock, who worked out of Albuquerque, N.M., spoke of deriving his architecture by “listening to the land.” He was best known as an architect of the American Southwest, where his buildings seemed to grow naturally out of the open desert—its wide spaces, its long history, and its natural materials.

      The AIA's 25-Year Award, for a building that had stood the test of time, was given to the Yale Center for British Art. It was the fifth building by the late Louis Kahn, an Estonian-born American architect, to win the award. The AIA also named 13 buildings for its annual honour awards. Among the better known were the Seattle Central Library, a joint venture by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas's firm, OMA, and Seattle-based LMN Architects, and the Jubilee Church in Rome by Meier.

      The 2006 Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects went to Tokyo architect Toyo Ito, best known for such works as the unique Sendai (Japan) Mediatheque. The Mediatheque was a kind of enormous cybercafe that exhibited all forms of media to inform the public and to support the arts.

Notable Buildings.

      Perhaps the most widely publicized work of architecture of the year was not a building but the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The basic design, by American architect Peter Eisenman and American sculptor Richard Serra (who later dropped out of the project), was selected from an international competition. Situated on a prominent site across from the Tiergarten, Berlin's central park, the memorial consisted of a field of 2,711 solid blocks of dark concrete that reached up to 4.7 m (15 ft) in height. Visitors wandered among the blocks, which were separated by narrow lanes. The intent was to create a feeling of being lost or trapped and also to promote contemplation. An underground information centre, located beneath the memorial, told the story of the Holocaust.

      Also notable was the new Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh. The architect was Spanish architect Enric Miralles, who won the international design competition for the building but died before the building was completed. Easily the year's most controversial work of architecture, it won its designers the Stirling Prize as the best building built in Britain in 2005 but also attracted many negative comments, partly because its cost ballooned from an early estimate of £40 million (about $67 million) to a final figure about 11 times greater. Rather than a single structure, the building was a villagelike cluster of parts. It was intended to blend into the city rather than to have a single assertive or dominating presence. Many of its architectural details were playfully inventive, and the interior spaces were oddly shaped and felt highly theatrical.

      A third major architectural work of 2005 was the Central Building designed by Zaha Hadid for the automobile manufacturer BMW in Leipzig, Ger. Iraqi-born Hadid, whose practice was based in London, was known for designing structures with jagged, explosive shapes or sweeping curves. The BMW building contained its Leipzig plant's main office and laboratory space. Conveyors snaked around overhead and carried partially built cars from one manufacturing area of the plant to another. By keeping the company's product always visible to the management, the design merged the white-collar and blue-collar functions of the plant and gave office workers the drama of the production line.

 Other notable buildings included the Clinton Presidential Center (Little Rock, Ark.), a riverfront structure shaped and constructed like a bridge and designed by the New York City architectural firm Polshek Partnership; the Casa da Música (Porto, Port.), which was designed by Koolhaas as a performance venue for all types of music; and the Barajas Airport (Madrid), which was designed by British architect Richard Rogers and featured a vast concourse beneath a sensuously undulating roof.

Parks and Public Spaces.

      The site of the former New York City World Trade Center, destroyed in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, continued to be a source of confusion and disagreement. During the year two proposed museums for the site, the International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center, were both canceled. The design for the Freedom Tower, a 541-m (1,776-ft) office building designed by American architect David Childs of the firm SOM, underwent modifications to make it less vulnerable to car-bomb attacks. It was moved farther back from the street, and the lower 60 m (200 ft) of the facade would be made of solid concrete with a few small windows. The concrete was to be wrapped, said Childs, in a “shimmering metal curtain that will give the impression of movement and light.” The design was widely criticized by architects and others. At the World Trade Center site, only two elements seemed fairly certain to go forward. They were the transit hub by Calatrava and a memorial to 9/11 by Israeli architect Michael Arad and American landscape architect Peter Walker, winners of a 2004 design competition.

      Also in New York City, the so-called High Line, an abandoned overhead rail line in Manhattan, was the subject of a design competition to convert it into an aerial park. The winning design, by Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, featured wood plank pathways that cut through a diverse array of plant life. It was hoped that new or existing buildings would eventually open onto the park at the height of their second floor.

Hurricane Katrina.

      The extensive destruction of buildings in Louisiana and Mississippi by Hurricane Katrina raised concerns about the adequacy of hurricane-protection measures and also sparked a debate about architecture. (See Economic Affairs: Special Report. (Preparing for Emergencies )) The U.S. National Trust for Historic Preservation estimated that as many as 38,000 historic structures in New Orleans alone had been affected in some way by the storm. Many of them were beyond saving. There was disagreement over what should be built in the damaged areas of New Orleans and other places. Members of the Congress for the New Urbanism, an influential organization that advocated traditional architecture and town planning, quickly met with the governor and other officials of Mississippi and promoted guidelines that would re-create the architectural styles of the past. Some architects, however, felt that the disaster should be taken as an opportunity to explore contemporary designs. There was also the question of whether rebuilding would be handled by government contracts to a few big developers or carried out in a slower, piecemeal manner. At year's end there was no answer in sight.

Deaths.

      Two of the most influential architects of the 20th century, both Pritzker winners, died in 2005. Philip Johnson (Johnson, Philip Cortelyou ) passed away in January at the age of 98. (See Obituaries.) Johnson was a mercurial figure who during his career tried many styles of design that always seemed to stay a step ahead of changing fashions. He was noted for having been one of the first to introduce the modern movement of architecture to the United States—in a 1932 exhibition and book, The International Style. Kenzo Tange (Tange, Kenzo ) died in March at the age of 91. (See Obituaries.) He reigned as the leading Modernist architect in Japan from the mid-1950s. His most celebrated works were two Olympic stadiums in Tokyo (1964), each with a membrane roof draping from a supporting pillar.

      Ralph Erskine also died in March at the age of 91. Born in London, Erskine married in Sweden and became one of Scandinavia's top architects. He was especially known for his success in allowing the future inhabitants of a building to share in the process of its design. He “nobly championed humanity against its many 20th-century enemies,” wrote one British critic.

Robert Campbell

▪ 2005

Introduction

Architecture

       Notable Civil Engineering ProjectsFor notable civil engineering projects in work or completed in 2004, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).

 If there was a theme in world architecture in 2004, it was excitement about new supertall buildings. Many of these skyscrapers took surprising new shapes, including cigar shapes and the shape of slivers of broken glass. “Hold On to Your Hats: Tall Buildings Are Coming to London,” was the title of one article in a British architectural magazine. Probably the most notable skyscraper of the year was the long-anticipated 30 St Mary Axe, which opened in London in May. Designed by architect Sir Norman Foster, the round 40–story tower looked so much like an upended pickle that the public nicknamed it the “gherkin.” The building was an example of two worldwide trends. The first was the movement toward so-called green architecture, in which buildings were designed to reduce the use of energy for heating, lighting, and cooling and thereby contribute less to global warming. The other trend was the creation of more pleasant environments for office workers by providing natural daylight and a variety of informal places for meeting and socializing.

      Several other towers were planned for sites in Britain, including the London Bridge Tower proposed by Italian architect Renzo Piano. A high-rise in the shape of a tapering prism that Piano called “the shard,” it would be mostly office space, with a hotel at the top, and at 310 m (1,016 ft) would be the tallest building in Europe. Torre Agbar, a corporate headquarters, opened during the summer in Barcelona, Spain. The structure, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, was cigar-shaped and rose to a height of 144 m (474 ft).

      East Asia was home to most of the tallest buildings that had been constructed in recent years, and it was expected to gain many more, most notably the Jinling Tower in Nanjing, China. The building was to twist 90° as it rose to a height of 320 m (1,050 ft). In Shanghai, however, a law was proposed that would limit future building heights to 18 stories.

      In New York City, Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava (see Biographies (Calatrava, Santiago )) proposed an innovative 255-m (835-ft) tower of residences called Townhouses in the Sky that would contain only 12 apartments. Each apartment would be a four-story glass cube, and the cubes would be stacked to form the tower. Controversy swirled around the 541-m (1,776-ft) Freedom Tower, which was planned for the site of the former World Trade Center (WTC) as part of the master plan by Polish-born American architect Daniel Libeskind. The proposed design was an awkward-looking compromise between Libeskind's ideas and those of architect David Childs, of the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Childs had been hired by a private developer who held the right to build on the site. Also in New York City, the Skyscraper Museum moved into new quarters in Manhattan with an exhibit of the high-rise designs of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Awards.

      The world's most prestigious architecture award, the Pritzker Prize for lifetime achievement, went to a woman for the first time in its 26 years of existence. Zaha Hadid, 54, an Iraqi-born architect who practiced out of London, won for a daring body of work that became influential among architects even before much of it had been built. Among her completed works were the Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, a fire station for the Vitra Furniture Co. in Germany, a car park and tramway in France, and a ski jump in Austria. Many other of her buildings were in design, including the Price Tower Arts Center in Bartlesville, Okla., a BMW plant in Germany, a train station in Naples, and the National Center of Contemporary Arts in Rome. Hadid was known for her brilliant drawings, which represented buildings as a free flow of shapes and spaces, with few right angles or conventional motifs.

       Rem Koolhaas of The Netherlands won the 2004 Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and Frei Otto of Germany won the 2005 Gold Medal (because of a change in schedule, both awards were announced in the same year). Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, 96, received Japan's $135,000 Premium Imperiale. Calatrava received the 2005 Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects. Both an engineer and an architect, Calatrava was known for soaring white birdlike or cathedral-like structures. The AIA presented its 25-Year Award, given to an American building that had proved its worth over time, to the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., by I.M. Pei. The AIA also named 16 American buildings for its Honor Awards. Among the more notable were the Seaside Interfaith Chapel in Florida, by Merrill and Pastor; the Center of Gravity Foundation Hall, a Zen meditation centre in New Mexico, by Predock Frane; the Salt Lake City, Utah, Public Library by Moshe Safdie; and State Street Village, Chicago, a student residence by Murphy/Jahn.

      The Aga Khan Award for distinguished architecture in the Muslim world, awarded every three years, was presented to seven works. They ranged from the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, two of the tallest buildings in the world, to Sandbag Shelters Prototypes, an experimental system of earth construction for housing that was intended to be built cheaply by the residents of poor countries.

Buildings of the Year.

      The year 2004 proved to be an exceptional one for remarkable buildings around the world. Many made playful use of new technologies that permitted architects to make shapes that had not been seen before. Also noteworthy was the extent to which architecture had become an international activity, with prominent buildings in one country often designed by an architect from another.

      Among the most widely noted new structures built in the United States were the national World War II Memorial, designed by Friedrich St. Florian, with an outdoor plaza and pool shaped by traditional curved colonnades on the Mall in Washington, D.C.; the Central Library in Seattle, Wash., by Rem Koolhaas, a widely praised building that looked, wrote one reviewer, “like a pile of books wrapped in taut netting”; the Campus Center at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, also by Koolhaas, a student activities centre squeezed under an overhead rail line; a renovation and addition to the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi; the Nasher Sculpture Center, a skylit pavilion and walled garden for the display of a collection of modern sculpture in Denver, Colo., by Piano; the Stata Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, a science research and teaching facility by Frank Gehry, whose design was free-form and humorous and gave parts of the building the appearance of colliding or collapsing; and the Genzyme Center, also in Cambridge, by the German firm Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner. The world headquarters of a drug company, the latter building was considered to be the best example in the U.S. of “green” design and was also admired for its indoor gardens and terraces spilling down the sides of a skylit atrium.

      Among noted structures elsewhere were a building for the new independent Parliament in Scotland, a boldly sculpted Modernist building designed by the late Spanish architect Enric Miralles; the Forum Building in Barcelona, a vast exhibition and meeting hall on a waterfront site, by Herzog and de Meuron of Switzerland; Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church in Italy, also by Piano, able to accommodate 7,200 people in an interior space spanned by bold stone arches; Jubilee Church in Rome by American Richard Meier, a complex of white walls that curved like shells; Kunsthaus Graz in Graz, Austria, by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier of Britain, an art museum that was described by one magazine as “a whopper of a big, bright, blue bubble with a shiny, scaly, acrylic glass skin” and was an example of what was being called “blob architecture”—buildings in free curvy shapes that were made possible through computer design; Sharp Centre for Design, Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, by the British Will Alsop, an amazing two-story box of galleries that seemed to float on thin stilts in the air above older buildings; Selfridges department store in Birmingham, Eng., by a firm called Future Systems, another “blob” with an undulating shape, covered with a skin of 15,000 aluminum disks resembling sequins; and Auditorio de Tenerife, an opera house in the Canary Islands, Spain, designed by Calatrava in a free white shape that reminded some of a bird skeleton, others of a seashell. Calatrava also designed much of the architecture for the Athens Olympic Games, including the architecture for the huge main stadium.

Exhibitions and Competitions.

      More than 5,000 persons entered a competition to choose a design for a memorial to those who died in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It was the largest design competition that had ever been held. The winner was a young New York architect, Michael Arad. The winning proposal, which he named “Reflecting Absence,” called for two recessed pools on the location of the footprints of the WTC Twin Towers. Also in New York, Santa Monica, Calif., architect Thom Mayne of the firm Morphosis won a competition to design an Olympic Village in Queens, to be built should the city succeed in hosting the 2012 Olympic Games.

      The Venice Architectural Biennale, directed by architectural historian Kurt W. Foster, presented a controversial display of what Foster called a new architectural era, one that was represented by organic forms and compound curves shaped by the computer. Not all visitors agreed. “A desert of trendy, pretentious, vacuous, computer-aided form-making,” sniffed Architectural Review.

Preservation.

      There was rising concern over threats of demolition or alteration of classic buildings of the Modernist era of the 20th century. Private houses by notable architects such as Richard Neutra and Rudolf Schindler were torn down in California. In New York City, Two Columbus Circle, originally a museum by Edward Durrell Stone, continued to be a source of controversy arising from the attempt by the Museum of Arts and Design to resurface its exterior. The Mostar Bridge in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a World Heritage Site, reopened after a meticulous reconstruction. Originally built in 1566, it was destroyed in 1993 during a civil war. In Venice the famed La Fenice Opera House, rebuilt after a 1996 fire, was reopened.

Controversies.

      Many American architects were concerned about the effect that increased security measures—required after the attacks on U.S. embassies and the WTC—were having on design quality. Of particular concern were new embassies, which, instead of being designed as examples of an open, welcoming democratic society, were increasingly being sited in isolated suburban locations and designed as secure fortresses. Instead of the previous policy of designing embassies to respond to local culture and climate, the U.S. Department of State created a standard design intended to be employed everywhere, with little modification.

Deaths.

       Fay Jones, 83 (see Obituaries (Jones, E Fay )), died in August 2004. He was a winner of the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects and designer of the Thorncrown Chapel in Arkansas, which the AIA in 1991 had voted the best American building of the 1980s. Once a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, Jones liked to work with modest natural materials such as stone and wood. Edward Larrabee Barnes, who died in November, was a leading member of a generation of architects who studied under Walter Gropius at Harvard in the 1940s. Barnes was known for crisp, geometric modern buildings, such as his Haystack Mountain School of Craft in Maine. Pierre Koenig, 78 (see Obituaries (Koenig, Pierre )), died in April. He was a designer of classic Modernist houses in southern California. Josef Kleihues, 71, and J. Irwin Miller, 95, both died in August. Kleihues was an architect influential in the rebuilding of Berlin, and Miller, among other achievements, sponsored dozens of buildings by notable architects in his hometown of Columbus, Ind.

Robert Campbell

▪ 2004

Introduction

Architecture

      The biggest architectural story of 2003 continued to be the World Trade Center (WTC) site in New York City. In February a proposal by Polish-born American architect Daniel Libeskind (see Biographies (Libeskind, Daniel )) was selected as the master plan for the rebuilding of the site, winning a design competition over proposals submitted by six other teams of prominent architects. Libeskind, best known as the architect of the Jewish Museum Berlin, proposed a semicircular group of glass towers in sharp, bold angular shapes. (See Sidebar (Rebuilding the World Trade Center ).) Meanwhile, a second competition was held to choose a design for the memorial to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that destroyed the WTC. This was open to anyone in the world, and 5,201 designs were submitted, the most ever in a design competition. They were judged by a 14-person special jury. In November the jury announced eight designs as finalists, all of them by relatively young and little-known designers. A final winner was expected to be chosen in January 2004.

Awards.

      The $100,000 Pritzker Prize, regarded as the architectural equivalent of a Nobel Prize, went to 85-year-old Danish architect Jørn Utzon. He was best known for his Sydney Opera House, a dramatic building of bold curving roof forms that resemble sails on the harbour in Sydney, Australia. The Opera House took 14 years to build and cost far more than was anticipated. Utzon was fired during construction. Nonetheless, the building became a world-famous landmark, and the Pritzker Prize was seen as a vindication of the architect. Pritzker juror Frank Gehry said it “changed the image of an entire country.” The American Institute of Architects awarded its annual Gold Medal for lifetime achievement to the late Samuel (“Sambo”) Mockbee, who died at the age of 57 in 2001. Mockbee, a winner of the MacArthur “genius” award, was best known as the founder of the Rural Studio, where architectural students designed and built homes and other structures for low-income people in rural Alabama. “Architecture Loses Its Conscience” was the headline in one architectural magazine announcing Mockbee's death. The AIA presented its 25-Year Award, given to an American building that had proved its worth over time, to the Design Research Headquarters Building in Cambridge, Mass., a faceted glass building that functions as a transparent display case for the products inside. It was designed by the late Benjamin Thompson. The AIA also announced its annual Honor Awards for good design to 15 individual buildings. Among the more notable were the Concert Hall and Exhibition Complex in Rouen, France, by Bernard Tschumi; the American Folk Art Museum in New York City, by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien; the Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, Calif., by Thom Mayne of Morphosis; and Simmons Hall dormitory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by Stephen Holl. A new prize, the $100,000 Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture, was awarded to Léon Krier, a prominent advocate for traditional design and an adviser to Prince Charles of the United Kingdom. The Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects went to the Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo, known for such buildings as the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles and the National Museum of Roman Art in Mérida, Spain.

Cultural and Civic Buildings.

       Notable Civil Engineering ProjectsEasily the most discussed building of the year, if not the decade, was the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, which opened in October after an agonizing 16-year period of design and construction. Designed by Gehry, the Hall won near-unanimous raves for both its architecture and its acoustics. Like Gehry's earlier Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the Disney's exterior featured bold curving shapes covered in shining metal and was often said to resemble a ship under full sail. The walls and ceiling of the interior concert hall were also shaped in sweeping curves. They were finished in warm-toned wood, which gave the concertgoer the sense of being inside an enormous cello. Earlier in the year, Gehry's performing arts centre at Bard College north of New York City also won plaudits for its sound. The acoustic consultant for both buildings was Yasuhisa Toyota of Japan. In Rome the Parco della Musica by Renzo Piano opened. It was a complex of three concert halls of different sizes, all in biomorphic bloblike shapes, grouped around an outdoor amphitheatre. In Fort Worth, Texas, Tadao Ando's Modern Art Museum opened; it was most memorable for its Y-shaped concrete columns that were dramatically reflected in a pool of water. Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid (see Biographies (Hadid, Zaha )), who practiced out of London, won attention for her Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was the first major building for this architect, long known for daring designs that usually did not get built. The Arts Center was a bold composition of boxlike galleries, piled up in a seemingly precarious manner. Hadid's dramatic ski jump and aerial café in Innsbruck, Austria, opened in fall 2002, and she was in the process of completing designs for an art centre to be attached to the celebrated Price Tower by Frank Lloyd Wright in Bartlesville, Okla. In Beacon, N.Y., the Dia Art Foundation opened Dia:Beacon. This was a former printing plant converted into a museum not by an architect but by the artist Robert Irwin. Its brilliantly skylit spaces proved to be a perfect setting for the work of the minimalist artists whom the foundation sponsored. A new home for the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia was designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. It was a glass pavilion, angled in such a way that when visitors looked at the bell they saw Independence Hall in the background. See also the table Notable Civil Engineering Projects.

Commercial Buildings.

      Perhaps the most remarkable commercial building was the 40-story office tower at 30 St Mary Axe in London, by Foster and Partners. Shaped like a fat cigar and covered in triangles of glass that looked like fishnet, the tower featured wedge-shaped glassed atriums that spiraled up the sides of the tower to encourage natural ventilation. In the Atacama Desert of Chile, the ESO (European Southern Observatory) hotel was a residential building for an astronomical observatory. In the moonscapelike desert, it resembled a natural rock ridge, with its surfaces of concrete coloured by iron oxide to imitate the reddish hues of the desert. In Oslo the Telenor World Headquarters was an experimental building intended as the ultimate in flexibility. Office workers did not have work stations but instead plugged in anywhere in the building as needed, sometimes using a screensaver of family photos and notes as the equivalent of a personal tackboard. The architect was NBBJ of the United States in collaboration with Norwegian architects. In The Netherlands the architecture firm MVRDV created the Silodam housing complex, a long 10-story building on the harbour in Amsterdam. The great variety of types and sizes of apartments inside were reflected by the many colours and shapes of the facade.

Future Buildings, Competitions, and Controversies.

      Two young New York architects won a competition for the design of a Washington, D.C., memorial to the victims of September 11. Julie Beckman and Keith Kaseman's design provided a parklike setting with a “light bench” for each of the 184 victims of the attack on the Pentagon and the downed American Airlines Flight 77. Beneath each bench would be a pool of water, mysteriously lit from below. A competition for an Air Force Memorial was won by New York architect James Ingo Freed, designer of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Freed proposed three stainless-steel spires that curved away from each other, like planes peeling off in formation. Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron won a competition to design the Olympic stadium for the Games to be held in Beijing in 2008. One much-hyped building proposal died in New York City when it was announced that a proposed $950 million branch of the Guggenheim Museum, to be raised on piers over the East River and designed by Gehry, would not be built because of the museum's economic problems.

Preservation.

      The World Monuments Fund issued a list of the 100 most endangered sites. Notable entries were the Great Wall of China Cultural Landscape, all of historic Lower Manhattan, and Wright's Ennis-Brown House in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, in Buffalo, N.Y., an elaborate restoration of Wright's Darwin D. Martin House of 1904 was under way. A competition to design a visitor centre for it was won by Toshiko Mori, chairman of the architecture program at Harvard University. Also in Buffalo, it was announced that a gas station designed by Wright in 1927, but never built, would be constructed near its original site as a tourist kiosk. In Bartlesville, Okla., the landmark Price Tower was converted from offices to a boutique hotel by New York architect Wendy Evans Joseph. One of the 20th century's most famous houses, the Farnsworth House in Plano, Ill., by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was purchased at auction in December by a preservation group, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which said that the house would “be protected forever and made available to the public.” Controversy surrounded a proposal by the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City to alter Two Columbus Circle as a new home for the museum. The 10-story building was designed by Edward Durell Stone and built in 1964 as the Huntington Hartford Museum. The landmark TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport, designed by Eero Saarinen and no longer in use, was the subject of talks among preservationists, JetBlue Airways, and the Port Authority in the hope of incorporating the building into a larger new terminal as a check-in hall. In Chicago a new curvy glass-and-steel football stadium was inserted into the traditional, neoclassic Soldier Field, a bizarre junction of styles that upset some and pleased others. Swedish retailer IKEA threatened to tear down a Marcel Breuer office building in New Haven, Conn. Architectural preservationists were also concerned about Beijing, where increased development for the upcoming Olympic Games of 2008 was causing older neighbourhoods of narrow twisting streets and courtyards to be demolished.

Exhibitions.

      A major exhibition of the work of Modernist Danish architect and furniture designer Arne Jacobsen was on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and later in Hamburg, Ger. At the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, “Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio” presented the work of a husband-wife team whose installations explore the ironies of contemporary life. “David Adler, Architect: The Elements of Style,” at the Art Institute of Chicago, displayed the work of a traditionalist American architect of the early 20th century. The National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., sponsored “Big & Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century,” using 50 projects from around the world to explore the impact of architecture on global climate. Architect Louis Kahn was the subject of My Architect, a film made by his son Nathaniel Kahn; the movie explored not only Kahn's architecture but also his complex family life.

Deaths.

      In March two notable figures in the field died. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Moynihan, Daniel Patrick ) was a powerful advocate of architecture and preservation, and British architect Peter Denham Smithson (Smithson, Peter Denham ), together with his wife, Alison, was a leading figure in British architecture for 40 years. (See Obituaries.) Cedric Price, who designed the steel-and-mesh aviary at the London Zoo, died in August at the age of 68. Price championed a temporary, adaptable, and playful architecture that influenced later figures such as Richard Rogers and the group Archigram. Geoffrey Bawa, known for modern buildings that blended with the local culture of Sri Lanka, died in May at the age of 83.

Robert Campbell

▪ 2003

Introduction

Architecture

      Plans to fill the void in the New York City skyline created by the loss of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 2001, the construction of a mammoth cathedral in Los Angeles, and differing opinions on preservation were hot topics in architecture in 2002.

      The aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that obliterated the World Trade Center (WTC) towers continued to dominate much of the news in architecture in 2002. In January the Max Protetch Gallery in New York City sponsored an exhibition to which more than 50 architects worldwide sent in designs for the site, some of them serious, some purely symbolic. In March came the “Tribute in Light,” a temporary memorial, in which two powerful shafts of blue light rose into the sky every night to mark the location of the former towers. A new government agency for the state of New York, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), was created to decide future plans for the site. Many architects also worked in volunteer organizations, such as the New York New Visions and the Civic Alliance, to help develop ideas and guidelines for the redevelopment of the area, including proposals for improving the rest of Lower Manhattan. In July the Civic Alliance sponsored a public symposium at which 5,000 people responded to preliminary LMDC plans, finding them for the most part unimaginative. As a result, in September the LMDC hired six teams of architects and planners, chosen from more than 400 applicants and including a number of internationally known figures, to come up with more inspiring ideas. The plans would probably include a mixture of office space, shopping, hotels, a transit station, a park, and a permanent memorial. The WTC disaster also stimulated fresh thinking about the engineering of tall buildings. It was expected that there would be changes in the building codes to strengthen buildings and also to create safer ways for tenants to evacuate them in emergencies. Security too became a concern of architects everywhere after September 11. In Washington, D.C., for example, consideration was being given to new underground visitor entrances to the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol.

Awards.

      The world's top award for lifetime achievement, the Pritzker Prize, went to Australian architect Glenn Murcutt (see Biographies (Murcutt, Glenn )); unlike most other prominent architects, he works alone and without an office staff. He does not have a computer, and he makes all of his drawings by hand. Murcutt has a five-year waiting list of people who want him to design a house for them. He designs only in Australia, where he understands the climate and the culture. He was influenced by Australian Aboriginal architecture and is best known for modest houses in a modern style, which are responsive to climate and which “touch this earth lightly”—an Aboriginal phrase he likes to quote. The Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, for lifetime achievement, was not awarded in 2002 because no candidate received the necessary three-fourths vote from the AIA board of directors. The AIA's 25-Year Award, given to a building of quality that had stood the test of time, went to the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, Spain. The structure—a museum that housed the work of the 20th-century Catalan artist Miró—was designed by the late architect Josep Lluís Sert, dean of the Harvard Design School and a childhood friend of the artist. The AIA also bestowed its annual Honor Awards for good design for individual buildings. Among the most notable recipients were the Rose Center for Earth and Space, a planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, by Polshek Partnership; the Sandra Day O'Connor U.S. District Courthouse in Phoenix, Ariz., by Richard Meier; and the Sony Center in Berlin, by Helmut Jahn of Murphy/Jahn. The Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects was awarded to Archigram, a group of architects active since the 1960s, known for a subversive “pop” mentality.

Cultural and Civic Buildings.

      One of the most ambitious religious buildings of modern times was the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, by Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo. The structure, which was larger than St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, cost $195 million. Following the mandates of the second Vatican Council (1962–65), the cathedral was designed to be a place in which the public would feel comfortable—a “town square” rather than a place of awe or mystery. It occupied a city block and included an underground garage, an outdoor café, and a residence for the cardinal and church offices. Modern in style, the cathedral nevertheless featured a traditional nave and was entered through a long ambulatory lined with chapels. The cathedral was built of pinkish beige concrete, with translucent windows of alabaster.

      In Switzerland the Swiss National Expo in Yverdon-les-Baines included a number of experimental buildings. The most unusual was the Blur Building by New York architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. The Blur Building was a cluster of platforms hovering above the water of a lake, entirely enveloped in a white mist produced by a system of pumps and nozzles. New York saw the opening of the American Folk Art Museum by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Despite being built between other buildings on a narrow midtown lot, it featured a variety of daylight spaces inside. It was also notable, in an era when much architecture was light and glassy, for the use of solid heavy materials, such as rough-surfaced concrete and, at the main entrance, tall dark panels of tombasil, an alloy of bronze. Another New York debut was the Austrian Cultural Forum, by Raimond Abraham, a tall thin building that sloped back from the street as it rose and rather resembled a totem pole. In Manchester, Eng., the Imperial War Museum North was designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect of Berlin's Jewish Museum. It was a free-form pile of big curvy shapes sheathed in metal. Much of the interior was given over to media displays rather than to objects. The displays projected images and sounds against the walls in order to re-create various aspects of war. In Sapporo, Japan, a stadium by Hiroshi Hara, used for the World Cup Association Football (soccer) finals, invented a new principle. Instead of a retractable roof to let sun and rain onto the grass field, the field itself glided smoothly outdoors whenever necessary. Also in Japan, a young British firm called Foreign Office Architects designed the Yokohama International Port Terminal, a cruise-ship facility. It looked like a natural land formation poking out into the harbour, with a sloping roof of wood and grass and with dramatic interior spaces under a steel plate ceiling that resembled traditional Japanese origami folded paper. In Tokyo the Gallery of Horyuji Treasures opened; it contained a collection of ancient Japanese art in a severe, elegant building by Yoshio Taniguchi, the architect whose competition-winning addition to the Museum of Modern Art in New York was under construction. MoMA, meanwhile, moved some of its collection to a temporary building in Queens, designed by Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzen and New Yorker Jaquelin Robertson. See also the table Notable Civil Engineering Projects.

Commercial Buildings.

      In New York's SoHo district, a new store for Prada clothiers by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, became a much-visited destination, thanks to such features as a dramatic swooping floor—called the “wave”—of zebrawood (an endangered species) and changing rooms with clear glass walls that turned translucent at the press of a button. The store embodied Koolhaas's belief, expressed in his book The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, which appeared in March, that the world had become so commercial that the only remaining important public spaces were shopping areas. Hanover, Ger., was the site of the North German Regional Clearing Bank by Behnisch, Behnisch and Partner. The structure looked like two buildings; a 17-story tower seemed to float above a six-story building that wrapped around it, with public shops and cafés on the ground floor. As was typical in this group's work, a great effort was made to reduce energy consumption, and it was claimed that the building produced 1,920 fewer tons of carbon-dioxide emission annually than a conventional building of the same size. In London the Lloyd's Register of Shipping, by Richard Rogers, was an elegant glass tower that seemed to be delicately inserted among older stone buildings, including a carefully restored historic churchyard. Also debuting in London was a housing estate by British-born Swedish architect Ralph Erskine, a brightly coloured, endlessly varied cluster of apartments. It was the first stage in redevelopment of land around the Millennium Dome in Greenwich on the River Thames.

Future Buildings, Competitions, and Controversies.

      In London a proposal for what would be the tallest building in Europe, London Bridge Tower, by Italian architect Renzo Piano, received planning approval but was opposed by those who thought it would mar views of St. Paul's Cathedral. The tower sloped to a sharp point at the top and was to be 310 m (1,016 ft) tall. A final design for the New York Times headquarters in New York, also by Piano, was announced in late December 2001. It was a 52-story glass tower covered with a lacy skin of white ceramic tubes. Piano was also chosen to design an addition to Richard Meier's High Museum in Atlanta, Ga. A design by American landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson won a competition for a memorial fountain to honour Diana, princess of Wales. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art selected Koolhaas for a $200 million renovation and expansion. Santiago Calatrava was picked to design a $240 million hall for the Atlanta Symphony. An innovative design by Diller + Scofidio, with floors that curved up to become walls and ceilings, was chosen for Eyebeam company headquarters in New York City, and that firm's design for a new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston was unveiled in September. London's Sir Norman Foster unveiled a design for the expansion of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in which the museum's open courtyards would be covered with glass and turned into sculpture gardens and social spaces. Frank O. Gehry's design for a new wing for the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., a characteristic Gehry building of colliding curved panels and dramatic interior spaces, won approval from the Commission of Fine Arts in late 2001. In Berlin the American embassy seemed at last to be on the road to construction after the settlement of a long controversy between the U.S. government and the city about how best to make it secure from terrorism. The California firm of Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners had won a competition in 1996 for the building, which would be sited next door to the historic Brandenburg Gate.

Preservation.

      The Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design (formerly the American Craft Museum) announced plans to renovate the former Huntington Hartford Gallery on Columbus Circle, a quirky modernist New York City landmark by Edward Durrell Stone. The museum hired Oregon architect Brad Cloepfil to produce a plan, but many in the preservation community felt that the building should not be tampered with. The National Trust for Historic Preservation issued its annual list of 11 endangered buildings, including the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minn., by Ralph Rapson; the Hackensack Water Works in Oradell, N.J.; sacred sites at Indian Pass, Imperial county, Calif.; and “Teardowns in Historic Neighborhoods,” a term that referred to cases in which older houses were demolished and replaced by larger new ones. One such case in 2002 was the loss of the Maslon House in California, a 1962 modernist landmark by Richard Neutra. By way of contrast, a house designed by John Hejduk in 1973 for a site in Connecticut, which never was built at that time, had been constructed in 2001 exactly as designed, on a site in The Netherlands. Called Wall House 2 by the architect, the house was a design well known and influential among architects. The Trans World Airlines Terminal at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, a 1962 masterpiece by Eero Saarinen that was no longer considered useful for air traffic, continued to deteriorate without any decision's being reached about its future. The Bronx Developmental Center, a controversial 1977 building by Meier, was gutted and clad in new facades by a new owner. A 1914 landmark mansion in Manhattan was successfully converted by architect Anabelle Selldorf into a museum for the Neue Gallerie, a collection of Austrian and German art. Lever House in New York, a modernist landmark of 1952, was stripped of its entire glass facade, which was deteriorating. The glass was replaced with new glass that looked identical to the old and thus raised a philosophical question among preservationists: was Lever preserved or rebuilt? The most famous house of the 20th century, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pa., underwent an elaborate restoration effort aimed at reversing the sagging of its cantilevered balconies.

Exhibitions.

      The eighth Architecture Biennale in Venice was by far the largest exhibit of the year, showing more than 150 buildings worldwide, most of them not yet built, in the form of scale models and images. The theme of the Biennale was one word, “Next,” and the goal of the exhibition was to preview what would be built in the coming years. More than 100,000 people attended during the Biennale's eight-week run. At the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., “Cesar Pelli: Connections” showcased the work of the American architect. A retrospective of Danish modernist Arne Jacobsen appeared at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Den. The Art Institute of Chicago mounted a show of the drawings of Helmut Jacoby, the leading architectural renderer of the 1960s and '70s.

Deaths.

      Samuel Mockbee, a former winner of the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” died in December 2001. He was best known as the founder of the Rural Studio, where architectural students designed and built homes and other structures for low-income people in rural Hale county, Ala., often making them out of salvaged wood or even tires, hay bales, and automobile windows. J. Carter Brown (Brown, J Carter ), long a major figure in architecture, died in June. During his tenure as director of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the gallery's East Building by architect I. M. Pei was built. As chair of the Washington Fine Arts Commission, he provided crucial support to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and as chair of the Pritzker Prize jury, he exercised a great influence on the careers of major architects. Boston architect Benjamin Thompson (Thompson, Benjamin C. ) died in August. He was best known for his series of “festival marketplaces,” including the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, Harborplace in Baltimore, Md., and South Street Seaport in New York City. Earlier in his career, Thompson was a founder, with Walter Gropius and others, of the Architects Collaborative. He also started a chain of stores called Design Research, selling modern fabrics and furnishings, and designed the chain's flagship building in Harvard Square. (See Obituaries.)

Robert Campbell

▪ 2000

Introduction

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects (For Notable Civil Engineering Projects in work or completed in 1999, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects ).)

Architecture

      A great dome that stood atop the Reichstag in Berlin, home of the Bundestag (the German parliament), dominated the world of architecture in 1999. Originally built in 1894, the Reichstag burned in 1933 and later suffered bomb damage during World War II. Its reopening in April was seen as a symbol of the reemergence of a united Germany after 54 years during which the nation was split in two, East and West. The new dome, like the rest of the renovation, was the work of British architect Sir Norman Foster (see Biographies (Foster, Sir Norman )). Made of modern glass and steel, the dome glowed at night and was expected to become the symbol of the city and a landmark like the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Inside the dome, curving ramps allowed visitors to witness the debates of the legislators below. The transparency of the dome as well as its welcoming appearance were intended to represent the open, democratic government of Germany. In other parts of the building, rather than making everything new and neat, Foster preserved evidence of the building's long and difficult history, including bomb damage, bullet holes, and graffiti left by Russian soldiers when they captured Berlin in 1945. The Reichstag, like other recent German buildings, was also notable as an experiment in so-called sustainable, or green, architecture—that is, architecture that does no damage to the Earth's environment. It was predicted that, thanks to new technologies, the renovated Reichstag would actually produce more energy than it consumed.

      The year was a banner one in other ways for Foster. He was named winner of the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour, for lifetime achievement. He also received several prestigious international commissions, including a new headquarters for the mayor and assembly of London, on a dramatic site on the river Thames near Tower Bridge, as well as a major addition to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Awards.

      Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta, known for his austere modern shapes and intense colours, won the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects—a prize rarely given to non-American architects. The AIA named the 100-story John Hancock Building in Chicago, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, as winner of its “25-Year Award.” The award is given to a building that has proved its merit over time. The AIA also announced its annual Honor Awards for architecture and urban design; among the winners were: Diggs Town, a formerly blighted housing project in Norfolk, Va., renovated into a neighbourhood of streets and front porches by Urban Design Associates of Pittsburgh, Pa.; 42nd Street Now!, a Disney-sponsored renovation of part of Times Square in New York City, by Robert A.M. Stern Associates; a headquarters for the World Bank in Washington, D.C., by Kohn Pedersen Fox; and the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Fin., by American architect Stephen Holl. In Europe, Swiss modernist Peter Zumthor won the Mies van der Rohe Award for his art museum in Bregenz, Austria. The first Latin American Mies Prize went to the Televisa Services Building in Mexico City, designed by the firm TEN Arquitectos. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) bestowed its Gold Medal on the city of Barcelona, Spain, citing 20 years of distinguished architecture and urban design. The RIBA Gold Medal, inaugurated in 1848, was customarily awarded to an individual and had never before been awarded to a city. In Japan the $121,000 Praemium Imperiale was awarded to architect Fumihiko Maki. Blair Kamin received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for a series of articles in the Chicago Tribune on lakefront development. A conference of construction officials in the U.S. named the top 10 building feats of the century. The list, headed by the Channel Tunnel that connected Great Britain and France, included four works of architecture: The Empire State Building in New York City (number four), the Sydney (Australia) Opera House (number seven), the World Trade Center in New York City (number nine), and Foster's Chek Lap Kok Airport in Hong Kong (number 10).

Notable New Buildings.

      With much of the world's economy humming, 1999 saw the arrival of an unusual number of remarkable buildings. Besides the German Reichstag, perhaps the most widely noted structure was another work in Berlin, the Jewish Museum by U.S.-based architect Daniel Libeskind. The museum opened in January as an empty architectural shell, containing no displays. Its knifelike, angular shapes and diagonally slashed windows created disturbing interior spaces, which visitors found deeply moving as a recollection of the disruptions of Jewish life in Germany, culminating in the Holocaust of 1941–45. However, some doubts were expressed as to whether displays, when they are installed in the future, would be able to compete with the theatrical architecture of the museum. Meanwhile, not far from the Jewish Museum, the proposed U.S. embassy by Moore Ruble Yudell remained unbuilt, as U.S. security officials negotiated with Berliners in an attempt to get more open space around the building. Across the street from the embassy site, a Holocaust memorial, designed by American Peter Eisenman, received government approval after a long controversy. Construction of the memorial, which consisted of a field of 2,700 stone pillars, a 20-m (65-ft)-high wall of books, and a research centre, was expected to begin in 2000. During 1999, Eisenman also won a major competition to create a design for several blocks on the west side of Manhattan in New York City. Sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the competition was intended to spark ideas rather than to create a buildable design. Eisenman, who created buildings that looked like flat loaves of bread with slices running through them, was also chosen to design a major visitor centre and museum in Spain's pilgrimage city of Santiago de Compostela.

      In London, on the south bank of the Thames, a vast Millennium Dome was built to celebrate the year 2000. (See Mathematics and Physical Sciences: Sidebar. (New Millennium-Just When Is It Anyway? )) The Dome was an enormous round structure enclosing 8 ha (about 860,000 sq ft) beneath a roof that was a stretched fiberglass membrane. The circular, tentlike roof had a diameter of 320 m (1,050 ft) and was suspended from 12 steel masts, each nearly 100 m (330 ft) tall. It was the largest so-called tensioned membrane structure ever built. Designed by British architect Richard Rogers, the Dome was expected to draw 12 million visitors during the year, after which it would be converted to other uses. Another remarkable Rogers building was an addition to the Palais de Justice in Bordeaux, France, and a Rogers-designed law courts building, featuring a skyline of sail-like pointed roofs, was selected to be built in Antwerp, Belg.

      In the small town of North Adams, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) opened. It was a renovation by architects Bruner/Cott of six former mill buildings with 20,000 sq m (about 215,000 sq ft) of floor space, making it the largest contemporary art museum in the country. Another 20 buildings and 50,000 sq m (about 540,000 sq ft) had yet to be renovated. In Oporto, Port., another museum for contemporary art was designed by Pritzker Prize-winner Alvaro Siza. It was an elegant modernist cluster of white stucco pavilions around a courtyard. Noted Australian architect Glenn Murcutt received his nation's top architecture award for the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre, a nature study facility near Sydney. Japanese Pritzker Prize-winner Tadao Ando completed a corporate retreat on an island: TOTO Seminar House, an austere concrete building with dramatic views of the ocean. In the U.S. the influential New Urbanists, who believed in compact, pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods as opposed to suburban sprawl, continued to flourish with such works as architect Dan Solomon's Vermont Village Plaza, a housing/shopping complex in riot-scarred south-central Los Angeles. In Ottawa a new U.S. embassy by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill opened to general acclaim.

On the Drawing Boards.

      Many other promising buildings were being designed in 1999, but they were not yet built. Pritzker Prize-winner Frank Gehry, designer of the famed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, was chosen to create a similarly free-form addition to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Noted Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron were picked for a new M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, but their modernist design ran into opposition from traditionalists, and the outcome was uncertain. In Austin, Texas, the Herzog firm resigned as designers of another art museum when trustees demanded a conservative redesign. Construction in Los Angeles began on a new Catholic cathedral by Pritzker Prize-winner Rafael Moneo of Spain. Moneo also won the job of adding to the Prado Museum in Madrid. The Chinese government picked a French architect, Paul Andreu, to design a new national theatre complex in Beijing. A design by American Stephen Holl, in the form of a loose row of crystal pavilions, was chosen as the future addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton selected New York's Polshek Partnership to design his Presidential Library in Arkansas. Bernard Tschumi, dean of the school of architecture at Columbia University, New York City, won the commission for a new school of architecture at Florida International University in Miami. New York-based Rafael Viñoly was designing new convention centres for both Pittsburgh and Boston. Still another Pritzker Prize-winner, Italian Renzo Piano, was working on a new museum of modern art for Harvard University on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass.

Exhibitions.

      In Sydney, Australia, “Beyond Architecture: Marion Mahoney and Walter Burley Griffin” explored the remarkable career of the married couple who began in the office of Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago and went on to design the city of Canberra, capital of Australia. “Archigram: Experimental Architecture, 1961–1974,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, recalled the designs, by a group of British visionaries, for cartoonlike cities in which some of the buildings grew and moved. “John Soane Architect: Master of Space and Light,” on the work of the great 19th-century British architect, opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, after which it was to travel to Italy and Paris. “The Unprivate House” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York displayed models, photos, and drawings of recent American houses. The late Italian master Carlo Scarpa was the subject of a major exhibit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. “Ralph Rapson: Sixty Years of Modern Design,” displaying the ebullient work of an American modernist, opened in Minneapolis, Minn., before moving to the Octagon Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Preservation.

      Fallingwater, perhaps the most famous house of the 20th century, was found to be in urgent need of structural repairs. Work on architect Frank Lloyd Wright's sagging masterpiece was to begin in 2000. In Manhattan a landmark post office by turn-of-the-century architects McKim, Mead & White appeared to be on the road to being converted into a new Pennsylvania railroad station. The demolition in 1963 of the old Penn Station across the street, also by the McKim firm, sparked a movement for historic preservation of great architecture. Architect David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the conversion, which was seen as an act of homage to the past. Also in New York came the completion, after years of work, of the stunning restoration of Grand Central Terminal, led by architects Beyer Blinder Belle. In Boston legendary Fenway Park, the home of baseball, was in jeopardy after the announcement of a plan to replace it with an uninspired effort by architects HOK of St. Louis, Mo. In Chicago the landmark Reliance Building, an 1895 office skyscraper by architect Daniel Burnham, reopened as the Hotel Burnham.

News and Trends.

      An emerging trend during the year was the so-called star system, in which a few internationally known “brand name” architects were asked to do a larger and larger share of the world's significant buildings, especially in the U.S. At a single institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Frank Gehry, Fumihiko Maki, Steven Holl, and Kevin Roche—all “star” names—were simultaneously at work on new buildings; at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, the roster included such high-profile names as Gehry, Henry Cobb, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, David Childs, Charles Gwathmey, Thom Mayne, and the firm of Moore Ruble Yudell. Whereas some feared that local architects were losing work to traveling stars, others worried that the stars were being spread too thin and would be unable to deliver their best work. Graves, for example, was designing for Target Stores such mundane items as an alarm clock, a spatula, and a toaster, leading some to wonder whether he was selling good design or, like baseball icon Pete Rose, merely his signature.

Deaths.

      It was a year of many losses in architecture. Among those who died were Joseph Esherick, past winner of the AIA Gold Medal and the architect of shingled houses in California that seemed to grow naturally from the soil; William H. “Holly” Whyte (see Obituaries (Whyte, William Hollingsworth )), who studied ways to make cities more pedestrian-friendly; Saul Steinberg, an artist trained as an architect, who loved to lampoon the world of building (see Obituaries (Steinberg, Saul )); Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck, who brought a humane conscience to the modern movement; Charlotte Perriand, a designer of furniture and collaborator with the more famous Le Corbusier; Colin Rowe, British-American teacher and theorist; and Sir Hugh Casson, a lead designer of the 1951 Festival of Britain.

Robert Campbell

▪ 1999

Introduction

Architecture

      As the millennium neared its end, the buildings that were generating the most architectural excitement continued to be art museums and transportation centres, especially airports. The biggest, most ambitious airport of them all, Chek Lap Kok, opened during the year in Hong Kong. Indeed, at 51 ha (1 ha = 2.47 ac), it was said to be the world's largest enclosed public space, with another 3 ha still under construction. British architect Sir Norman Foster, the principal designer, created a roof of lightweight steel vaults that allowed daylight to penetrate into the vast terminal. "It is a quest for calm spaces bathed in filtered light," the architect said.

      Of the many remarkable new museums, perhaps the most notable was the small, remote Miho Museum near Kyoto, Japan, by American architect I.M. Pei that opened in late 1997. It housed a collection of Asian art owned by the Koyama family, leaders of a 350,000-person spiritual association, Shinji Shumeikai, a group for whom art and nature were the key to well-being. The museum was a modern glass-and-steel structure but with triangular roofs that recalled the shapes of traditional Japanese temples. It occupied a forested mountainous site that was often shrouded in mist. (See Buildings (Architecture and Civil Engineering ), below.)

      The Miho was also noteworthy as an example of the increasing use of television to popularize architecture. A documentary by producer Peter Rosen, "The Museum on the Mountain," premiered on American television in October. Another example of the trend was a widely praised two-part biography of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, by noted filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, that appeared in November, and still another was "Concert of Wills: Making the Getty Center," about the design and construction of the vast art complex in Los Angeles designed by Richard Meier.

Cultural Buildings.

      Besides the Miho, other museums included the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Fin.; by American Steven Holl, it was an experiment surfaced in zinc and glass, using the curving free-form shapes that had become common in the architecture of the late 1990s. Not yet open at the year's end was the long-awaited and controversial Jewish Museum in Berlin, an angular Z-shaped construction by avant-garde architect Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind's Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabrück, Ger., did open during 1998—the first work of the architect, then 52, to be built. It housed the paintings of a German Jewish artist murdered at the Auschwitz extermination camp in 1944. Its interior spaces, like those of the Jewish Museum, featured tilting walls and floors resembling those in such Expressionist films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

      Spanish architect Rafael Moneo designed a new museum on an island in the harbour of Stockholm. The building was a modest villagelike assemblage of spaces gathered around a former drill hall that was used for exhibitions. In New Caledonia in the South Pacific, Italian architect Renzo Piano designed a cultural centre of swelling wooden egglike shapes, reminiscent of the architecture of the indigenous Kanak people. And in Basel, Switz., Piano designed the Beyeler Museum for a collection of French Impressionist masterpieces. It was an elegant high-tech pavilion of steel and glass. In Dallas, Texas, ground was broken for the Cathedral of Hope, which was to be the home of the world's largest gay and lesbian congregation. It was designed in a free-form style by American Philip Johnson.

Civic Buildings.

      Probably the most discussed new civic building of the year was the new British Library near St. Pancras Station in London. The architect, Sir Colin St. John Wilson, had worked on the structure since 1964, and ground was broken in 1982, but the project was held up by bickering among government agencies. The $800 million building was widely criticized as bland and uninspiring. In the U.S. a government building of comparable size was the $816 million Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., by James Ingo Freed, a partner in the firm of Pei Cobb Freed. Freed, the designer of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum nearby, wrapped the Reagan Building in a classical cloak of traditional limestone columns and domes and then exploded the interior as a spectacular contemporary glass-roofed atrium. In Boston a new federal courthouse by another partner in the same firm, Henry Cobb, featured a six-story glass curtain wall offering views across the harbour to the city's downtown.

      The Lisbon World Exposition—Expo '98—featured a ceremonial square designed by Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira that was shaded by an engineering marvel—a thin concrete canopy, spanning 65 m (1 m = 3.28 ft), that looked as delicate as a tablecloth. The square was planned for conversion after the fair into a headquarters for the Portuguese Presidency and Council of Ministers. Also at the Lisbon fair was a new permanent aquarium by Peter Chermayeff of the U.S.

Commercial Buildings.

      The international rage for free-form architecture—an architecture of seemingly random curves and tilts, in which buildings often seem to be exploding or collapsing, as opposed to conventional vertical walls and right angles—was demonstrated in spectacular fashion with the opening of a new cineplex in Dresden, Ger., by the Viennese firm Coop Himmelblau. The building prompted one critic to write, “Not since the Pompidou Centre in Paris has such a compelling building transformed and energized its urban environs. . . . The forms shoot off, and the eyes convince the body it is in the throes of a white-knuckle experience.” Such structures became possible to design and construct only with the advent of the computer, the best-known example being the 1997 Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, by U.S. architect Frank Gehry.

      In the Napa Valley of California, the Dominus Winery was the first American building of the much-honoured Swiss partnership Herzog & De Meuron. The winery was a 91-m-long, two-story building that stretched like a wall across the vineyards, its exterior formed of piles of loose rocks that were held in place by the kind of steel-mesh screens normally used to prevent rockslides along highways. In Berlin the new Debis office tower on the Potsdamer Platz proved to be yet another remarkable building by Renzo Piano. Unlike the usual boxy office tower, the Debis was a bundle of vertical shafts, each containing a different function—either office space or elevators or exit stairs. Debis was also a sophisticated exercise in climate control. The glass wall of the office areas was really two walls. In the outer layer, glass panels were automatically operated by sensors, opening and closing to provide both ventilation and wind control. This outer layer also contained shades that could be operated by the tenants indoors, creating a varied appearance on the facade. Tenants could also open and close windows in the inner layer, set back about half a metre from the outer glass. In its use of a natural method of climate control rather than air-conditioning, the tower was typical of European and, especially, German architecture. Many German architects were going much farther, seeking the elusive goal of “zero-energy” by attempting to derive all their power from sunlight and soil.

Awards.

      Renzo Piano was named the 1998 winner of architecture's highest international honour, the Pritzker Prize. He first became known as the designer, with Richard Rogers, of the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1976. Other works included the Kansai Air Terminal in Osaka, Japan, and the Menil Museum in Houston, Texas. Known for his interest in construction technology and his ability to collaborate with engineers to create inventive new building types, Piano avoided developing a personal style but instead searched for a unique solution to each building problem.

      The Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, a lifetime achievement award, went to Frank Gehry, who was commended especially for his Guggenheim Museum in Spain.The AIA gave its 25-Year Award to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, by Louis Kahn. The 25-Year Award was given to a building at least 25 years old that had stood the test of time. It was the fourth year in which the prize had gone to a work by Kahn. The AIA named Centerbrook Architects and Planners of Essex, Conn., as Firm of the Year. It also presented its annual Honor Awards for the best American buildings of the year. Among the more prominent of the 10 winners were the Chapel of St. Ignatius at the University of Seattle, Wash., by Steven Holl Architects and the renovation of the landmark U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

      At a ceremony in the historic Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, in October, attended by the Aga Khan and King Juan Carlos of Spain, the triennial Aga Khan Award for Architecture was presented to seven buildings scattered in countries from Malaysia to Israel. The Aga Khan, the wealthy spiritual leader of the Ismaili sect of Muslims, started the award program in 1977 to promote culturally appropriate architecture in the Islamic world.

Exhibitions.

      “Alvar Aalto: Between Humanism and Materialism” was on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in the spring. It depicted the life work of the Finnish architect, who was known for combining Modernism with a love of nature. In the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Frank Gehry jazzed up Frank Lloyd Wright's famous spiral ramp with chrome plating and neon lights for an exhibit of “The Art of the Motorcycle.” At the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, an exhibit called “The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life” explored the near-mythical significance of lawns in American culture.

      “At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture,” organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, opened in Tokyo before traveling to Mexico, after which it was scheduled to visit Germany, Brazil, Los Angeles, and New York City. In 1,200 models, computer simulations, drawings, and photographs, the exhibit attempted to sum up all movements and trends of the entire century in a manner that would be easily understood by the general public. Sydney, Australia, was host to an exhibit called “Marion Mahoney and Walter Burley Griffin,” the married team of architects who worked in the office of Frank Lloyd Wright in his early years and then went on to design the city of Canberra, capital of Australia.

New Commissions.

      Architects—in many cases quite avant-garde architects—were selected for several hotly contested new projects in the U.S. during the year. Zaha Hadid, London-based leader of the so-called Deconstructivist movement in architecture, who was known for designing computer-generated buildings that appeared to be freeze-framed at the moment of exploding, was chosen as designer of the Cincinnati (Ohio) Contemporary Arts Center, her first American building. Libeskind won the job of designing a new Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas (see BIOGRAPHIES (Koolhaas, Rem )), author of the classic book Delirious New York,was selected to design a new campus centre at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Henry Cobb was chosen as architect for a new National Constitution Center near Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

      Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates of New York City won the job of converting the city's central post office into a new Pennsylvania Station, a replacement for the great Penn Station across the street that was demolished in 1963. In Edinburgh it was announced that Spanish architect Enric Miralles would design Scotland's new Parliament building, a structure made necessary by Scotland's recently granted status of home rule. Also in Scotland, Glasgow embarked on a year (1999) as “United Kingdom City of Architecture and Design,” during which the city planned to restore the Glasgow Herald Building by the city's famed turn-of-the-century architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Preservation.

      New York City's other great railroad landmark, Grand Central Station, reopened after years of meticulous restoration by architects Beyer Blinder Belle. Still another New York City icon, the main reading room of the Public Library, also reopened after renovation. A classic of the so-called Beaux-Arts style, the room was restored by architect Lewis Davis, who had to deal with such problems as windows painted black 50 years earlier, during World War II, because of the fear of air raids. In Philadelphia it was announced that the modernist classic PSFS Building, one of the first modern skyscrapers, would be converted to a hotel. Two of the most famous houses by Frank Lloyd Wright became preservation issues. Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, built over a waterfall, was found to be suffering severe structural weakening that would, if untreated, cause it to collapse into the river. And at Taliesin East, Wright's own home in Wisconsin, a centuries-old oak tree fell during a windstorm and crushed part of the roof. Plans were quickly made to repair both houses.

      An international protest was mounted after the announcement that the 1972 Sho-Hondo Buddhist temple at the foot of Mt. Fuji in Japan, regarded as a classic of late modern architecture, would be demolished by the religious leaders who owned it. The World Monuments Fund announced its biennial list of the world's most endangered historic sites, ranging from the early-modern Russian Russakov Club theatre (1929) in Moscow to Fort Apache, a Native American village in Arizona. In New York City the nearly all-glass (including floors) penthouse apartment of the late architect Paul Rudolph, a modern classic, was placed at risk when the building it sat atop was offered for sale.

News Events and Controversies.

      In Washington, D.C., government agencies approved a revised design of the controversial proposed World War II Memorial, planned for a site on the Mall near the Washington Monument. Times Square in New York City continued its rebirth with several new projects. Architects Philip Johnson and Alan Ritchie unveiled a proposal for two towers, 40 and 49 stories, the entire facades of which would be changeable illuminated advertising. Also in New York City a 3,700-ton historic theatre, the Empire, was moved about 52 m along 42nd Street to make room for a new 25-screen cinema. City agencies had insisted that the old theatre be preserved. Ground was broken for a new theatre, the Second Stage, designed by Koolhaas and local architect Richard Gluckman.

      The town of Seaside, Fla., gained notoriety when it was used as the setting for the film The Truman Show, which presented it, some thought unfairly, as a prettified prison. The movement that had created Seaside, the so-called New Urbanism, continued to spread rapidly throughout the U.S. and in other countries. It advocated closely knit, easily walkable “Main Street” towns, as opposed to the sprawl of highways and suburbs that had characterized development since World War II.

ROBERT CAMPBELL

BRIDGES

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects (For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects ).)

      Even though much of Asia suffered a financial crisis in 1998, the world's longest bridge was completed there, and other major projects were underway. Foremost was the opening in April in Japan of the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, a suspension bridge with a central main span of 1,991 m (1 m = 3.28 ft). At year's end it was by the far the world's longest span, easily displacing the U.K.'s Humber Bridge. The 3,911-m-long Akashi crosses a strait of the Inland Sea and links the Japanese islands of Honshu and Shikoku via Awaji Island. The bridge took 10 years to build and was affected by the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which moved the tops of the 283-m steel towers farther apart by 0.8 m. Engineers then recalculated the design.

      A second noteworthy project in Japan was the Tatara cable-stayed bridge, which made up part of another bridge chain from Honshu to Shikoku. Crossing nine islands, the $800 million structure was to have a central span of 890 m when it opens in 1999 and a total length of 1,480 m. Cable-stay rather than suspension was chosen for this bridge because large suspension anchorages would have involved unsightly excavations in the middle of a national park.

      In China construction was well advanced on the Jiangyin highway suspension bridge, one of the world's four largest. The superstructure team from Norwegian contractor Kværner, which built the 1,377-m Tsing Ma Bridge in Hong Kong, moved north to construct this 1,385-m central span suspension bridge across the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) near Shanghai. It was scheduled to be completed in mid-1999 as a symbol of the 50th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution.

      Another landmark opening in Asia during the year was the Bangabandhu Jamuna Multipurpose Bridge in Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest nations and one regularly buffeted by typhoons and floods. The multispan concrete structure was the first major link between the two parts of the country separated by the Jamuna River, which can be up to 40 km wide in its floodplain and which frequently changes course (1 km = 0.62 mi). When construction began, the bridge abutment could be fixed at only one end; the location of the other end could not be determined until the end of the next flood season. The bridge also needed extremely deep foundations, each of the concrete piers at 100 m spacings requiring 13-m-diameter tubes driven 105 m deep for stability.

      In Europe another record holder, the Great Belt (Store Bælt) East suspension bridge opened in June. It was, at 1,624 m, the world's second longest span, and it carried a four-lane highway that extended onto multispan concrete viaducts on either side for a total crossing of 6.8 km. The bridge is part of an 18-km road-and-rail crossing between Funen and Zealand, Denmark's major islands. Another major bridge in Europe was to be the Rion-Antirion in Greece. Crossing the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth, it was to have three cable-stayed spans and total 2.9 km in length over water up to 62 m deep.

      In the U.S., particularly in California, attention increasingly was focused on retrofitting and rebuilding bridges so that they would be more resistant to earthquakes. Approaches to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco were being strengthened, and the design for a single-tower suspension bridge and viaduct as the more than $1 billion replacement of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was approved.

ADRIAN LEE GREEMAN

BUILDINGS

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects (For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects ).)

      At the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in Nouméa, New Caledonia, which opened in 1998, fingerlike, laminated-wood ribs webbed with a fretwork of iroko wood and enclosing 10 shell-like exhibition pavilions reached toward the sky. Besides evoking the thatched structures of the native Kanak people, the pavilion's airfoil shape and double-wall construction, designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (Genoa, Italy), served two purposes. The shape caused prevailing breezes to draw hot air out of the naturally ventilated structures, assisting the infiltration of cooler air from their base, and steel rods and connectors reinforced the two shells against typhoons.

      In Berlin the Debis tower opened. A 22-story office building, also designed by Piano, it also featured a double-wall construction but one that was technologically sophisticated. Electronic sensors measured temperature, wind, and the Sun's intensity and instructed computerized controls to pivot open a glass outer wall when natural ventilation was needed. On cool days the window wall closed, sealing a 70-cm-wide airspace to insulate the interior (1 cm = 0.39 in). Some areas of the building were shaded by specially fabricated, high-strength terra-cotta rods and panels. These innovations allowed occupants to have highly individualized control of heat, glare, and ventilation, while reducing energy consumption well below the strict European norms.

      Rehabilitation of Berlin's 1894 Reichstag, which languished as a semi-ruin during the divided-city era, neared completion. It shared with the Tjibaou and Debis projects an increasing architectural focus on environmentally sustainable design and energy conservation. Within restored massive stone walls, the London-based firm, Sir Norman Foster & Partners, designed a glass box as the place where the German parliament will sit. Breezes wafting through a louvered-glass dome atop the Bundestag hall were designed to draw exhaust air up a funnel-like chimney. Mirrors on the exterior of the funnel would reflect daylight deep into the hall, reducing the need for electric light, while a track-mounted sunshade would revolve as the Sun moves, to reduce glare.

      Exhibitions during the year showcased technological prowess. Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza, working with engineer Cecil Balmond of the Ove Arup Partnership, slung an inches-thin, curved-concrete roof spanning 65 m as a welcoming entrance to Lisbon's Expo '98 (1 m = 3.28 ft). The Millennium Dome, said to be the world's largest at 320 m in diameter, neared completion in Greenwich, east of London. Twelve outward-tilted, 90-m-high masts held tensioned-steel cables, stretching taut a coated, fibreglass roof. The designers were the Richard Rogers Partnership, architect (London), and Buro Happold (Bath, Eng.).

      The site of the Miho Museum, near Kyoto, Japan, was adjacent to long-sacred landscapes. Pursuant to strict conservation criteria, architect Pei Cobb Freed & Partners placed 80% of the floor area underground, restoring on the roof preexisting landforms and native plantings. About 2,000 piles were driven for the 460-m-high Shanghai World Financial Center, designed by architect Kohn Pedersen Fox of New York City and slated for completion in 2001. Primarily an office building of composite steel and concrete construction, it was to be topped by an observation deck and 10 floors of hotel guest rooms, both reached by double-decked, express elevators.

      Technological advances in computers and telecommunications technologies began to affect commercial office building design in 1998. Data networking systems increasingly permitted roving workers to plug in phones and computers wherever desired within a building or complex of company facilities. Wireless networks also showed promise, though they remained limited in data capacity and sometimes entailed more wiring than conventional networks. Such technology advances promised a more mobile workplace, where employees increasingly eschew offices and desks for a variety of formal and informal work settings.

JAMES S. RUSSELL

DAMS

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects (For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects ).)

      Though often considered less valuable than claimed and in many cases environmentally harmful, in 1998 dams continued to be in demand to supply drinking water to the expanding population, for municipal and industrial purposes, and for agriculture. This was evidenced by the completion of 242 dams in 1997 and the 1,738 dams under construction in 1998. The less-developed countries continued to build the largest numbers: India (625), China (302), Turkey (236), and South Korea (145). In the developed nations dam construction slowed considerably, mostly because of the recognition that environmental impacts of the construction had often not been properly considered. A particular focus in this regard was the resettlement of people from areas flooded by dam reservoirs.

      In China the Three Gorges Dam continued to receive considerable attention because of the 1.3 million people that would be displaced from the reservoir area and the consequent economic damage to them, which had not been addressed adequately. After years of debate, however, the Chinese announced that they had made satisfactory arrangements for the displaced people. This was later confirmed in a report by the World Bank. The World Bank subsequently invited the World Conservation Union to hold a workshop to discuss and develop an agreement on international standards for deciding whether a dam should be built. The Union planned to conduct a review on the effectiveness of large dams in promoting social and economic development.

      Worldwide in 1998 there were more than 45,000 dams, over 20,000 in China alone. About 80% of these dams were less than 30 m high, and only 1% had heights in excess of 150 m (1 m = 3.28 ft). By type, 75% were earthfill dams, 10% gravity dams, 7% rockfill dams, 6% arch dams, and 2% masonry dams. As of 1998 only 80-85% of the hydroelectric potential had been tapped in the developed countries, and less than 20% had been exploited in the less-developed countries. Approximately 70-80% of the surface water in most less-developed countries was going to waste into the seas and oceans.

      In Laos, near the Vietnam border, work proceeded on the Nam Theum 2 hydroelectric project. With a capacity of 680 MW, it was expected to generate $250 million per year in revenue from electricity sales. The reservoir was to be 70 km long, cover some 450 sq km, and store three billion cu m of water (1 sq km = 0.386 sq mi; 1 cu m = 35.3 cu ft). Its cost was estimated at $1.2 billion, and it would require the resettlement of 800 families in 17 villages. The government claimed that no family would be inconvenienced during resettlement and none would be worse off after resettlement.

      Slovakia was pressing Hungary to build a dam on the Danube River so that the Gabcikovo hydroelectric project could be completed. Hungary stopped work on its Nagymaros Dam in 1989 after pressure from environmentalists. Nagymaros is 100 km downstream from Slovakia's Gabcikovo Dam and was needed to deal with river fluctuations caused by the Gabcikovo power output (1 km = 0.62 mi).

      The 165-m-high Sainte Marguerite 3 Dam was the largest under construction in Canada. An earthfill and rockfill dam 380 m long with a volume content of 6.3 million cu m and due for completion in 2001, it was to provide 882 MW of power.

      In the U.S. the 168-m-high Seven Oaks Dam in southern California was scheduled for completion in 1999. In 1998 the U.S. Congress ordered that their effect on wildlife and recreation be considered rather than their power output alone, when existing dams needed to be relicensed.

T.W. MERMEL

ROADS

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects (For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects ).)

      One of the biggest highway spending programs in history was approved by the U.S. Congress in 1998. The six-year infrastructure program, totaling $217 billion, would pay for new and reconstructed roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems across the nation and correct inequities in the formula for distributing highway funds by ensuring that no state would get back less than 91 cents for each dollar of gasoline taxes paid into the federal highway trust fund.

      The International Road Federation (IRF) praised the U.S. investment, and Switzerland cautioned that if European Union (EU) countries failed to follow the U.S. example and unblock road spending programs, they risked falling to third place behind the U.S. and Southeast Asia in global competition. In June the EU approved more than $500 million for its Trans-European Networks, with 62% of the fund targeted for rail projects. Though the U.K. government planned to reduce road-building projects, it gave its consent for the construction of Great Britain's first private tollway, a $1 billion bypass of Birmingham. The project won legal clearance after protesters lost their suit, claiming that the government acted unlawfully in giving the go-ahead for the scheme. The IRF also made further progress in relaunching infrastructure development in Central Asia and the Caucasus, following the successful Silk Road Conference in Azerbaijan on Sept. 7-8, 1998. The IRF, which functions as two separate organizations—one based in Washington, D.C., and the other in Geneva—would become a single global organization on Jan. 1, 1999.

      Despite the economic crises in Southeast Asia, a huge road-building program in China appeared undisturbed. By 2010 an estimated 90 million more Chinese would be able to afford a car, and construction work was underway to complete two north-south and two east-west highways. In 1998 China became the largest borrower of investment loans ($2.6 billion) from the World Bank. China also slated $6 billion for new road projects in Hong Kong.

      In Pakistan work started on the 154-km (1 km = 0.62 mi) section of the M-1 expressway from Peshawar to Islamabad. The road, valued at $430 million, would form part of a 1,300-km expressway from Peshawar in the north to Karachi in the south. Another section of the road opened—the $1 billion, 357-km Lahore-Islamabad expressway. In neighbouring India, where 80% of passenger and 60% of freight movement was by road, authorities were told by the World Bank that it would be prepared to allocate $1 billion to finance badly needed road construction. Following devastating floods, Bangladesh received $273 million, the largest-ever credit from the World Bank for road rehabilitation and maintenance projects.

      Bangladesh also witnessed the opening of Bangabandhu Bridge—a 4.8-km, more than $900 million structure over the Jamuna River—which physically linked the east and west. Other highway bridge openings included the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in Japan, part of a system of bridges linking the islands of Honshu and Shikoku (its main span of 1,991 m made it the longest suspension bridge in the world); the 17-km-long Vasco da Gama structure (including 12.3 km of viaducts) over the Tagus River in Lisbon; and the 6.8-km East Bridge in Denmark, which completed the $6.5 billion Great Belt (Store Bælt) project linking two islands. (See Bridges (Architecture and Civil Engineering ), above.)

PATRICK SMITH

      See also Latin America's New Transportation Links (Spotlight: Latin America's New Transportation Links ); Sidebar. (Trans-Kalahari Highway )

TUNNELS

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects (For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects ).)

      Transportation created the greatest need for tunneling in 1998. Roads, railways, and urban mass transit systems throughout the world required tunnels, not as a last resort or only option through hills and mountains or under waterways but as the alternative of choice to satisfy a growing number of public and engineering concerns, including protection of the environment, a reduction of noise in urban and residential areas, and heightened awareness for security against the increased risk of terrorist attack.

      The use of tunnels to protect the environment was best illustrated by the new road project in Paris, where two long tunnels totaling 17.7 km were to provide the final link in the A86 ring road around Paris and preserve the natural beauty of the Seine River valley and countryside near the palace of Versailles (1 km = 0.62 mi). One of the two tunnels, at 10.1 km long and 11.6 m in outer diameter, would be the first to employ a double-deck design for the exclusive use of automobiles that would provide three lanes in each direction on each deck (1 m = 3.28 ft). The second, 7.6 km long and 10.67 m in outer diameter, would provide a conventional two-lane interior, one lane in each direction, for trucks and other large vehicles. The project was expected to be completed by 2005.

      Other outstanding road tunnels under construction during 1998 included the Lærdal Tunnel in Norway, the world's longest road tunnel to date at 24.5 km; the 14.2-m-diameter Elbe Tunnel under the Elbe River in Hamburg, Ger., which used the world's largest full-face soft-ground tunnel boring machine; and the 6.6-km twin-tube bored tunnel under the Westerschelde River in The Netherlands, which was chosen in preference to a bridge or an immersed-tube tunnel to replace ferry services across the busy waterway into the ports of Belgium. In Scandinavia 20 precast concrete elements 176 m long, 40 m wide, and 9 m high were floated out and lowered into a 10-m-deep trench on the seabed to form the 3.8-km immersed-tube tunnel section of the 16-km Øresund road-and-rail bridge-and-tunnel link across The Sound to the Baltic Sea between Kastrup near Copenhagen and Lernacken near Malmö in Sweden. Work started in 1995, and the project was expected to open to traffic in mid-2000.

      Tunneling has increased significantly on high-speed railways where trains need lines as straight and as flat as possible to maintain speeds of 300 km/h and more. For example, of the new 79-km high-speed line between Florence and Bologna in Italy, 73 km was in a tunnel. Other countries currently building or planning high-speed railways with large portions in tunnels included Germany, Switzerland, Taiwan, France, Spain, Sweden, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Tunneling for subways was underway in many cities in 1998, including Lisbon, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, London, Madrid, Athens, Paris, Rome, Toronto, Bangkok, Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, and Delhi, India.

      Timetables for several tunneling projects were linked to events scheduled to take place in 2000. In Sydney, Australia, a new 10-km railway tunnel link from the airport to the city centre was to be completed and in operation before the start of the Olympic Games in September. In London the Jubilee Line extension of the Underground system was scheduled to open by the end of 1999 in time to carry thousands of visitors expected to celebrate the dawn of the new century at the Millennium Dome in Greenwich.

SHANI WALLIS

▪ 1998

Introduction

Architecture

      With many national economies booming, the year 1997 was a good one for architecture in much of the world. It was also a year of increasing internationalism. Several of the most prominent American firms were doing as much as half their work overseas. At the same time, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York City chose 10 finalists to compete for the job of expanding its facilities, 6 of the firms were either European or East Asian. The biggest news, however, was the formal opening of two long-anticipated art museums, one in Los Angeles and the other in Bilbao, Spain. Each was designed by one of the world's most prominent architects, both winners of the Pritzker Prize. The two buildings seemed to define a watershed between an older and a newer kind of architecture.

      The first of the two to be completed, a branch of New York City's Guggenheim Museum, opened in October in Bilbao. The architect, Frank O. Gehry of the U.S., created an amazing swirling pile of angled and curving free forms with an exterior surface of shining titanium. It was a building that could have been designed or built only with the aid of a computer. Gehry, in fact, had been a pioneer in adapting computer programs from the world of aircraft design. (See Buildings, (Architecture and Civil Engineering ) below). To many observers his museum seemed to be a masterpiece that might inaugurate a new era in architecture. The museum, the cost of which was paid by the people of Bilbao and its province, was also interesting as a demonstration of the way in which a star architect and attention-getting building could put a relatively little-known city on the world's cultural map.

      Only two months later, in December, the even larger Getty Center opened in Los Angeles. Bringing together, on a single dramatic site, most of the art-related activities funded by the bequest of wealthy oilman J. Paul Getty, it was undoubtedly the most discussed and anticipated building of its time. With a $1 billion construction budget, it was often called the architectural commission of the century. The architect was Richard Meier, also an American, who had long been known for houses in an elegant, austere Modernist style and for museums in Barcelona, Spain; Frankfurt, Ger.; and Atlanta, Ga. In some ways Meier's museum seemed as much a culmination of traditional modernism as Gehry's seemed a new departure. Its crisply cut white shapes reminded observers of the early modern architecture of the French pioneer Le Corbusier. Dispersed among gardens, courtyards, and water features, the Getty buildings also reminded one of a much older model, the villa built by the Roman Emperor Hadrian outside Rome.

Awards.

      The Pritzker Prize, often called the architectural equivalent of a Nobel, was won in 1997 by Sverre Fehn of Norway), (Fehn, Sverre ) something of a dark horse who was not widely known internationally. Most of his major works were in Scandinavia, including the Glacier Museum in Norway and an extension of the National Theatre in Copenhagen. The Pritzker jury commended Fehn for successfully combining modern architectural form with elements of his Norwegian heritage. Fehn was awarded the prize at a ceremony in May at the site of the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

      Tadao Ando of Japan received the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Best known for his exquisite handling of natural light in chapels in Japan—built, usually, entirely out of smooth concrete—Ando was also named winner of a competition for the design of a new museum of modern art in Fort Worth, Texas, his first U.S. commission. This museum was to be built directly across the street from Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum, one of the most celebrated of 20th-century buildings.

      The Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects was not awarded in 1997. The AIA, however, named 13 U.S. buildings as winners of its annual Honor Awards for architecture. Among the most prominent were a renovation of historic Memorial Hall at Harvard University by Venturi, Scott Brown, with Bruner/Cott and Robert Neiley; the Bass Center for Molecular and Structural Biology at Yale University by Kallmann McKinnell & Wood; and the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, Calif., by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. The National Library of France in Paris, by Dominique Perrault, won the Mies van der Rohe award for European buildings "of conceptual and technical merit." The extensive use of glass in the building had outraged bibliophiles because exposure to sunlight makes the preservation of materials problematic.

Civic Buildings.

      Memorials of various kinds were in the news in the U.S. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial opened to the public on a site fronting the Potomac River Basin in Washington, D.C. Designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, it comprised a series of outdoor pools and courtyards with walls of dark basalt stone, on which were engraved quotations and images drawn from the president's four terms in office. As a result of pressure from various interest groups, it was decided not to show Roosevelt with his signature cigarette holder or his wife, Eleanor, in a fur boa. Congress also mandated that the designer add some reference to the fact that the president used a wheelchair.

      Opening to general acclaim was the Women in Military Service to America Memorial at the foot of Arlington (Va.) National Cemetery. Designers Marian Weiss and Michael Manfredi carved out new space behind the 1939 semicircular landscape wall by McKim Mead & White, which was also restored as part of the project. The controversial World War II Memorial, planned for a site on the Mall near the Washington Monument, was being revised by Friedrich St. Florian after criticism that his winning design, for a large paved plaza and water feature, might be so intrusive as to interfere with views from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument.

      Also new in Washington was the long-awaited passenger terminal at National Airport by Cesar Pelli. The main concourse was a huge ceremonial space, with a vaulted roof and tall windows overlooking the Potomac River. Washington's other airport, Dulles International, designed by the late Eero Saarinen and regarded as an architectural masterpiece, was doubled in size by architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in a manner that seemed only to enhance its power. In Portland, Ore., a new federal courthouse by Kohn Pedersen Fox was an outstanding example of recent efforts by the U.S. government to improve the architecture of public buildings. In Madison, Wis., the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center, based on a design made more than 50 years earlier by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, opened on a lakefront site in July.

Cultural Buildings.

      At the year's end it appeared that the long-stalled Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles by Gehry would be built. In September it was announced that 83% of its $220 million cost was in hand and that the hall was expected to be completed early in 2001.

      In January the Museum of Modern Art in New York City announced that 10 architects had been chosen to make competing proposals for the museum's expansion. The museum avoided many famous names in search of a younger architect. In the spring the 10 proposals went on exhibit in the museum, and in December it was announced that Yoshio Taniguchi of Japan was the winner. Another of the 10 competitors, Stephen Holl of New York City, meanwhile won considerable praise for his Chapel of St. Ignatius at Seattle (Wash.) University.

      In Singapore a vast 30-ha (75-ac) technical college, Temasek Polytechnic, was the last building by the late British architect James Stirling, designed with his partner Michael Wilford. In Santa Fe, N.M., a museum for the work of painter Georgia O'Keeffe opened in a former adobe church, renovated and expanded by New York architect Richard Gluckman.

Commercial Buildings.

      Gehry garnered attention with an office building in Prague known as "Fred and Ginger," named for the dancing pair of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Its two towers seemed to be locked in a ballroom dance. The RWE AG Hochhaus in Essen, Ger., was seen as the first of a new generation of energy-saving, environmentally responsible office towers, reflecting the great interest in such "green" architecture in Europe. The 30-story tower was cylindrical with small floor areas that allowed maximum daylight for all offices. Exterior walls sandwiched aluminum blinds between two layers of glass. The Commerzbank building in Frankfurt by Norman Foster of Britain was another "green" tower completed in 1997. (See Buildings (Architecture and Civil Engineering ), below).

      In Culver City, Calif., architect Eric Moss added two buildings to what had become virtually a town of some 20 commercial structures he had done in a highly personal style. The buildings often looked more like elaborate sculptures than conventional architecture.

Exhibitions.

      The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City staged the largest exhibit ever held of the work of the Scottish designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Originating in Glasgow, Scot., the exhibit later traveled to Chicago and Los Angeles. It focused on 250 items, including furniture, watercolours, posters, and other objects by the noted architect, one of the founders of the Art Nouveau style at the turn of the century. At the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, American pop-culture scholar Karal Ann Marling curated an exhibit on the work of the theme-park architecture of the Disney Co. entitled "The Architecture of Reassurance." Mounted at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Ger., was a major exhibit of the work of American designers Charles and Ray Eames, creators of the "Eames chair" and many other classics of graphic and industrial design.

News Events.

      Aldo Rossi, one of the most influential architects of his generation, died in Italy in September. Winner of the 1990 Pritzker Prize, Rossi was known for his belief that one purpose of architecture is to embody the memory of a people and a culture and to provide a setting for ritual and everyday drama. His own buildings often seemed to possess a dreamlike familiarity. ) (Rossi, Aldo ) Paul Rudolph died in August in New York City of cancer that was thought to date back to his days of working with asbestos in a naval shipyard during World War II. He was best known for a series of monumentally rugged concrete buildings of the 1960s, including the Art and Architecture Building at Yale University. ) (Rudolph, Paul ) William Turnbull, much admired as a practitioner of a woody, landscape-sensitive, modest architecture and a collaborator, with Charles Moore and others, on the landmark Sea Ranch condominiums of 1966, died in June.

      A political controversy erupted in California over a referendum proposal to award state architectural contracts on the basis purely of low cost rather than quality of the architectural design. It was strongly opposed by architects. Near Chicago the legendary Farnsworth House (1946-50), designed by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and regarded as one of the great private houses of the Modern movement, was opened for public tours for the first time.

Urban Design.

      With the runaway commercial success of the Disney new town of Celebration in Florida, the movement known as the New Urbanism continued to gain in strength and popularity. New Urbanists believed in traditional tightly knit, walkable towns rather than the more sprawling, car-oriented suburban developments of recent decades. As the year ended, many New Urbanist communities, sometimes called "neotraditional," were on the drawing boards. Among the largest was Cornell near Toronto, designed to contain 10,000 homes plus a shopping main street and office space. Designed by the Miami, Fla., team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk) (Duany, Andres, and Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth ), leaders of the New Urbanism movement, Cornell began selling its first 700 houses in June. The town plan was described by Duany as his firm's "absolutely flawless, best, flagship project." Supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, New Urbanist principles were also beginning to be applied to the renovation of older housing projects in and near the centres of American cities.

      Another trend worldwide was the growth of "entertainment retail," in which firms such as Nike, Disney, and Time Warner created stores that were as much theme parks as sales outlets. Their purpose was to advertise their products in key locations.

      Controversy surrounded major public spaces in three U.S. cities in 1997. In San Francisco a competition was held in August for the redesign of neglected Union Square, a plaza above an underground garage at the heart of downtown. The winning entry, which the designers described as "one plane that wraps itself over the garage like a piece of origami," was thought too avant-garde by some, and its future was uncertain. In Philadelphia the long-running controversy over Independence Mall, where 500 historic buildings were demolished in the 1960s to create a little-used park, continued. The new proposal, by the National Park Service with landscape architect Laurie Olin, would shrink the park by adding new buildings, including a new shelter for the Liberty Bell. In Boston proposals to shrink and enliven another barren civic space, City Hall Plaza, by adding a new hotel along one edge ran into opposition from the U.S. government on the grounds that the hotel would obstruct views of government workers in a federal building.

      More successful was the ongoing revival of Times Square in New York City, where several deteriorating theatres were restored, two of them into a new Ford Center for the Performing Arts. Plans were also announced for a 16-screen movie theatre complex and for a design by Gehry to wrap the former Times Tower in a "striptease" fabric of see-through mesh and a jazzy new 47-story hotel complex by the Miami design firm Arquitectonica.

ROBERT CAMPBELL

      See also Building and Construction. (Art, Antiques, and Collections )

      This article updates architecture, history of Western (Western architecture).

Bridges

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects(For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).)

      Repairs, renovations, and rehabilitations gained prominence in 1997 as bridges throughout the world revealed the need to be strengthened for 21st-century traffic loads and to be upgraded to meet new earthquake-resistant design standards. In regard to the latter, five crossings of the bay area around San Francisco required major upgrades. Some work was under way on the approaches to the Golden Gate Bridge, though funding was still required for the main towers, the main span, and the Fort Point arch. Design and initial construction upgrading work was also under way on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, which needed huge new foundations and strengthened steel work. Most problematic was the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which needed about $1.5 billion worth of work. The suspension section was to be upgraded to withstand seismic shocks better, but costs for upgrading the viaduct were so high that a $1 billion replacement was to be built. A variety of designs were proposed, including exotic tilting cable-stays and a single-pylon suspension span, though none would be built until after 2000.

      On a positive note, 1997 witnessed the resurgence of the suspension bridge, the most suitable design for the longest spans. In Hong Kong the outgoing British administration celebrated the opening in April of the 1,377-m-long central span of the Tsing Ma suspension bridge with fireworks and a speech from Baroness Thatcher (1 m = 3.28 ft). Though second in length to Britain's 1,410-m Humber Bridge, Tsing Ma was the sturdiest of the long suspension bridges, carrying not just a dual three-lane highway to the airport but also a high-speed railway inside its steel deck box. The bridge also had to withstand typhoon-force winds.

      Humber's length record would not last much longer. During the year the last deck sections were lifted into place for the 1,624-m central span Great Belt (Store Bælt) East Bridge in Denmark, part of an extended crossing between the islands of Zealand and Funen. The bridge carried a dual two-lane highway.

      When completed in 1998, Great Belt East would not hold the world length record for long. In Japan the 1,991-m-long Akashi Kaikyo suspension bridge was nearing the end of its 10-year construction program; it would form the major element of a second crossing to Shikoku Island from Honshu, Japan's main island.

      China was pressing ahead with plans for a 28-km (17.4-mi) crossing of the Pearl River Delta to Hong Kong, mainly on a viaduct though including a 1,400-m span, a 900-m span, and a 250-m span. In Bangladesh the 9-km (5.6-mi) Bangabandhu Bridge (until August 28 the Jamuna Multipurpose Bridge) was taking shape; it would cross treacherous and deep soft silts and a riverbed that shifted alignment every year. Huge steel piles up to 100 m long and 7 m in diameter supported the piers for the 99-m-long precast concrete deck spans that were being placed one every 12 days.

      Finally, a small cable-stayed bridge completed during the year in Kolding, Den., may have been a portent of the future. Just 40 m long, it could support a five-ton tractor load easily, but the deck weighed only two tons because it was made of reinforced polyester. A normal concrete deck would weigh 30 tons. According to some industry observers, plastic and carbon-fibre bridges might eventually exceed those of steel by a factor of two in length.

ADRIAN LEE GREEMAN

      This article updates bridge.

BUILDINGS

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects(For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).)

       Architects had long dreamed that exterior walls of buildings would protect yet breathe—like human skin. That dream came one step closer to reality in 1997 with the completion of two office towers. The "skin" of the headquarters for RWE AG in Essen, Ger. (Ingenhoven, Overdiek, Kahlen & Partners, architect, Düsseldorf), consisted of two layers sandwiching a 50-cm-wide air space (1 cm = 0.39 in). The outer layer of glass incorporated ventilating slots; an inner glass layer slid open as needed. With the outer ventilating slots closed, the air space acted as an insulating layer. When the slots were open, the air space became a cooling chimney; hot, stale air rose and was exhausted, and cooler fresh air was drawn in. The extensive glass usually eliminated the need for daytime electric lights (automated blinds set between the glass layers offered protection from solar heat and glare). The building's exposed concrete slab absorbed heat generated during the day, reradiating it at night for winter heating or summer precooling. These design elements reduced RWE's energy use to well below Germany's strict requirements. At the same time, users had a great deal of discretion in the control of temperature, ventilation, and light.

      While many of the same techniques were used by the London-based firm of Sir Norman Foster & Partners in the design of the Commerzbank tower, completed in Frankfurt, Ger., that project took natural ventilation one step farther. Excess heat rose within the full-height open internal shaft, and fresh air was drawn inward through four-story gardens carved into the exterior. Another benefit was that inside offices, which could legally be windowless in some countries but not in Germany, opened onto the gardens.

      The Getty Center in Los Angeles opened in December after 14 years of design and construction. At 87,790 sq m (945,000 sq ft), it was among the largest cultural complexes ever constructed at one time. Among its innovations was a louver and skylight system that precisely limited the amount of natural light falling on sensitive paintings.

      Several large Asian airports were under construction during the year. The first 516,000-sq m (5,554,000-sq ft) terminal area at Chek Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong (Sir Norman Foster & Partners, architect; Ove Arup & Partners, engineer) was roofed in huge 36 × 36-m vaults supported by a steel lattice set at a diagonal (36 m = 118 ft). Seoul, S.Kor.'s vast international airport was divided into a "land side" of ticketing, baggage, and ground-transportation functions linked by an underground automated people mover to several linear "air-side" terminals for boarding and deplaning (Fentress Bradburn, Denver, Colo., with the Korean Architects Collaborative International). Kisho Kurokawa (Japan) designed satellite terminals for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's airport that evoked the tropical environment, using tree-form column-trunks that supported inverted double-curved roofs ("branches").

      Highly sophisticated computer-modeling software enabled the design of buildings of unprecedented sculptural complexity. Chief among them was the Guggenheim Museum that opened in Bilbao, Spain. CATIA, the computer software used by architect Frank O. Gehry (Santa Monica, Calif.) not only helped realize the museum's sinuous titanium-clad vaults and flowerlike forms; it also analyzed the supporting steel structure, conveying to the fabricator the loads and geometries of the connections and thereby greatly reducing the time needed to calculate their proper strength.

JAMES S. RUSSELL

Dams

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects(For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).)

      More than 1,500 dams were reported to be under construction throughout the world in 1997. The largest numbers were being built in India (650), China (280), Turkey (173), South Korea (131), Japan (126), Iran (49), and Brazil (42). There were 175 dams completed in 1996. The number of new dams on which construction had begun during the past few years varied between 200 and 300. This annual addition of dams was expected ultimately to move upward as population growth stimulated increases in food production, the need for additional municipal water supply and sanitation, and production of hydroelectric power.

      Still, dams continued to be a subject of controversy, as some claimed they did more harm than good. Organizations were formed to support both sides. Some called for referees, committees, commissions, and governmental bodies to express the wisdom that should prevail, to identify what was fair, and to discern between right and wrong.

      Dam safety continued to command the attention of dam owners and designers. Engineers continued to meet under the auspices of the International Commission on Large Dams, an organization that exchanged views on new developments and experiences and presented technical case studies. Alertness to natural threats was also constantly required. In Nepal, for instance, the Khimti Dam and hydroelectric plant faced the threat of being swept away by the possible failure of a frozen mass of glacial moraine that was holding back 80 million cu m (2.8 trillion cu ft) of water in a lake. Emergency measures were instituted to prevent a disaster. As dams age, modifications to enhance their safety become important design and construction activities.

      At the beginning of the year, 40 dams were under construction in the U.S. The highest (168 m [1 m = 3.28 ft]), Seven Oaks Dam in California, was designed to be a flood-control project. The Eastside Reservoir Dam, also in California, was being built as a very large water-supply project and would consist of three dams—of 87 m, 56 m, and 40 m in height.

      In China the first phase of the Three Gorges Dam on the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) was scheduled to be completed in 1997. Diversion of the river from its main channel began in November. Sidebar. (Three Gorges Dam ))

      In Laos the environmental assessment of the Nam Theun 2 Dam was being reviewed. Opponents claimed that the dam would drown 470 sq km (180 sq mi) of remarkable grasslands and forests on the Nakai Plateau, several rare animal species would disappear, and the fisheries that helped feed thousands of people would be wiped out. Supporters, on the other hand, claimed that Nam Theun 2 would help lift Laos from the bottom rung of the poorest nations. In Vietnam the centrepiece of the nation's hydroelectric program was the 3,600-MW Son La Dam (at a cost of $3.5 billion), scheduled to be finished by 2007.

      An active dam program in Iran was aided by available foreign money funding. The 1997-98 program called for the completion of six dams already under way and for the start of seven more in 1998. Turkey announced a program to start 19 dams with a combined capacity of 1,534 MW. Work was continuing on the 510-MW, 210-m-high concrete-arch Berke Dam on the Ceyhan River. The biggest project under way in Syria was the Martyr Basil al-Assad storage dam. The 45-m-high dam, with a 4.5-km (2.8-mi) crest length, was being designed to store 600 million cu m (21 trillion cu ft) of water and allow 55,000 ha (135,850 ac) to be irrigated.

T.W. MERMEL

      This article updates dam.

Roads

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects(For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).)

      In 1997 the world's first all-electronic toll highway opened in Toronto. Highway 407 was to be a 69-km-long (1 km = 0.62 mi) route running east to west around the north of the city, to ease congestion on the existing main artery, Highway 401. The first 36-km section, built at a cost of about $900 million, was opened to traffic in June but initially without its advanced toll-collection system. Under this system, those wishing to use the highway would be required to have a windshield-mounted transponder that would record their journeys and make an automatic charge for the appropriate toll. Vehicles without a transponder would be recorded through an automatic license-plate-recognition system. Drivers could travel at highway speeds, and control gates would not be required.

      Difficulties in commissioning the technology led to a series of delays, during which time drivers were allowed free use of the highway. This made the problem worse, as traffic volumes grew rapidly beyond the forecast figures. The installation of additional toll-recording and video-recognition devices finally allowed the technology to be switched on in October, almost a year late.

      Many highway developers were watching developments on 407 with great interest. When the technology could be demonstrated to be effective, it would make the construction of new toll roads almost anywhere in the world more attractive to financiers. Because the system did not require large areas of land for a traditional toll-collection plaza, it would also allow existing non-tolled highways to be converted to toll routes with comparative ease.

      Throughout the world the movement toward financing road infrastructure by means of private sources and tolls continued to gain popularity, but in one country it went backward. In the late 1980s Mexico had embarked on one of the world's biggest road-building programs, which envisioned the construction of 6,000 km of new high-quality highways. The highways would be built by private companies that would be allowed to operate them and charge tolls for a concession period before ownership reverted to the government (a system known as build-operate-transfer). Economic difficulties and the devaluation of the Mexican peso in 1994-95 resulted in insufficient revenue for servicing the debts. The government was forced to buy back some of the toll roads and assume $5 billion worth of debt.

      An alternative system to encourage private-sector financing of highways also was inaugurated in 1997. A bypass around the town of Haltwhistle in northern England was the first "design-build-finance-operate" project to be completed. A private developer built the highway and was to be repaid by the government on the basis of the number of vehicles using the highway, although the drivers themselves would not be required to pay—a system known as "shadow tolling."

      A major international conference in October discussed plans to revive the Silk Road, an ancient trading route linking Europe and China. The latter was thought likely to become the largest single market for highway development and was beginning to welcome private-sector investment for its ambitious construction projects.

RUSS SWAN

      This article updates road (roads and highways).

Tunnels

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects(For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).)

      One of the most shattering events of 1997 occurred in a highway tunnel in Paris when Diana, princess of Wales—along with two of three companions—died following a car crash on August 31. (See OBITUARIES (Diana, princess of Wales ).) The car, traveling at a high speed, went out of control and hit a central concrete pillar supporting the roof of the 142-m (465-ft)-long highway underpass built in 1954. Despite steep dips into the tunnel with relatively tight curves close to the portals, there were no crash barriers on either side of the roadway.

      There were two other significant accidents in tunnels during the year. In September high concentrations of acrylamide and methylolacrylamide in a chemical grout being used to control heavy water ingress during drill-and-blast excavation of the 8.6-km-long Hallandsås railway tunnel in Sweden (1 km = 0.62 mi) drained into a local stream and poisoned a herd of cows. The neurotoxic acrylamide was suspected of having been washed out before the two liquid solutions of the grout had time to polymerize to form the impermeable and inert rubberlike grouting material. An immediate investigation suspended tunneling and initiated an intense testing program of the groundwater wells from which the local rural community drew its drinking water. In July a subway tunnel collapse in São Paulo, Braz., took with it a private home. There were no fatalities or serious injuries, but several residents had to be evacuated.

      All, however, was not tragedy and misfortune. London design started on the 26 km of twin-tube soft-ground tunneling on the new 108-km high-speed rail link to the British terminal of the Channel Tunnel. The estimated £3 billion project was scheduled to open in 2003. In Germany work progressed on the 177-km Frankfurt-Cologne high-speed railway, which was to include 27 single-tube, double-track tunnels totaling some 40 km. In Italy excavation of 23 tunnels to house 30 km of the 220-km Rome-Naples high-speed rail line continued, and work started on the 90-km Florence-Bologna line, 71 km of which was to be in a series of tunnels.

      In India the last 40 m (130 ft) of difficult soft-ground tunneling marked the successful completion of the 760-km Konkan railway between Bombay (Mumbai) and Mangalore. Some 83 km of the line extended through 92 tunnels along the rugged west coast of the subcontinent, where viaducts across the valleys linked tunnels through the hills.

      During the year China received two 8.8-m (28.9-ft)-diameter Wirth TBMs (tunnel boring machines) and their entire support systems from Germany for the 18.5-km Qinling railway tunnel in Shaanxi province. The TBMs were to excavate the east tube of the twin-tube double-track railway tunnel, working toward a mid-tunnel junction, whereas the parallel west tube was to be excavated by a drill-and-blast method.

      One of the most significant water-associated tunnels begun in 1997 was the 29-km-long first of the four tunnels on the 70-km Inland Feeder project in southern California. The project would deliver nearly 2.5 billion litres (650 million gal) of water per day from the Colorado River and California State Water Project aqueducts into the new Eastside Reservoir. The new reservoir would secure a six-month emergency storage of drinkable water for Los Angeles should a major earthquake sever the city's vital water-import aqueducts.

SHANI WALLIS

      This article updates tunnel (tunnels and underground excavations).

▪ 1997

Introduction

Architecture

      Two architects, one Spanish and the other American, dominated much of the world's architectural news in 1996. Each won a prestigious award. José Rafael Moneo received the $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the world's most prestigious architecture honour, and in late 1996 it was announced that Richard Meier would receive the 1997 Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Both prizes were for career achievement rather than for any one building.

      Moneo received his Pritzker at a ceremony in Los Angeles in June, the same month in which he was chosen to design a new $50 million Roman Catholic cathedral for that city, intended to replace the structure damaged in a 1994 earthquake. The proposed demolition of the old cathedral was stopped by court order, however, after a protest by historic preservation groups, and at year's end the outcome was not clear. Other Moneo buildings under construction in 1996 included a major addition to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, and museums of art and architecture in Stockholm. Among the architect's completed works, the best known was the National Museum of Roman Art in Mérida, Spain, completed in 1986 and regarded as a masterpiece.

      Richard Meier's gold medal was announced during a year in which the first section opened of his enormous Getty Center, an institution for the study and conservation of art, the construction cost of which was expected to reach some $1 billion. Dramatically sited on a ridge overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles, the Getty was scheduled to be completed in 1997. Like Moneo, Meier had designed buildings in many parts of the world; these included the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, Spain, the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, Calif., and a federal courthouse in Islip, N.Y.

      The opening of a branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, designed by Pritzker Prize winner Frank Gehry of the U.S., scheduled for 1997, was much anticipated. A pile of sharply twisting, curving shapes, surfaced in titanium and rising to a height of 30 m (100 ft), it might signal the beginning of a new free-form kind of architecture that had become possible because of computers, without which Gehry's complex forms could not have been designed, engineered, or constructed.

Awards.

      It was announced that the Phillips Exeter Academy Library in Exeter, N.H., by Louis I. Kahn, would receive the 1997 "Twenty-Five Year Award" from the AIA. This prize was given each year to an American building that had proved its merit during at least a quarter of a century. The library, a simple, monumental cube of brick, was one of the early successes of Kahn, whom many regard as the most influential architect of his generation. The AIA also named 10 winners of its 1997 Honor Awards for the best designs of the year. Among the more prominent were the renovation of the New Victory Theater in New York City's Times Square by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer and the Tokyo International Forum by the Uruguayan-born U.S. architect Rafael Viñoly.

      Earlier in the year the AIA had announced its Honor Awards for 1996, which included Gehry's Center for the Visual Arts in Toledo, Ohio; the Munich (Ger.) Order Center by Murphy/Jahn of Chicago; and the urban design of the Cleveland (Ohio) Gateway district by Sasaki Associates. The Aga Khan Award for Architecture, given every three years to promote good architecture and urban design in the Islamic world, announced 12 winners, which included a plan for the restoration of some 500 buildings in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, and the IBM tower in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that was cited as an example of high-rise architecture responsive to a tropical climate.

Civic Buildings.

      A design was announced for what had been described as the most important overseas American building of the century—a new embassy in Berlin. It was to be constructed at a corner of the city's main civic square, the Pariser Platz, next to the landmark Brandenburg Gate. Six architects were asked to submit designs for the embassy. The designs were then evaluated by a jury of architects and public officials. The winner was the Los Angeles firm of Moore Ruble Yudell, with Gruen Associates, which proposed a building that included many echoes of traditional architecture. One such echo was a "lodge" in an interior courtyard, intended as a social gathering place for the embassy staff that would evoke memories of both a U.S. suburban house and the visitors' lodges of the national parks.

      A new Main Public Library in San Francisco was designed by James Ingo Freed of the firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, the architect of the famed Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Freed dealt with the problem of inserting an up-to-date library in the city's historic Civic Center by using such modern materials as stainless steel to re-create traditional motifs such as classical columns. A huge free-form skylit atrium dominated the interior.

      The 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Ga., failed to produce significant architecture, a disappointment after the spectacular Olympics of other years. Unlike Games in other parts of the world, Atlanta's were privately financed, and the buildings were routine and inexpensive. An attempt was made, however, to spin off some long-term benefits for the city, including a new downtown park and new trees and artworks intended to provide a better environment for pedestrians.

      In Leipzig, Ger., a huge new convention centre, the Neue Messe Leipzig, featured a spectacular vaulted glass hall. Potential heat and glare in the space were controlled by external sprinklers, which sprayed the glass, and by computer-controlled ventilation systems. The building was seen as a symbol of the resurgence of the former East Germany. In Japan the Tokyo International Forum, a vast complex containing four large theatres and a convention centre, was scheduled to open officially in early 1997.

Cultural Buildings.

      The Aronoff Center for Design and Art opened at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. It was designed by the experimental U.S. architect Peter Eisenman. Like Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, it was regarded as the harbinger of a new generation of free-form computer-generated designs—although Eisenman's irregular shapes tended to be angular rather than curved. The construction drawings for the building were not conventionally dimensioned in feet or metres. Instead, 8,000 key points were plotted in three dimensions by computer and then located on the building site by an engineer using a laser transit. Eisenman argued that this process allowed him to create a building "so fractured that the space is no longer contained by form—it's rattled loose."

      In Chicago an almost equally controversial but very different building for the arts was the new Museum of Contemporary Art. It was designed by the German architect Josef Paul Kleihues in a sober, symmetrical, neo-classical style. One architectural magazine said that "it seems to summarize a composure and restraint that has blessedly come to us after an era in which the over-the-top, program-be-damned hedonism of museums like Peter Eisenman's Wexner Center [in Ohio] and Gehry's Vitra Museum [in Germany] has been celebrated." Kleihues used local Indiana limestone at the base of his building and then switched to panels made of aluminum sandblasted with iron filings at the upper levels, a material expected to age and weather well in the Chicago climate.

      Another large cultural project was the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles by Moshe Safdie, a museum of Jewish life not far from Meier's Getty Center. Like the Getty, the Skirball was a cluster of buildings sited on a hill, visible from a distance on the freeways.

      At Harvard University, Philadelphia architects Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates restored the university's largest building, the Victorian-style Memorial Hall, into an up-to-date dining hall with a basement of student fast-food counters and study nooks. In Mexico City Ricardo Legoretta and other architects created a new National Center for the Arts.

Commercial Buildings.

      Probably the most discussed and written-about commercial venture of 1996 was the opening of the new town of Celebration outside Orlando, Fla., created by the Walt Disney Co. Many prominent architects, including Jaquelin Robertson, Robert A.M. Stern, Cesar Pelli, Michael Graves, Charles Moore, Philip Johnson, Aldo Rossi, William Rawn, and the firm of Venturi, Scott Brown, collaborated in the planning of the town and the design of its buildings. Unlike less-wealthy developers, Disney was able to begin the project by building the town's downtown, in which shops, restaurants, and entertainment facilities faced an artificial lake, even before there was a resident population. Celebration was intended to be a normal community, not an exclusive gated enclave, and was expected to reach a population of approximately 20,000. Exteriors but not interiors of the houses had to conform to an elaborate set of guidelines intended to re-create the atmosphere of the small-town America of the pre-World War II era. Of the buildings completed by the year's end, a movie complex in Art Deco style by Pelli, a cylindrical post office by Graves, and two office buildings by Rossi were among the more notable.

      Celebration was regarded as the most visible example of the increasingly influential movement known as New Urbanism, which could be summarized as an attempt to return to the pedestrian-friendly, compactly built town of the past, as opposed to what the New Urbanists described as the car-dominated suburban sprawl of freeways, malls, and widely dispersed single-family houses. Admired by many, Celebration and other examples of New Urbanism were criticized by others as a retreat to a dreamworld of the American past, one that would appeal to only a small slice of the current population.

      Also during the year, in Britain, another New Urbanist town opened its first 250 homes. This was Poundbury, sponsored by Prince Charles, designed by the Luxembourg architect Leon Krier, and intended, like Celebration, to re-create the values of the past.

      Also for Disney—now regarded as the world's leading private patron of architecture—was an office building in Anaheim, Calif., by Gehry, much of it covered in iridescent quilted sheet-metal panels that to passing motorists appeared to be changing colour. Gehry's competition-winning Disney Concert Hall for downtown Los Angeles, however, remained mired in political and budgetary problems and seemed likely never to be built.

Competitions.

      A national competition was under way in the United States to design a memorial to veterans of World War II on a prominent site near the Washington Monument on the Mall in Washington, D.C. It drew more than 400 entries, from which 6 finalists were chosen. No announcement of a winner had been made by the year's end.

      A design by Berlin-based architect Daniel Libeskind, featuring irregular, heaped-up, angular shapes, was chosen from more than 100 proposals for a new wing for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Pritzker Prize winner Christian de Portzamparc won a competition to plan the Massena neighbourhood of Paris.

Controversies and News Events.

      The proliferation of memorials in Washington, D.C., led critics to complain that the Mall was in danger of turning into a world's fair. Partly in response, a new plan for the civic core of Washington—in which future monuments would be dispersed along North, South, and East Capitol streets, which radiate from the U.S. Capitol—was proposed by the National Capital Planning Commission. The intention was to return to the original planning concept of Washington as created by Pierre L'Enfant. Meanwhile, in addition to the World War II memorial, a U.S. Air Force memorial design by Freed in the shape of the air force insignia's five-pointed star was approved for a site across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial.

      The question of how to make government buildings secure from such threats as the bombing of an Oklahoma City, Okla., office structure in 1995 came to a head during the year in Washington as the National Park Service published five proposals for the future of the area around the White House. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the White House and the section of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of it were closed to vehicular traffic. The plan preferred by the Park Service would reopen the avenue for service vehicles and special events only. Critics feared that the new emphasis on security might have a dampening effect on the street life of cities. Similarly, a new U.S. embassy in Peru, by the Miami, Fla., firm Arquitectonica, was described in a U.S. architecture magazine this way: "Forget architecture as goodwill ambassador. The message here is, 'Keep out!' " The Berlin embassy, however, following German preference, was to be built to the edge of the sidewalk, with normal-sized windows and without visible barriers or setbacks.

       Notable Civil Engineering ProjectsThe battle for the title of world's tallest building continued in East Asia. (See Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).) The Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, designed by Cesar Pelli, captured the title in April at 452 m, topping the Sears Tower in Chicago (1 m = 3.28 ft). But foundation work was under way in Shanghai for the 460-m Shanghai World Financial Center, and in Hong Kong approval was expected for the 468-m Nina Tower. New engineering techniques, often using high-strength concrete frames in addition to steel, were employed in all the towers.

      (ROBERT CAMPBELL)

      See also Building and Construction (Business and Industry Review ).

      This article updates architecture, history of Western (Western architecture).

BRIDGES

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects(For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).)

      The spectacular recent triumph of the cable-stayed bridge was overshadowed in 1996 by the resurgence of the suspension bridge. Several record-breaking examples of the latter were either completed or were close to it.

      Suspension bridges—those with a curved, usually steel, cable slung between two towers and anchored back behind them—traditionally produce the longest spans. They support the deck from vertical hanger cables off the main cable. The cable-stay, where the cables radiate out in straight lines directly from the tower to the deck, had begun to challenge the suspension design for medium-length bridges. The main span lengths of cable-stays had now reached once unbelievable 856 m (1 m = 3.28 ft).

      Suspension bridges such as the Tsing Ma in Hong Kong, the Great Belt's (Storebælt's) East Bridge in Denmark, and Akashi Kaikyo in Japan, all currently taking final shape, were, however, even longer. Tsing Ma, which, when completed in 1997 would connect Hong Kong with its new airport on Lantau Island, was 1,377 m long and carried a dual three-lane highway as well as the new airport railway on a lower deck.

      The Great Belt, which would help link Copenhagen, on the island of Zealand, to mainland Europe, was even longer at 1,624 m. Cables for this bridge were finished in November, in record time, through the use of a new computer-controlled "spinning" system that promised to halve the cost of fabricating suspension cable. The Great Belt would be the longest in the world when it opened in 1998.

      Almost immediately, however, an even longer bridge, Japan's Akashi, would take the record with a stunning 1,991-m-long central span. By late 1996 cables and decks had been completed, and the 10-year-long construction program was scheduled to finish in 1998.

      Bridge building action was becoming increasingly significant in the Pacific area. Apart from Japan, China was coming to the fore. A 990-m dual two-lane road bridge was completed across the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) at Sandouping between Yichang and Chongqing. The bridge linked the two sides of the huge Three Gorges Dam project, which was well under way just upstream. Construction began on an even bigger Yangtze bridge, the Jiangyin. With a 1,385-m span, it would be the fourth largest in the world when completed in 1999. It would not use spinning construction, where the wires are laid one by one in the air, but would employ a preformed-cables method favoured by the Japanese.

      Also nearing completion in China was the Humen Bridge, an 888-m-long suspension bridge across the Pearl River at the so-called Tiger's Mouth (Boca Tigris) downstream from Guangzhou (Canton). It was not only one of the country's first suspension bridges but also part of a longer link across the river estuary that included several kilometres of viaduct and a 260-m concrete box span, also a record length.

      Increasingly, the main bridge was merely part of a very long link. Akashi, for example, was part of three very long links to Shikoku Island from Japan's "mainland" island, Honshu. The Great Belt's suspension bridge was part of an overall viaduct, concrete bridge, and tunnel link. In Scandinavia work was also well under way for the long Øresund connection between Copenhagen and western Sweden, which again included tunnels, as well as a concrete viaduct totaling 12 km (7.5 mi). Included was an artificial island and a cable-stayed bridge. In the U.K. the 5.2-km (3.2-mi) second crossing of the Severn Estuary with a 456-m-long central span became part of the country's longest connection in the summer.

      (ADRIAN LEE GREEMAN)

      This article updates bridge.

BUILDINGS

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects(For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).)

      Major developments during 1996 included the topping out of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. At 452 m (1 m = 3.28 ft), the twin towers were, at least temporarily, the tallest buildings in the world. Construction also began on other buildings that would be more than 375 m in height. The 420-m-high Jin Mao development in Shanghai was under construction, and plans were under way for Millennium towers in Tokyo and London, at 840 m and 385 m, respectively. The former would be a quantum leap in building heights if it was built.

      Construction was under way near Paris for the 80,000-seat Stade de France for the 1998 World Cup. Of particular interest was the flat annular disklike roof to be suspended 45 m above ground level from 18 slender steel pylons. The pylons were situated behind the upper tier of seats and projected through holes in the steel-framed roof, which was supported from the pylons by sloping steel cables. The roof would extend as far as 69 m inward from the pylons and 25 m on the outside. The inner part of the disk would be clad with translucent glass to avoid light contrast between sky and roof.

      At Alexandria, Egypt, a monumental (design life of 200 years) library was being built. This area was known for its difficult ground conditions, both for construction and for the design of foundations. Consequently, the building design featured four levels below ground level and up to six floors above. The high water table in the porous strata on which the building was situated made exclusion of water during construction difficult, and the completed structure had to be designed against flotation. The basement wall took the form of a reinforced-concrete diaphragm wall, extending down 35 m and built by placing the concrete in a trench excavated in the ground and filled with bentonite mud. In order to support the building and prevent flotation, some 700 reinforced-concrete piles up to 1.5 m in diameter were bored down to a depth of 37 m. Owing to the corrosive nature of the groundwater, all construction in contact with the ground had to be carefully designed and built to ensure the intended design life.

      The superstructure of the glass hall at the Tokyo International Forum was lens-shaped in plan, about 207 m long by 32 m wide at the centre and nearly 60 m high. While the structure was of large scale, the engineers sought to keep individual components small in order to produce a delicate total building. The roof was carried on two columns situated 124 m apart on the long axis. The upper side was nominally flat and glass-clad, and the structure supporting it was made up of steel ribs up to 12.5 m deep, much like the hull of a ship. Within this were compression and tension members providing strength both for carrying the weight and for the lateral wind load from the walls. The glass-clad walls were carried on vertical mullions 10.5 m apart that took the form of light trusses spanning vertically up to 32.5 m to carry the wind loads on the walls.

      An interesting new concept of grid shells for lightweight roofs was developed in Germany. Spherical and irregular doubly curved surfaces are impossible to modularize totally. Through the use of a quadrangular mesh with members of equal length, however, these shapes can be formed, provided that the panel shapes are allowed to vary from square to diamond-shaped. The system provides for the panel side members to be joined at the ends to allow in-plane rotation and, at the same time, enable clamping of continuous bracing cables on the diagonals, which are necessary to maintain the geometry. Glass-clad roofs with spans as large as 33 m were constructed in this way, using members one metre in length. (GEOFFREY M. PINFOLD)

      This article updates building construction.

DAMS

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects(For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).)

      More than 1,100 dams were under construction throughout the world during 1996. The leading countries were China (270), Turkey (173), Japan (134), South Korea (134), India (77), Spain (50), Italy (46), the U.S. (37), Romania (36), and Iran (27).

      Privatization of power generation and its impact on dam building was under way in many countries. Zimbabwe was inviting private investment to start the Batokan Gorge Dam, which was to supply 600 MW on the Zambezi River. Mexico was looking for private capital to develop its two Temascal dams, which would add 200 MW to the nation's system.

      In Turkey construction began on the Ermenek Dam, designed to be 190 m high and generate 1,022 GW-hr. Turkey and Syria were having a dispute over the allocation of the waters of the Euphrates River. Syria demanded that Turkey halt work on the Birecik Dam. The dispute was intensified because of the reduction of river flow by Turkey to allow repairs at Ataturk Dam, with its 24,000 MW plant.

      Syria was also pursuing an aggressive dam-building program. Just completed was the Thawrah Dam on the Snobar River, with a reservoir that would hold 98 million cu m and irrigate 9,600 ha. Syria was also nearing completion of the Khahour Dam, which would irrigate 55,000 ha and store 600 million cu m of water. (1 ha = 2.47 ac; 1 cu m = 35.3 cu ft.)

      Iran completed its largest-volume dam, the Karkheh on the river of the same name. The 127-m-high dam would supply irrigation water to 220,000 ha and produce 400 MW of power.

      In India construction was continuing on the Sardar Sarovar Dam despite protests regarding the resettlement of people from the reservoir area. The government considered the need of water for irrigation to be paramount.

      Of China's 270 large dams under construction, 15 were designed to be more than 100 m high. The huge Three Gorges project on the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) was running ahead of schedule. The Chinese claimed that all the environmental objections to the dam were being satisfied and that the benefits would be much greater than originally envisioned by the planners. The river diversion was expected to take place in October 1997, a year earlier than planned, and the entire project was scheduled to be completed by the year 2009. By the end of 1996, China had more than 20,000 large dams in operation.

      In Malaysia the long-awaited Bakun Dam was started during the year by the award of the construction contract. The dam was to be 205 m high and would produce 2,400 MW of power. It was scheduled to be completed in 2002.

      In Portugal the Algueva Dam on the Guadiana River would provide 240 MW and was to impound what would be Europe's largest reservoir. Financial and environmental problems cast doubt, however, as to whether the construction would proceed on schedule.

      In Nigeria the Kafin Zaki Dam was under construction. It was to have a reservoir capacity of 2,500 cu m.

      In the United States 37 dams were under construction, and 9 new hydroelectric plants were placed in operation, the largest of which was Rocky Mountain, with an installed capacity of 848 MW at a cost in excess of $1 billion. As compared with the 1960s, when 1,675 dams were built, only 63 had been constructed in the 1990s as of the end of 1996. (T.W. MERMEL)

      This article updates dam.

ROADS

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects(For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).)

      Growing economic activity in many less-developed parts of the world led to the announcement in 1996 of many projects for new roads and highways. The trend of recent years toward the use of private-sector financing and the collection of tolls continued, although automated toll-collection systems remained unproven.

      The longest highway-construction project under way in the world was the Indus Highway in Pakistan. Covering a total distance of 1,200 km (1 km = 0.6 mi), the highway runs along the valley of the Indus River from Kotri in the south to Peshawar in the north. The first two phases of the project, covering 767 km and costing $220 million, were to be completed by 1997. In India another large project to upgrade 330 km of existing roads from two to four lanes was announced. The largest project to be funded by the Asian Development Bank, it would cost $220 million and include work in five states: Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Rajasthan, and West Bengal.

      The expected increase in road building in the Middle East began in 1996, with projects announced and under way in the United Arab Emirates. In Dubayy the municipality planned to spend $260 million on roads, the highest budget allocation in its history. Abu Dhabi began work on a $272 million project to upgrade the road link to Dubayy to an international standard divided highway.

      The Silk Road, which was established about 2,000 years ago to connect the ancient civilizations of Rome and China, could once again become an international highway. Under a program promoted by the International Road Federation (IRF) and reflecting the growing importance of trade in the Caucasus region, the plan would involve a regionwide improvement in road connections in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakstan, and neighbouring countries.

      Other countries in the former Soviet Union were developing their road networks. In Russia plans were under way to upgrade the road linking the two main cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, to be financed by tolls. Both Ukraine and Belarus were building new expressway connections to their western borders with Poland.

      In Eastern Europe the aftermath of war in former Yugoslavia had left a legacy of damaged roads. Studies were under way in Croatia to develop its road network to reflect its new independent status. Bosnia and Herzegovina estimated that it required $3 billion for major infrastructure repairs and was hoping to attract international aid and private finance; 1,000 km of its roads, along with 70 bridges and 20 tunnels, were destroyed in the civil war.

      The development of a true highway network in Western Europe took a step closer to reality with the launch of a continentwide program called "Eurovia." Promoted by the IRF, it intended to reflect the growing international trade in the region and the importance of integration with other transport modes instead of the country-by-country development that had occurred previously.

      The world's most northerly road project was under way in Norway. This 28.5-km highway would provide a direct connection from the mainland to the island of Magerøya, Europe's northernmost point and an increasingly popular tourist attraction. The project involved the construction of the world's longest undersea road tunnel, 6.8 km long, and would be completed in 1998.

      At the end of 1996, the world's first all-electronic toll highway was approaching completion. Highway 407 in Toronto was built ahead of schedule, but the commissioning of its advanced electronic toll-collection system, in which drivers would pay for road use through transponders mounted on the windshield instead of with cash, was proving difficult. (RUSS SWAN)

      This articles updates road (roads and highways).

TUNNELS

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects(For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).)

      The most significant developments in regard to tunnels in 1996 concerned their operation rather than their construction. Faith in tunnels as important public facilities was shaken when, on the night of November 18, fire broke out on a heavy truck being transported on a freight train shuttle through the 50-km-long Channel Tunnel. Instead of continuing the journey to the U.K. terminal—the official safety procedure—the operator of the shuttle stopped the train in the tunnel about 13 km from the French portal. The fire, exacerbated by the forced ventilation system, disabled the train by burning through the overhead power supply and caused extensive damage to the concrete lining of the tunnel and its services and track. The 31 passengers and 3 shuttle crew evacuated to safety into the central service tunnel, and firefighting crews from both France and the U.K. had the fire extinguished by the following morning.

      Eurotunnel, the company that built and operated the Channel Tunnel, had been successfully increasing its market share of the cross-Channel transport business before the incident. Limited services continued through the undamaged north tunnel, but the loss of business during the busy end-of-year holidays shook Eurotunnel's already fragile financial situation. It was expected to take several weeks or months to repair the damaged tunnel and resume normal operations.

      Activity during 1996 centred mainly on the continuation of projects already in progress, including subway (metro) projects in many cities throughout the world, the undersea Trans-Tokyo Bay highway project in Japan, and the regular requirement for water supply, sewerage, and utility tunnels in urban areas. The concentration of tunneling activity during 1996 remained in the Far East.

      Tunneling on the Los Angeles subway project remained embroiled in controversy and scandal. As work was beginning to return to normal after the sacking of the contractor associated with the Hollywood Boulevard tunnel collapse in June 1995, the new senior management of the reorganized Metropolitan Transportation Authority was accused of corruption in the evaluation and award of the $65 million contract to manage construction of the new $670 million Eastside extension.

      Other major tunneling jobs that encountered trouble during the year included the Athens subway. There tunneling was suspended for investigation into why the tunnel-boring machines engaged on the project were inducing excessive settlement or failing to reach optimum progress rates in the prevailing ground conditions.

      On the brighter side, tunneling gained a high profile on some exciting new projects. More than 22 km of single- and twin-tube tunneling under the streets of London as well as through the chalk hills of the Kent countryside were included on the 110-km Channel Tunnel railway link, the construction and operation of which was awarded to a privately financed consortium in early 1996. With the Ted Williams Tunnel under Boston Harbor completed in 1995, work continued on Boston's $10 billion project, in which 13 km (8 mi) of tunnels and roads were being built through the heart of the city.

      The trend toward more and more tunneling in cities around the world to utilize the environmental, social, and technical advantages of underground space was confirmed in 1996. To illustrate the trend, London Electricity had completed its first man-entry electricity cable tunnel beneath the streets of London in 1990. By the end of 1996, it had committed to more than 30 km of these cost-effective, safe, easily operated, and efficient alternatives to the open-trench burial of electricity cables. (SHANI WALLIS)

      This article updates tunnel (tunnels and underground excavations).

▪ 1996

Introduction

Architecture

      The most talked-about work of architecture and engineering in 1995 was what some called "the Crossroads of Europe," the immense new cluster of buildings at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel (Eurotunnel) in Lille, France.

      The complex, known as Euralille, was one hour from Paris and two hours from London by train. It was to be linked by high-speed rail to Amsterdam; Brussels; Cologne, Germany; and other parts of Europe in the future and would likely serve as the nerve centre for a multinational community of 100 million people. Parts of Euralille opened in 1994 and 1995, but much was still under construction. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas created the master plan for Euralille. He also designed the vast Grand Palais, or Congrexpo, which included a conference centre, an exhibit hall, and an arena for rock concerts. Koolhaas gave each of them a different architectural appearance, using industrial materials such as corrugated polyester and aluminum, in order to create a sense of random collision and congestion—qualities that he admired and that were described in his book Delirious New York.

      Other buildings, straddling the station for the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse), included a slope-sided Credit-Lyonnais bank tower by French architect Christian de Portzamparc and Euralille Centre, a vast complex by Frenchman Jean Nouvel that included stores, restaurants, theatres, a business school, a sports centre, and residential apartments. Hotels, parks, and a world trade centre were also planned for Euralille.

Awards.

      Tadao Ando of Japan was the 1995 winner of the most prestigious international award in the field, the $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Already widely honoured, Ando was known for an austere, almost monastic type of architecture, usually built of beautifully finished raw concrete, often in simple geometric shapes, and without any ornament or historic detail. "I do not believe architecture should speak too much," Ando had said. "It should remain silent and let nature in the guise of sunlight and wind speak." A believer in solid construction, Ando proudly announced that after the destructive January 17 Great Hanshin Earthquake in the Kobe, Japan, area, all of his 30 buildings in the quake zone remained intact. (See Geophysics (Earth and Space Sciences ).) One of the architect's major works was the Suntory Museum in Osaka, which opened during 1995 and contained spaces for housing contemporary art and for staging performing arts.

      In an unusual move the Royal Institute of British Architects gave its Gold Medal to a teacher and critic rather than an architect: Colin Rowe, a British-born professor of architecture at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. The triennial Aga Khan Awards for Architecture were presented for 12 works of Islamic architecture, ranging from the reconstruction of historic neighbourhoods to the design of an environmentally sensitive office tower. The Mies van der Rohe Pavilion Award for European Architecture was given to Nicholas Grimshaw's Waterloo International Terminal, the British link to the Channel Tunnel. The American Institute of Architects did not award its Gold Medal in 1995. The winner of the AIA's Twenty-Five Year Award for 1996 was announced. Given annually to a building that has proved its worth over time, the award went to the 1962 Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel in Colorado Springs, Colo., by Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill. The AIA also chose 13 buildings for its annual Honor Awards for good design. Among the more prominent of the 1995 winners were Westendstrasse 1, an office tower in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, by Kohn Pedersen Fox; Seiji Ozawa Hall, a concert space in Massachusetts by William Rawn; Arrow International, a corporate headquarters in Pennsylvania by Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood; Jacobs Field baseball park in Cleveland, Ohio, and Hong Kong Stadium in Hong Kong, both by the firm of HOK; and the Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco, by James Polshek.

Cultural Buildings.

      Buildings intended for music or books tended to dominate world architecture in 1995. The construction of libraries was somewhat puzzling because some people were predicting that books would soon be made obsolete by electronic media. Many new libraries, however, were being envisioned as community centres, replete with day-care facilities, art galleries, and restaurants.

      The most prominent and controversial library was the National Library of France. It was completed in 1995 but was not expected to be open to the public until 1997, which allowed a two-year time frame for moving 12 million books onto the library's 435 km (270 mi) of shelves. Designed by Dominique Perrault and erected on the Left Bank of the Seine River in Paris, the structure was much criticized for being "upside down." The books, which were to be housed in glass towers that resembled office buildings, would be bathed in sunlight, while the patrons would be relegated to underground reading rooms.

      Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie's Library Square opened in Vancouver, B.C. A dramatic building in the shape of an oval, it resembled the ancient Colosseum in Rome. In Denver, Colo., a new main library by U.S. architect Michael Graves also employed a round shape, this time a circular rotunda set between symmetrical wings in a manner that vaguely recalled such neoclassical buildings as the U.S. Capitol. Both libraries tried to achieve a sense of grandeur by evoking memories of great buildings of the past. In San Antonio, Texas, by contrast, a new main library by Mexican architect Ricardo Legoretta was a bold modern structure in bright colours of red, yellow, and blue.

      In Cleveland the long-awaited Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opened. It was designed by famed U.S. architect I.M. Pei, who, at age 79, admitted to journalists that in his attempts to appreciate rock music, he had progressed as far as Bruce Springsteen but could not continue any farther. Sited on the shore of Lake Erie, the Rock Hall looked like a frozen explosion, with solid chunks in the shape of cubes and cylinders seeming to blast outward from a central glass pyramid. The pyramid reminded many of Pei's more famous pyramid at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The exhibits, designed by the Burdick Group, were a wild mix of celebrity memorabilia on the one hand and serious displays on the history of rock on the other. The actual Hall of Fame was a windowless room at the top of the building, with walls made of black glass onto which were projected the images of the stars, in a manner that recalled the stained glass windows of a cathedral.

      In Paris the final phase of the Cité de la Musique opened at the edge of the Parc de la Villette. Designed by Portzamparc, it included a 2,700-seat concert hall and a museum that housed more than 4,500 historic instruments. In Japan the Kirishima International Concert Hall, in a remote mountain setting, was designed by Fumihiko Maki. Sheathed in the architect's trademark glowing brushed-silver surfaces, it peaked in one of his "cloud" roofs: a mound of folded planes in stainless steel, looking rather like Japanese origami paper. In the countryside of Britain, a new hall for the famed Glyndebourne Opera, by Michael Hopkins, featured a horseshoe-shaped interior finished in reclaimed 150-year-old pine. Critics said the hall resembled a huge, beautifully crafted and polished instrument, such as a violin.

Other Buildings.

      A Korean War Veterans' Memorial opened on the Mall in Washington, D.C. It included a wall of dark granite, on which were engraved ghostlike images of soldiers and other veterans. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, was designed by British architect Richard Rogers in the high-tech style of his earlier Pompidou Centre, with huge curving wings of gleaming stainless steel. In Houston, Texas, Renzo Piano of Italy, Rogers' partner in the Pompidou design, created a small gem of a museum for the work of U.S. artist Cy Twombly. Piano also was the architect of the vast Kansai International Airport in Osaka, Japan, which opened in late 1994.

Competitions.

      With most of the German government moving to Berlin, a major design competition was held for a new U.S. embassy to be built next to the landmark Brandenburg Gate. Six prominent American architects were asked to propose designs for the embassy, with a winner to be selected by a jury of architects and diplomats. The jurors completed their work in September, but no result was announced by year's end. In London a competition for a design to convert a riverfront power plant into a new branch of the Tate Gallery was won by the Swiss firm of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

Exhibitions.

      The year's most significant architectural exhibition was undoubtedly the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin. Artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude (see BIOGRAPHIES (Christo and Jeanne-Claude )), swaddled this former home of the German Parliament in translucent polypropylene. The magical effect was to convert the grim old building, for one week, into an architectural cloud formation. After the wraps came off, construction crews began the task of renovating the Reichstag, which would become, again, the German capitol. The architect for the renovation was Sir Norman Foster of Britain.

      The Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a show of the work of Koolhaas. It included drawings and models of Koolhaas' work for Euralille, as well as other urban design plans and the architect's unchosen but memorable proposal for the National Library of France. The Art Institute of Chicago displayed the work of Bruce Goff, an idiosyncratic follower of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Controversies and News Events.

      Times Square in New York City was again a topic of controversy, thanks to a proposal for a 47-story hotel for the Disney Co. designed by the Miami firm Arquitectonica. In cartoon fashion, the tower would be split by a curved glass "bolt of light." Disney, which planned to renovate other properties along 42nd Street, was also at work in Florida. The company opened a sales office there for Celebration, an entire new town that the company was building near Disney World and for which it was employing a star list of architects, including Robert Venturi, Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, Cesar Pelli, Robert A.M. Stern, and Jaquelin Robertson. With no buildings yet built, Disney instead erected full-size billboards of the future houses to entice prospective buyers. Critics noted that while the town celebrated the architecture of the American small town and evoked its vision of democracy, the community actually would be carefully controlled by the Disney corporation.

      After more than a year of delay caused by technical glitches, the Denver International Airport finally opened in February, at a cost of $4.9 billion. Occupying a larger area than the entire city of Paris, the airport featured a terminal building roofed by a tent made of white membrane stretched over steel masts. It looked to some like the snowcapped Rockies, to others like a teepee encampment. In Chicago a losing battle was waged to save from demolition the Arts Club, an interior by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

      Two catastrophes during the year were expected to influence the architecture of the future. The April 19 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, Okla., which also damaged some 70 other buildings, was likely to lead to stricter security requirements for government architecture. Some feared the rise of a fortress mentality, ill suited to a democracy, a fear that was reinforced by a decision to close off a section of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., to protect the White House. The Great Hanshin Earthquake was the first major quake ever to strike a modern downtown. It was even more devastating than the Oklahoma City bombing—many buildings toppled over into the streets, and about 6,000 people died—but it was noted that little damage was suffered by the most recently constructed buildings, which were erected according to strict earthquake codes. The problem remained of how to protect Japan's older cities—and cities located on earthquake fault lines in other countries, such as the U.S.—from similar catastrophes in the future.

      Among those who died during the year were Wolf von Eckardt, former architecture critic of the Washington (D.C.) Post, at 77. A death of another kind was the demise of the Architects Collaborative (TAC) in Cambridge, Mass., founded in 1946 by legendary architect Walter Gropius with a group of young partners. Once one of the largest and most successful firms in the U.S., TAC collapsed under debt in April. (ROBERT CAMPBELL)

      See also Building and Construction (Business and Industry Review ).

      This updates the articles architecture, history of Western (Western architecture) and building construction.

BRIDGES

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects(For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).)

      The year 1995 started with a celebration and a shock. Fanfares were for the official opening in January of the Pont de Normandie, the world's longest cable-stayed type, with elegant A-frame towers carrying a motorway across the Seine estuary on France's northern coast. The 856-m-long (1 m = 3.3 ft) central composite steel and concrete span took technology a huge step forward.

      The shock, quite literally, was to the world's biggest bridge project on January 10. The earthquake in Japan looked as if it might also have damaged the half-built 500 billion yen Akashi Kaikyo suspension bridge, just 10 km (1 km = 0.62 mi) from the quake's epicentre. The bridge's 1,990-m main span passes over the Akashi Strait, which contains one of the main fault lines in the Kobe area.

      Work stopped on the bridge, but no damage was found. Still, surveys showed the quake had pushed the towers apart by 1.1 m—only 0.005% of the total span but enough to mean that suspension hangers and deck needed redesigning.

      Seismic resistance was also a major design concern for other bridges as well, particularly in California, where many thousands of ordinary road bridges as well as larger crossings needed expensive retrofit strengthening to come up to modern standards. For example, the Golden Gate suspension bridge at San Francisco was now deemed unsafe even in a magnitude-7 quake. Some $175 million in upgrades would be needed to permit it to carry emergency traffic within 24 hours of a magnitude-8.5 earthquake. Portugal's new Tagus II bridge also got a substantial working over for seismic resistance. The 420-m centre span cable-stayed bridge, on which construction began in 1994, was part of an 18-km viaduct crossing of repeated concrete spans.

      Other examples of this trend in bridge building—very long composite multispan bridges, usually featuring a single main span over a shipping channel—included the bridge section on the Øresund link between Sweden and Denmark, begun in November, with its spectacular 1,200-m cable-stayed central section and a 492-m main span; the Store Bælt interisland link in Denmark, which included a tunnel and an artificial island centre point as well as the bridge with a 1,620-m main span (it would hold the world record briefly in 1997); and the second Severn crossing in Great Britain, which ran 5.2 km across the estuary, using a cable-stayed 456-m centre bridge and repeated concrete box spans between 2,000-ton caisson piers for the remainder. Canada's Prince Edward Island project had no main bridge but rather used 250-m-long precast concrete spans to form the 11-km viaduct. The bridge piers, of special superstrength concrete to withstand ice floes, were also of interest. At 1,377 m the main span of the Tsing Ma suspension bridge in Hong Kong was shorter than Store Bælt, but the bridge was double-decked to carry rail and road traffic; cable spinning for this bridge had been completed by early summer. Part of the series of bridges linking the Japanese islands of Honshu and Shikoku, the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge itself was yet another sample of contemporary composite multispan bridge projects.

      Indeed, the Far East was where the most exciting projects were planned for coming years. China had several giant projects under consideration for crossing its big rivers, including the Chang Jiang (Yangtze), Huang Ho (Yellow River), and Zhu Jiang (Pearl River). India had three large bridges planned for the south. A hint for the next century came perhaps from a tiny five-metre slab footbridge in Oxfordshire, England. For the first time ever, plastic reinforcement was used in the concrete instead of steel.

      (ADRIAN LEE GREEMAN)

      This updates the article bridge.

BUILDINGS

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects(For Notable Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).)

      The world's tallest buildings were being developed in Asia in 1995. Construction of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was under way, and completion was expected toward the end of 1996. At 450 m, it would be overtaken in height by the 460-m Chongqing Tower, Chongqing, China, which was expected to be completed in 1997. A Hong Kong developer, however, was planning to complete a 468-m-tall building, the Nina Tower, by 1997. This skyscraper was to be square in plan and would feature a composite steel and concrete construction with splayed corners to reduce wind drag.

      Construction on Hong Kong's new airport at Chek Lap Kok began in 1995 with the main terminal contract awarded early in the year. A Y-shaped footprint was selected from some 50 possible designs for the building. It was 1.2 km long and accommodated 38 pier gates. The design incorporated modular steel framed barrel vaults supported on high columns, with a partially glazed roof in an attempt to create a feeling of light and space.

      Mid-1995 saw the tragic collapse of a six-year-old multi-story department store in Seoul, South Korea, where more than 500 people were killed. The building, a reinforced-concrete slab construction, was supported by columns 10.8 m apart. The collapse was attributed to a failure around a column at roof level that then led to the progressive failure of other columns. The debris load on floors below then caused a collapse of the entire building.

      The reunification of Germany resulted in increased construction in the former East Germany. In Leipzig, a centuries-old trading hub, a new conference and exhibition centre was being built to the north of the city to replace the outdated exhibition facilities. The focal point of the development was a 250 × 80-m steel-framed, glass-clad hall. The main structure included external arch trusses rising 28 m and spaced 25 m apart. Supported by these was a grid of steel tubes arranged in squares that, in turn, supported the glazing envelope. A smooth, highly transparent glass surface was presented internally, and efforts were also made to keep the degree of natural daylight virtually uninterrupted by the steel structure.

      In Nottingham, England, a novel form of prefabrication was used to combine high quality with quick construction. An architect chose this technique to match a facades' brickwork construction with that of other buildings in the area. Over 1,000 one-story brick piers were prefabricated. The building was also designed to reduce solar gain (increase in heat in structures with large areas of glass) and maximize the use of ambient energy in an attempt to avoid the need for air conditioning. (GEOFFREY M. PINFOLD)

      This updates the article building construction.

DAMS

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects(For Notable Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).)

      Throughout the world in 1995 there were over 60,000 dams more than 15 m high, holding back some 6,000 cu km of water. Since 1975 the rate of dam construction had slowed worldwide, with only about 300 dams being built each year. This decrease was attributed to a recognition of the damage caused to ecosystems and of the social impact of population displacement.

      Less developed countries were under pressure for continued economic development, however, and believed that the alternatives, nuclear and fossil-fuel energy sources, also had objectionable environmental impacts. The growing need for food and energy called for a balance to be achieved between preservation and exploitation of the environment. Many governments had opted for dam construction.

      Along this line, Pres. Nelson Mandela opened the Durban, South Africa, meeting of the International Commission on Large Dams with a reminder that more than 12 million people in South Africa were without access to reliable drinking water and that without its large dams the country would not have been able to grow as it had.

      In China the controversial Three Gorges Dam was going ahead in spite of the World Bank's withdrawal of financial aid because of environmental and resettlement concerns. In Southeast Asia the Mekong River project was revived by Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. (China and Myanmar [Burma] also had been invited to join.) Thailand was expected to be the principal producer and user of the power, amounting to 80%, with Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia sharing the rest. In Nepal the Arun III Dam was being proposed at a site in the Himalayan region, but there too the World Bank withdrew its funding after pressure from environmental groups.

      India's first private dam project, the Baspa II Dam, got under way, although debates over resettlement issues caused a slowdown in construction. Turkmenistan started its third dam since it became independent. The Madav Dam would form a 250 million-cu m reservoir to regulate the flooding of the Tedzhen River. The national plan called for seven new reservoirs by the year 2004. Despite economic and financial boycotts, Iran pushed forward its dam program, with the 120-m-high Zanjan Dam and the 126-m-high Kowsar Dam, the latter of which was to store 450 million cu m of irrigation and drinking water.

      Ethiopia accelerated its dam building program to increase the supply of potable water, and Oman was responding to its water shortage by building numerous aquifer recharge dams, which, although small, would store water that would otherwise be lost.

      South Africa and Swaziland embarked on a joint venture to develop a series of dams to regulate the waters of the Komati River. Five dams would be involved, with the Maguga Dam to be started in 1996. Morocco announced an ambitious program to provide a million hectares under irrigation by the year 2000. The Itaipú Dam, the largest in the world in both output and size, was completed in Brazil.

      In the U.S. the extensive drought helped gain approval for the Domenigoni Valley off-stream dam project, intended to create a reservoir with a capacity of 1,010,000,000 cu m of water serving the Los Angeles and San Diego areas. Also in California, the Auburn Dam, which had been stopped in 1975 because of fears of earthquakes, was revived as a solution to flood threats on the American River. A final decision was not expected soon because alternatives were being presented. On the Santa Ana River near Los Angeles, the Seven Oaks Dam was being built to provide flood control and was scheduled to be completed in the year 2000.

      (T.W. MERMEL)

      This updates the article dam.

ROADS

      One of the abiding images of 1995 was the crumpled section of the Hanshin Expressway in the Japanese city of Kobe, which collapsed during the January 17 earthquake. Once again questions were raised about the wisdom of constructing elevated highways in earthquake-prone regions.

      Massive highway projects were being planned throughout Asia. China was increasing its road network at the rate of about 13,000 km (1 km = 0.6 mi) each year, providing both urban and long-distance routes. The Shanghai ring road, a 48-km four-lane highway, was opened, helping to ease congestion in one of the world's largest and busiest cities. Three major expressways running north-south and three running east-west would provide the country with a basic network. South Korea announced plans to triple its expressway system to over 4,500 km within 30 years. A $1.2 billion plan to provide a road network linking China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma)—was agreed upon between the governments of those six countries. The project would be paid for by tolls, with initial funding from the Asian Development Bank.

      The use of tolls to pay for new infrastructure, usually through a build-operate-transfer (BOT) contract arrangement, was becoming increasingly common throughout the world. Under these arrangements a private company would build the highway and then be permitted to charge tolls for a designated period of years, after which the highway would revert to government ownership. Indonesia invited bids for the construction of 770 km of toll roads worth an estimated $2.7 billion, mostly on the island of Java. India invited similar proposals for eight highways and nine bridges, together valued at $300 million. The Pakistan National Highway Authority announced plans for 754 km of highways—the largest being a 270-km two-lane expressway linking the Karachi port with Hub Chauki—which were to be offered as BOT contracts.

      In Russia a 700-km highway to link Moscow with St. Petersburg was being studied, as were highways to link Moscow with Warsaw, Poland, and Kiev, Ukraine. It was estimated that 1% of all road bridges in Russia collapsed each year. Hungary was seen as a good example of the use of BOT contracts, with the first privately funded highway—the 42-km, $370 million M1 motorway—opened in 1995. Five further motorway sections totaling 580 km were under construction and were scheduled to open between 1996 and 2003.

      In the United Kingdom a novel form of private finance was being planned. Under a design-build-finance-operate contract, a private company would assume all responsibility for the construction of a highway but would not collect tolls. Instead, costs would be paid by so-called "shadow tolls"; the road would be free for motorists, but the government would compensate the builder as if tolls had been charged.

      In Toronto construction began on Highway 407, the world's first all-electronic tolled highway. In order to use the highway, drivers would be required to use transponding equipment fitted with "smart cards," and all tolls would be charged automatically. A similar project was begun in Melbourne, Australia.

      In the U.S. the first privately owned and operated highway constructed in the 20th century was completed and opened to traffic. The 22.5-km Dulles Greenway connected Leesburg, Va., to Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C. State Route 91 in California was the first highway in the U.S. to employ "congestion pricing," where motorists were charged higher tolls at busier times of day.

      (RUSS SWAN)

      This updates the article road (roads and highways).

TUNNELS

       Notable Civil Engineering Projects(For Notable Civil Engineering Projects, see Table (Notable Civil Engineering Projects).)

      New tunneling techniques were introduced in 1995 to cope more efficiently with difficult ground conditions or logistically difficult projects. Odd as it may sound, the injection of foam into the excavation chamber of soft-ground earth pressure balance (EPB) pressurized tunnel-boring machines (TBMs) was being used as a soil-conditioning agent to counterbalance the pressure within the water-bearing soils. The purpose behind this operation was to decrease the permeability of the soil and give it a homogeneous consistency for more favourable extrusion through the screw conveyor of the EPB technique. Consisting mostly of air, the foam bubbles eventually would disappear, leaving a slightly moist, easily handled soil.

      Major mechanical advances took place in Japan, where a triple-headed TBM was launched to excavate the three chambers of a 17-m-wide ×7.5-m-high underground station for the Osaka Metro all in one pass, and segment robots on the eight TBMs working on the Trans-Tokyo Bay Highway project were lifting and placing the eleven 10-metric ton precast concrete segments in each 1.5-m-wide ×650-mm-thick ring of segmental lining. These robots also fitted and tightened the 110 bolts in each bolting ring, all totally automatically. Such developments were yet to be employed outside Japan. In London the technique of compensation grouting was developed to sophisticated levels to control surface settlement and prevent damage to buildings as the tunnels for the new Jubilee Line Extension of the Underground network passed close by such famous landmarks as Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. The technique compensated for the predicted amount of settlement by injecting thin horizontal lenses of grout or mortar into the ground above the tunnel alignment and below the foundations of the sensitive structures. When grout was applied gently and skillfully, settlement was effectively eliminated, which restored the slight declivities back to normal level ground.

      Large-scale excavation for metro systems also continued during 1995 beneath Lisbon, Paris, Cairo, Munich, Washington, and Los Angeles, where in June a section of tunnel collapsed, leaving a gaping hole in Hollywood Boulevard.

      The tunneling industry awaited official reports from the British Institution of Civil Engineers and the U.K. Health and Safety Executive concerning the safe use of NATM (New Austrian Tunneling Method), or shotcrete-supported tunneling, in urban areas following the collapse of NATM tunneling at Heathrow Airport in October 1994. A full year later the exact cause of the collapse was not known. Despite the delayed reports, NATM work was resumed on the Heathrow Express Railway project and on London's Jubilee Line Extension. NATM work also continued on the Munich Metro following a collapse in 1994 that claimed three lives.

      Urgent remedial work to a London underground tunnel under the River Thames was delayed by more than six months when an injunction initiated by historical societies prevented the application of shotcrete to strengthen the interior of the structure. The brick-lined tunnel, finished in the mid-1800s, was the first-ever subaqueous tunnel in soft ground. Covering the interior with layers of shotcrete was adopted as the most appropriate and cost-effective method of renovating the tunnel and ensuring public safety. Historical societies wanted to preserve the interior as a monument of English heritage even though there was no public access into the tunnel nor could the interior be seen from within the passing trains. (SHANI WALLIS)

      This updates the article tunnel (tunnels and underground excavations).

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