The understated elegance of such projects is attracting a serious clientele, the kind of patrons who wouldn’t be caught dead with a logo on their shirts—so why would they call undue attention to their houses, offices or art galleries? They’re drawn to architecture that’s less about the object—the thingness of a building—and more about the experience of space. Avant-garde critics might call such designers and their patrons timid, but they tend to be the opposite: assured and confident in their desire for something subtle. “People come to us for a particular quality, not for show,” says New York architect Calvin Tsao. “They want space that is both functional and has a certain ambience, that sense of calm.”
While a sleek neomodernist look has become hugely popular—just check out the décor of all those cute boutique hotels and cool supermarkets in places like Switzerland—the best of this design is not a style as much as an ethos. New York-based Richard Gluckman, an architect known for his beautifully minimalist museum and gallery spaces, says he’s been guided by a mantra of the Russian constructivists: “Not the new, just the necessary.” Though this architecture of restraint has been around a long time, its sudden high visibility is due in part to its stark contrast to cutting-edge contemporary design. “The minimalist strain, the architecture of seductive deduction, works best against an environment that is clangorous,” says Reed Kroloff, the new director of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. “It looks beautiful because so much around it is so noisy.”
These subtle, antiheroic architects do have their own heroes among the older generation of masters. Italy’s Renzo Piano is beloved for his clean lines, impeccable craftsmanship and skill at capturing natural light. Álvaro Siza of Portugal is the genius of strong and subtle structures, artfully deploying bright sunlight and deep shadows. In Japan, Yoshio Taniguchi is worshiped for the exquisite detail and crisp austerity of his buildings. And the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor is admired for his almost ascetic devotion to honest forms and expression of materials—most recently in his stunning chapel dedicated to Brother Claus at the edge of a farm field near Cologne, Germany. Though the roots of today’s architecture of restraint go back to early 20th-century modernism, the best designers reflect, as Zumthor does, the particulars of the places where they build. “The specificity of climate, culture, landscape and materials is really a radical idea right now because of the numbing effects of globalized culture,” says Nova Scotia architect Brian MacKay-Lyons. “It’s a source of authentic content. It gives us something to sink our teeth into.”
The powerful expression of place is evident all through MacKay-Lyons’s “plain modern” esthetic. His houses pay tribute to the vernacular building traditions of Nova Scotia—barns, sheds, ships—and exploit the views of the rugged terrain and the sea. Hill House is designed both for its spectacular outlook and for protection against harsh coastal storms. Across the North Atlantic, the best Scandinavian designers are similarly responsive to climate and landscape. The Finnish firm Heikkinen-Komonen, artistic heirs of Alvar Aalto, are known for using sophisticated materials and forms as well as simpler wood or brick, depending on the site. On the hill of Howth in Ireland, Dublin architects O’Donnell & Tuomey designed a house from the inside out, orienting the spaces toward the north light and the magnetic view of harbor and island. In the rocky sunbleached landscape of central Spain, Jesús Aparicio used stone from the site, embedded in concrete, for the massive walls of his Casa del Horizonte, while Rick Joy made three stark plate-steel boxes for the Desert Nomad House and set them at angles, like indestructible relics, in the rugged Arizona desert.
Even historical surroundings can affect neomodernist design, though in extremely subtle ways. Gluckman, usually religious in the pristine neutrality of his gallery interiors, used a soft-red corrugated metal façade for his addition to the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, a nod to the abundance of Spanish roof tile in town. And New York-based Deborah Berke, an architect and professor at Yale, sees in the austerity of her neomodernist projects the ghost of the classic New England-style church she attended as a child: “The stark white lofty spaces were filled with texture and light, but not decoration,” she says.
When Louis Kahn said “Architecture is the thoughtful making of space,” you might think he was stating the obvious. But it’s amazing how often architects fail in that most basic mission. It’s in the creation of space—and the artful deployment of natural and artificial light—that the neomodernists make or break the success of their work. There’s not a lot of wizardry to play with if you’re a minimalist—no fancy ornamental details or flashy materials to catch the eye and distract from a room of bad proportions.
So when this architecture works, the spaces sing. The place may be dramatic—as in “The Brain,” a retreat designed by Seattle architect Tom Kundig, with its boxy concrete solidity offset by soaring openings of paned glass. Or the spaces can quietly ebb and flow, from indoors to the garden, as in the residential work of Waro Kishi, a Kyoto architect who has re-imagined the way space slips and shifts through a traditional Japanese house. Or space can be captivating and glamorous, as in Michael Gabellini’s interiors—his softly elegant galleries, fashion showrooms and makeover of Top of the Rock at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. Gabellini says he aims to create “a floating quality of space that helps sculpt the volume and creates a seductive interplay between light and space.” He and other modernists do have a trick or two up their sleeves, whether it’s carefully calibrating the height of the windows or carving out a slot for natural daylight near the ceiling to draw the eye. “These are architects’ architects,” says Rosalie Genevro, executive director of the Architectural League in New York. “These are people who really know how to build, who are not about cheap effects, but have a sensitive way of putting together the basic elements—they know what effect that has on the experience of space.”
Their designs call for the luxury of fine craftsmanship. When the details are spare, the forms simple and the scale modest, the construction has to be close to perfection. The materials don’t have to be expensive—the beauty is in the making. “Craft and quality take time,” says Berke, “and in this day and age, time is more expensive than money.” A bank Berke designed in Columbus, Indiana—a town famous for its great architectural commissions—uses homely brick, yet the details were carefully calibrated so that the bricks at the end of a row turned the corner rather than be cut off. The bank hall’s floor is humble—polished concrete—but with high ceilings and a long glass box on the roof that floods the interior with daylight, this modest financial institution has a surprising grandeur.
The architecture of restraint is so versatile and adaptable that it can convincingly spring up out of the snows of the Arctic or the dust of the African desert and seem at home. It can be dressed up—tastefully, of course—for high-end luxury or dressed down and serve a social agenda, like the award-winning Kahere Elia poultry farming school that Heikkinen-Komonen designed in Guinea. Its subtle refinement may require the discerning eye of the privileged—yet it’s ultimately democratic and accessible.
So what’s not to like? Among design aficionados, there is some skepticism. “The incredible revival of this new modernism makes you ask, ‘What is timeless? What is innovative?’ " says critic Aaron Betsky, former head of the Netherlands Architecture Institute and now director of the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio. “There is a sense of elegance—the simple basic forms have a clarity and directness about them. But at the same time, one wonders if they are not deadening.” A quiet, calm esthetic that’s provided refuge from the exhausting hyperstylized architecture of Gehry wanna-bes does risk being, well, a little boring.
Yet in the end, isn’t design diversity the best hope for a pluralist society? It’s hard not to admire both Gehry and Piano—yet no one would want a city filled with architecture designed by only one of them. Still, after all the wild-looking designs coming soon to a metropolis near you—beware those skyscrapers that twirl and bend and twist and shout—it would be nice to have a quiet, peaceful space to sit and wonder why nothing in life is perfect—not even a kind of design that distills architecture to its very essence.
