The 25 Most Significant Works of Postwar Architecture
Three architects, three journalists and two designers gathered over Zoom to make a list of the most influential and lasting buildings that have been erected — or cleverly updated — since World War II. Here are the results.
A few months ago, I set up a Zoom call with the architects Toshiko Mori, Annabelle Selldorf and Vincent Van Duysen; the designer Tom Dixon; the artist and set designer Es Devlin; the critic and T contributor Nikil Saval; and Tom Delavan, T’s design/interiors director, to talk about postwar architecture. Our goal was to make a list — similar to ones we’ve done on influential rooms, protest art and contemporary art — of the 25 most significant buildings constructed after World War II. The word “significant” always inspires debate, and there was plenty of disagreement among those assembled, but we hoped to surface projects made over the last eight decades anywhere in the world, whether public or private — though we did limit our list to those that are still standing (which, if you consider various oppressive governments, imposed some geographical limitations) — and so we asked each of our panelists to nominate 10 or so entries ahead of time, from which we would mercilessly cull.
Modernists, of course, played an important role in this discussion, and a few of them — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Lina Bo Bardi, Luis Barragán — were named again and again on our individual ballots. There were also three buildings — Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (1951; Plano, Ill.); Kahn’s Salk Institute (1965; La Jolla, Calif.); Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompéia (1986; São Paulo) — that received three preliminary votes each, practically mandating their inclusion as finalists. From there, though, the conversation was as sprawling and high-spirited as the styles, countries, aesthetics, typologies and practitioners represented by the projects we narrowed in on below (which appear in chronological order, from their dates of completion), as our experts lobbied for or against architecture that they felt had not only reshaped the world and era in which it was introduced but also has endured and remains influential today.
