An "a" List for the Baby Boom

By KURT ANDERSEN

Prevailing fashions in architecture, being fashions, tend to change course at just the moment they become mainstream doctrine. The effect (although not the intention, usually) is to make outsiders and stylistic slow learners scramble to catch up. Thus today, as the giant architectural firms have begun routinely gussying up their new high-rise towers in pseudoantique brica-brac -- fake Corinthian columns, pediments and pyramidal tops -- the cutting edge has glided past. As postmodern cliches become ubiquitous, in other words, the movement is becoming passe.

The mid-'80s shift in the consensus among cognoscenti has just been made ^ especially clear. This is the season of "40 Under 40," architecture's cliquish, roughly once-a-decade (1941, 1966, 1976 and this year) initiation rite, in which several dozen younger Americans were declared the best and the brightest of their generation in a recent exhibition at New York City's International Design Center. Although the Architectural League of New York started the tradition, Interiors magazine was the 1986 sponsor, and Architect Andrew MacNair (who wound up on the list himself) oversaw the selection process. The last time a new 40 was named, in 1976, postmodernism was just revealing its jolly don's face to the world. The newly anointed 40 (54 men and women, in fact, eight of whom are 40 or older) tend strikingly in a different direction: stripped-down, scrupulous, refined but seldom fancy, unafraid of ornament but almost never giddy. There is an unabashedness about construction and materials, but this lightly worn constructivism is a matter of instinct, not doctrine. Much of the new generation's architecture recalls the best buildings of the 1910s and '20s, buildings on the cusp between the neoclassical and the modern -- early, excitingly unsettled modernism, before assembly-line imitation gave austerity a bad name. The work of the younger generation, then, may be backward-looking, but its inspirations are antiquity and the early 20th century, not the 18th and 19th centuries. Quaintness does not excite.

The up-and-comers' neomodern bent is ironic, given who advised MacNair in selecting the final 40: Philip Johnson and Robert A.M. Stern. Grandmaster Johnson, 80, is the most notorious ex-modernist in the world; Stern, a sort of architectural Ralph Lauren, specializes in exactly the sort of direct 19th century-style borrowing that his younger peers are eschewing. This year's "40 Under 40" honors list is the third that Stern, 47, has helped compile (and the first of the three on which he has not appeared). Being named is no guarantee of a successful career, obviously, but a remarkable number of today's most celebrated architects are 40 Under 40 alumni from 1966. They include Gunnar Birkerts, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, Hugh Hardy, William Pedersen, Hugh Newell Jacobsen, Richard Meier, Charles Moore, Giovanni Pasanella, James Stewart Polshek, Jaquelin Robertson, Der Scutt, Stern, Stanley Tigerman and Robert Venturi.

The new roster is authentically eclectic. The oddities are, if nothing else, evidence of the Establishment's endearing tolerance for the quixotic. Elizabeth Diller's and Daniel Libeskind's wooden sculptures are provocative and perverse and may (possibly) be interesting art, but how much do they have to do with architecture? Lynne Breslin's dreamy, convoluted "Stargame" drawings would make good black-light posters, but is she among the several dozen most talented young American architects? At the other end of the spectrum, postmodern sweetness still has baby-boom adherents. The cupola- topped shingle-style studio that Mark Simon designed for a Long Island beachfront is something of a contortionist folly: it jams all the moves of a mansion into a building the size of a gazebo. But in its earnest eagerness to please, the little building is more cute than contentious. John Syvertsen has envisioned a Wisconsin lake cottage as a kind of friendly folk pavilion: the tin chimney, latticework and exposed Y trusses satisfy the middle-class Arcadian ideal, while the broad stairs and hipped roof make the cottage nearly grand -- rustic classical.

Mark Mack's tough, beautiful houses are rustic in more complicated, suggestive ways. The archetypes that inspire them are ancient but not quite classical, more primitive than Periclean. If Northern California had had an early civilization of master builders, one imagines, their settlements would have looked like this.

The work of Arquitectonica Alumni Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is ferociously intelligent, as well as the most neoclassical of the lot. The couple practice and build mainly in South Florida, so it is fitting that they are attracted to Mediterranean forms. Theirs is a swaggering, hard-edged classicism on the cheap. Out of stucco they make neo-Roman villas: stark, complicated buildings that recall the Viennese Adolf Loos and do not suffer in the comparison.

Steven Holl's precise, highly wrought store and apartment interiors are austere and dreamy, a combination of effects not regularly encountered outside of Japan. The attention to surface detail is almost excessive. Glass panes are sandblasted and etched with miniature geometric murals. When Holl has room to move around (for example, in his designs for a retail and residential building, as yet unbuilt, at Florida's Seaside), his work seems sublime rather than precious or cramped.

It is natural that Diane Legge Lohan, being a partner in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Chicago office, designs rather conventionally modern corporate buildings. But in her printing plant for the Boston Globe newspaper she has managed the improbable. With a long, gorgeous, barrel-vaulted main hall in particular, Lohan has again made industrial modernism beautiful -- and without a bit of frippery. W.G. Clark and Charles Menefee have accomplished their own unlikely feat with the cool, cool Middleton Inn: here are glass houses that delight as glass houses have not delighted in a generation. Overlooking a South Carolina river, the inn boasts rooms that are perfect modernist compositions: light, airy, lively, serene. Clark and Menefee's work, like most of the best work by younger Americans today, is all about restraint in the face of lush temptation and few stylistic rules. When anything goes, less is more interesting.