In the United States, after 1959, office buildings for administrative headquarters of large corporations followed the 1955-57 suburban-campus model of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Connecticut General Life Insurance Company or, if urban, the towerlike form, often with strong structural expression (e.g., Torre Velasca, Milan, by Belgiojoso, Peressutti, and Rogers, 1959) or the slab form, usually emphasizing glazed walls (e.g., Mannesmann Building, Düsseldorf, Germany, by Paul Schneider-Esleben, 1959), but they rarely achieved an urban composition such as the 1962 Place Ville-Marie, built at Montreal by the Chinese-born American architect I.M. In 1949 Nowicki had challenged Louis Sullivan’s precept, form follows function, with another, form follows form; this dictum helped free architecture from programmatic expression. In England, distinctive educational architecture arrived at Hunstanton Secondary School, Norfolk (1949-54), by Peter and Alison Smithson. Most New Brutalist buildings, however, owed more to Le Corbusier’s late work-for example, the gray concrete masses of Denys Lasdun’s University of East Anglia, Norfolk (1962-68)-while Sir James Stirling’s History Faculty, Cambridge (1964-67), brought a neo-Constructivist element to the Brutalist tradition.

In Madison, for example, the municipality takes the lead in laying out neighborhoods on the periphery of the city, in concert with developers. Most of the smart meters that Xcel has been placing in Boulder homes communicate to the utility via broadband over power lines (BPL) and a fiber-optic communications system the company maintains; typically, BPL will carry the data the first 75 meters or so from the smart meter out to where it meets up with a fiber link. From the look of things, the next generation will be able to move around. Pick a color and pattern from our wood and ceramic countertop collection that will elevate the look and feel of your new space. Organized by the Minnesota chapter of the National Kitchen and Bath Association, the tour will feature before and after photos, details of the project and product information. Crown Hall (1952-56) marked the apogee of this quarter-century project. Hugh Stubbins’s congress hall at Berlin (1957) and Eero Saarinen’s Trans World Airlines terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York City (1956-62), were outstanding examples of these dynamically monumental, single-form buildings the geometric shapes and silhouettes of which were derived from mathematical computation and technological innovation.

Pier Luigi Nervi in Italy gave structural integrity to the complex curves and geometry of reinforced-concrete structures, such as the Orbetello aircraft hangar (begun 1938) and Turin’s exposition hall (1948-50). The Spaniard Eduardo Torroja, his pupil Felix Candela, and the American Frederick Severud followed his lead. Rome’s Pallazzi dello Sport done by Nervi (1960), Eero Saarinen’s Dulles International Airport at Chantilly, Virginia (1958-62), and Chicago’s exposition hall, McCormick Place, by C.F. International competitions for the opera house at Sydney (1957) and a government centre at Toronto (1958) were won by the Dane Jørn Utzon and the Finn Viljo Revell, respectively. These designs posed problems in structural engineering and in scale, but many architects, such as the American Minoru Yamasaki in the McGregor Building for Wayne State University at Detroit (1958), attempted to make structure become decorative, while the decorative screen, as used by Edward Durell Stone at the United States embassy in New Delhi (1957-59), offered a device for wrapping programmatic interiors within a rich pattern of sculptured walls. The high-rise, dense campus at Boston University by José Luis Sert and the skyscraper towers of MIT’s earth-sciences building (1964) by I.M.

The Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the Chicago Circle Campus of the University of Illinois (1965), both by the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with Walter Netsch as the principal designer (1956), and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla, California, by Louis I. Kahn (1966), all offered intimations of a new city built around a cultural, educational centre. Paul Rudolph’s art and architecture building (1963) at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, gathered its studios, galleries, classrooms, and light wells on 36 interpenetrating levels distributed over six stories. Louis I. Kahn, in his minneapolis design firms for the Richards Medical Research Building (1960), gave the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia a linear programmatic composition of laboratories, each served by vertical systems for circulating gases, liquids, and electricity. There was increasing interest in highly sculptural masses and spaces, as well as in the decorative qualities of diverse building materials and exposed structural systems. The Harrison and Abramovitz’s tower for the Aluminum Company of America at Pittsburgh (1954) advertised its own product, as did Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Inland Steel Building at Chicago (1955-57). Perhaps the most chaste of all was the Seagram Building (1954-58) at New York City, designed by Mies and Philip Johnson.