Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde

Joseph Giovannini is the esteemed architecture critic who coined the term Deconstructivism in the 1980s to describe explosively complex buildings by such architects as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, and Daniel Libeskind.  His recently published work, Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde, (Rizzoli, November, 2021,) is the definitive book on the period that explains the surprising architectural inventions built internationally from the 1980s and ‘90s until today.

Writing for The New York Times, he identified the movement that displaced the pediments and columns of Post Modernism with fragmented form and fluid space. The architectural strategies of explosion, collision, and fragmentation reflected socially disruptive times and paradigm shifts in art, philosophy, and science, including chaos science. Architects were challenging a long- established system of architectural thought and construction predicated on linear logic and gravity itself. Giovannini’s history of the avant-garde includes its evolution into digital form-making in the twenty-first century. 

Giovannini wrote the book as an architecture insider over decades, while the history was happening, producing an intimate, close-up history as he introduces architects who risked their careers but made their reputations pursuing a new paradigm. The architects produced fresh astonishments, some fantastical. The buildings worked, and they worked well, but perhaps their highest and best function was to fascinate. 

A three-time Pulitzer nominee in architecture criticism who trained in architecture at Harvard, Joseph Giovannini has led a career that has spanned three decades and two coasts. He has served as the architecture critic for New York Magazine and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and was long a staff writer on design and architecture for The New York Times, and has contributed to many other publications, including The New Yorker, Architectural Record, Architectural Digest, Art in America, Art Forum, Architecture Magazine, Architect Magazine, Industrial Design Magazine, and Interior Design.  

He is a prominent figure in American architecture and has been an activist critic with a record of discovering emerging talent for major mainstream publications and professional journals.  Mr. Giovannini heads Giovannini Associates. His architecture and design work has appeared in numerous architecture and design publications.  He has taught advanced and graduate design studios at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture, and at the University of Innsbruck. He holds a master’s in architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He did his B.A. in English at Yale University, and an M.A in French Language and Literature from Middlebury College for work done at La Sorbonne, Paris.

This event qualifies for 1 AIA/CES Learning Unit (LU).

$15

Things to Know
This event is for ages 12 and older.
The entrance to the Annenberg Theater is located behind the Annenberg Theater Box Office, adjacent to the Palm Springs Art Museum's North Parking Lot.
Ample free public parking is available in the multi-level public garage across from the Palm Springs Art Museum.
Handicap parking is available. This event is wheelchair accessible.
The organizer of this event is Modernism Week.

Event Check-in Location 
Annenberg Theater,  Palm Springs Art Museum, 101 N. Museum Dr., Palm Springs, CA 92262
View Map
 

Photo Credits: Book and cover design: Abbot Miller, Pentagram, New York, Design and drawing by Zaha Hadid, © Zaha Hadid Foundation, Architects: Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue Photograph © Hisao Suzuki, Architect: Günther Domenig Photo © Gerald Zugmann/Vienna, Deign: Daniel Libeskind Photograph by Marirosa Toscani Ballo, © Sawaya & Moroni, Architect: Thom Maine / Morphosis Photograph © Ernst Peter Prokop