Architecture Unbound

A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde

Transgressive • Oblique • Aberrant • Deconstructed • Digital

By Joseph Giovannini

Hardcover trapezoid / 9” x 11” / 876 pages / 698 Color and B&W drawings and photographs

$50.00 U.S. / ISBN: 978-0-8478-5879-8 / Rizzoli New York / Release date: 30 November 2021

Architecture’s Wilder Shores

In Architecture Unbound, noted architecture critic Joseph Giovannini traces a century of the avant-garde to transgressive and progressive art movements that roiled Europe before and after World War I, and to the social unrest and cultural disruption of the 1960s. Manifestos produced during this pivotal and fertile period opened the way to tentative forays into an inventive, anti-authoritarian architecture in the next decade. Built projects broke onto the front pages and into public awareness in the 1980s, and took digital form in the 1990s, with large-scale international projects landing on the far side of the millennium.

As Giovannini writes in the Prologue, “With strategies of explosion, collision, and fragmentation, architects were introducing forces that dislocated architecture’s system of thought and construction predicated on gravity. Architects produced fresh astonishments, some fantastical. The buildings worked, and they worked well, but perhaps their highest and best function was to fascinate.”

Architecture Unbound tracks complex historical developments and conceptual influences across the century, presenting an authoritative and illuminating history of the twentieth-century avant-garde and its evolution into digital form-making in the twenty-first century. He profiles influential practitioners and their most notable projects including Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall, Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House, Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV Tower, and Herzog and de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing. He includes scores of other projects and architects who contributed to the groundswell of work that established a broadly based movement that has continued in an ongoing digital phase.

The avant-garde focus of Giovannini’s text, which includes Claude Parent and Paul Virilio’s theories of the oblique, is translated into the book’s trapezoidal format and inventive typographical layout, designed by celebrated graphic designer Abbott Miller of Pentagram. Giovannini analyzes this innovative and daring epoch of design with the evocative prose and finely drawn insights of a book that will earn its place on bookshelves as an essential addition to the contemporary architecture canon.

“I couldn’t put the book down. Giovannini is open; he explores ideas, he talks about serious things, he digs. [In Architecture Unbound,] he brings together famous architects and architects who are unknown or underrated. He is not a critic with a bias or agenda.”

— FRANK O. GEHRY, ARCHITECT

“A masterpiece.”

— RICHARD KOSHALEK, FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE LOS ANGELES MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART AND THE HIRSHHORN MUSEUM, WASHINGTON D.C.

“An extraordinary effort that fills a cultural void.”

— BARTON PHELPS, FAIA, LOS ANGELES ARCHITECT

“Refreshing in its refusal to fall into the polemics of star architecture critiques, this is a tale of an architecture that Giovannini sees as having finally caught up with the “shape-shifting” sciences and art movements of the early 20th century. … Assembling a brilliantly illustrated roster of stories, anecdotes, and critical assessments of the work of a wide range of protagonists, tracing their varied careers, precedents, interrelations, and academic and institutional histories, [Giovannini] has produced an extraordinary 831-page, 21/2”-thick volume, with suitable vertigo-testing graphics to match”

— ANTHONY VIDLER, ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIAN AND CRITIC

“This voluminous and beautifully designed book will oblige revisions of the architecture of the past half century. It is a major achievement.”

— WILLIAM J.R. CURTIS, ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIAN

“With Architecture Unbound, the avant-garde lineage of architecture at last has a galvanizing critical voice.”

— NEIL M. DENARI, FOUNDER AND PRINCIPAL OF NEIL M. DENARI ARCHITECTS

“An instant classic.”

— THOMAS LEESER, FOUNDER AND PRINCIPAL OF LEESER ARCHITECTURE

“A milestone. Giovannini puts to shame more conventional, linear narratives with dazzling diagonal visions of architecture’s generative power, informed by genre-defying leaps through cultural and aesthetic history that, amazingly, nail the landing. Thoroughly researched, with pinpoint attention to detail, Architecture Unbound captures the thrill of architecture’s triumphant liberation.”

— CRAIG HODGETTS, FOUNDER AND PRINCIPAL OF HODGETTS + FUNG ARCHITECTS, LOS ANGELES

“The magisterial Architecture Unbound … [is] a voluminous resource and must-have reference on an exciting period of architectural form-making.”

— JOHN HILL, A DAILY DOSE OF ARCHITECTURE BOOKS

“An amazing achievement.”

— JAMES WINES, FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT OF SITE, NEW YORK CITY

“An authoritative and illuminating history of the twentieth-century avant-garde and its evolution into digital form-making in the twenty-first century.”

— AMAZING ARCHITECTURE

“The text is so comprehensive, and rich with detailed accounts of key events over four decades, that it must be taken very seriously by anyone interested in turn of the century cultural history. The author interviewed all of the key players . . .… [and] gives the back story for each, with fascinating detours into the careers of their mentors, inspirations, and co-conspirators across Europe and the U.S. It’s a wild ride for the reader.”

— MARK HEWITT, FAIA, in COMMON\EDGE