When Philip Johnson curated the Museum of Modern Arts? (MoMA) 1932 ?International Exhibition of Modern Architecture,? he did so with the explicit intention of defining the International Style. As a guest curator at the same institution in 1988 alongside Mark Wigley (now Dean Emeritus of the Columbia GSAPP), Johnson took the opposite approach: rather than present architecture derived from a rigidly uniform set of design principles, he gathered a collection of work by architects whose similar (but not identical) approaches had yielded similar results. The designers he selected?Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, and the firm Coop Himmelblau (led by Wolf Prix)?would prove to be some of the most influential architects of the late 20th Century to the present day.[1,2]
View into the exhibition (1988). Photographer unknown. Image via MoMA

When Philip Johnson curated the Museum of Modern Arts? (MoMA) 1932 ?International Exhibition of Modern Architecture,? he did so with the explicit intention of defining the International Style. As a guest curator at the same institution in 1988 alongside Mark Wigley (now Dean Emeritus of the Columbia GSAPP), Johnson took the opposite approach: rather than present architecture derived from a rigidly uniform set of design principles, he gathered a collection of work by architects whose similar (but not identical) approaches had yielded similar results. The designers he selected?...