POSTMODERNIST ARCHITECTURE MODELS

No architect embodied the contradictions of Postmodernism more completely than Philip Johnson. As the co-curator of MoMA's landmark 1932 International Style exhibition, he had done more than almost anyone to establish the Modernist orthodoxy that would define American commercial architecture for forty years. By the 1970s, he was quietly taking it apart.

Pennzoil Place in Houston (1976) was the first sign of the shift — two trapezoidal towers, their sliced-glass roofs angled toward each other across a narrow gap, producing a silhouette no conventional curtain-wall building could achieve. Eight years later, 550 Madison Avenue in New York (1984, and still widely known as the AT&T Building) made the break explicit: a granite-clad skyscraper topped with a Chippendale broken pediment that announced, with considerable theatricality, that Modernism's prohibition on historical reference was over.

Both buildings remain among the most discussed skyscrapers of the twentieth century. Both are represented here.

Each model is cast in fine plaster and finished by hand in our West Sussex studio.