Perspecta 32: The Yale Architectural Journal

Those eagle-eyed editors over at Yale's venerable design journal Perspecta have been noticing a lot of buildings springing up the past few years that smack seriously of mid-century modernism, even if their high-tech materials make Mies-era steel and glass look downright primitive. That's why they've devoted this issue to essays (by bigwigs like George Baird, Peggy Deamer, K. Michael Hays, and Demetri Porphyrios) that explore the "resurfacing" of high modernism--what's changed, what hasn't, and why. Thankfully, not all of the contributions are as impenetrable as their titles, such as Hays's "Prolegomenon for a Study Linking the Advanced Architecture of the Present to that of the 1970s through Ideologies of Media, the Experience of Cities in Transition, and the Ongoing Effects of Reification." And plenty of small black-and-white photos of the works under discussion (plus a full-color gatefold of recent "neo-modernist" projects) are included alongside the text to help clarify the more oblique ideas. Look at Jean Tschumi's 1960 Nestl headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland, against Jacques Richter and Ignazio Dahl Rocha's late '90s redo and add-on for the same complex, for example, and the whole point of this dense, ambitious issue of Perspecta clicks intriguingly into place. --Timothy Murphy