ARCHITECTURE AT THE END OF THE 20th CENTURY

Abstract

The last decades of the last century were characterized by economic prosperity, at least until the 60s, when economic prosperity was briefly interrupted by energy crises. Architecture ceased to be restricted to a handful of building types. The increased variety and complexity of functions within and around buildings called for new structural and architectural solutions. The early modern style was grounded on rationalism and it intended to break with the historical precedents, many architects became convinced of their ability to solve most social problems by architectural means. Gradually, from modernism and from its derivatives, such as brutalism, functionalism and structuralism, a new and different type of architecture evolved.
In the 20th century progress, continued to advance at a frantic pace, especially in industry; increased urbanization followed and with it the concentration of labor in cities, a trend which has continued right up to the present time. During the period 1960-2000 housing became a mass affair to the point when tens of millions of families could move into well-equipped homes. However, an improvement in world housing conditions and city life remains a task for the twenty-first century. Modernism, undoubtedly, achieved great technical progress in building but by the end of the modernist period (around the 1960s) disenchantment with it had set in strongly. This in turn led to post-modernism which gradually spread throughout the world.
The complex problem of ecology and methods to apply these concepts to the process of designing buildings is of an extreme importance for our profession and the education of future architects. As the use of building materials continued to evolve together with demands for comfort and better hygiene, the form of building changed: they became more open. The development of building forms in hot climate zones was quite different. The tendency in those areas was to locate living areas underground to utilize the coolness of the earth and to create ventilation through buoyancy, thus improving thermal comfort. New schools of architecture, regional developments, or vernacular architecture will spread new approaches, ideas, technologies or materials in order to enrich the already highly divers faces of contemporary architecture.