into construction. Green building practices also be-
came more common in remodeling and renovation
projects.
In 1998, the Leadership in Energy and Environ-
mental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating Sys-
tem, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council
(USGBC), was established to provide a set of stan-
dards for environmentally sustainable construction.
The effort to establish a comprehensive rating sys-
tem for green design and construction was begun in
1994 by Robert K. Watson of the Natural Resources
Defense Council. LEED has since evolved from a sin-
gle construction standard to six connected stan-
dards covering the entire building process, from de-
velopment to construction. Receiving a high LEED
rating has become a desirable goal for architects and
builders.
Nonresidential Buildings For centuries, cathedrals
were the most impressive buildings in a city. During
the industrial age, towering office structures domi-
nated urban landscapes and made many architects’
reputations. By the 1990’s, museums and other cul-
tural buildings were the most prestigious architec-
tural commissions. In many cases, the spectacular
buildings themselves began to be seen as more of an
attraction than the art or other objects and activities
that they housed.
One of the best-known examples of the unique
destination museum is the Guggenheim Museum
Bilbao, opened in 1997 and designed by Frank
Gehry. Located alongside the Nervión River in the
port city of Bilbao, in the Basque country of Spain,
the museum expanded the city’s economy from an
industrial base to a major tourist destination. The
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao was Gehry’s most dis-
tinctive design in the 1990’s. Its unusual shapes and
intricate, curvilinear forms were made possible in
part by computer-aided three-dimensional interac-
tive application, or CATIA, a French software pro-
gram for computer modeling.
At the end of the twentieth century, no architect
was better known or more distinctive in his designs
than Gehry. His earlier buildings had featured
sharp, angular, rectilinear forms, but beginning in
the late 1980’s, Gehry increasingly worked with
curved and twisting shapes. From the outside, his
later buildings are whimsical and sometimes confus-
ing, usually overshadowing the buildings around
them. Gehry first envisions the exterior of the build-
ing to be as free-flowing as possible, later dividing up
the interior space to encompass specific activities—
not always successfully, his critics argue. Among his
early 1990’s buildings in this style are the Team Dis-
neyland Administration Building (1988-1995) in
Anaheim, California, and the American Center
(1988-1994) in Paris.
Not all clients wanted such exotic facades or clas-
sical re-creations. The Getty Center (1984-1997) in
Los Angeles is elegant and restrained, set on a hill-
top away from the bustling metropolis below. It was
designed by Richard Meier, an architect with a var-
ied career spanning several decades and continents.
In commercial and retail buildings, the modernist
movement had lost popularity to more ornamented
buildings. Postmodernist buildings continued to be
built, but no overarching style characterized the
1990’s. One trend, popularized by the work of I. M.
Pei, was the increased use of glass for the exteriors of
buildings. New technology and processes made glass
extremely durable and easy to work with, and many
architects followed Pei’s lead in exploiting it as a
building material. Exposing the interior and exterior
mechanical workings of the buildings, such as pipes
and ductwork, was a utilitarian but decorative trend.
Other architects reached back into classical prin-
ciples to design traditional structures. A prominent
proponent of this approach was Robert A. M. Stern.
His design for the Spangler Campus Center at the
Harvard Business School looks as though it could
have been built more than a century earlier.Technology and Jobs Computer use in architec-
ture continued to expand. Increasingly sophisti-
cated new software enabled architects to determine
structural integrity, visualize traffic flows, and so on,
while designing developments. Among the most ad-
vanced software was CATIA, a French software pro-
gram originally developed to design fighter jets but
soon adopted by many other industries. This versa-
tile program not only modeled complex forms for
unique designs but also analyzed the structural de-
tails and calculated costs. Perhaps its most dramatic
use in architecture was by Gehry, for modeling his
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the later Walt Dis-
ney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
Not only did new technology advance the prac-
tice of architecture, it also influenced the buildings
designed as well. The predominance of new technol-
ogy in people’s workplaces and homes required ar-The Nineties in America Architecture 49