An American architectural epoch closes its doors

Ouroussoff writes, "A dynamic moment in American architecture — the explosion of art museums, concert halls and performing arts centers that transformed cities across the country over the last decade — is officially over. The money has dried up, and who knows when there will be a similar boom...

At their most ambitious, they are an effort to rethink the two great urban planning movements that gave shape to the civic and cultural identity of the American city.

The more influential of these was the City Beautiful Movement in the late 19th century. Modeled after the Beaux-Arts grandiosity of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the movement was an expression of a newly confident, ascendant America — a country of national monopolies and sprawling rail networks. The homogeneity of the architecture, with its classical facades typically arranged around formal parks, reflected the desire to create a symbolic language of national unity after the Civil War. Emulated in cities like Washington, Cleveland, Denver and Detroit, the movement gave the country its first uniform vision of city planning.

The urge returned during the cold war in New York’s Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Los Angeles Music Center. These sprawling cultural complexes, cut off from their surrounding neighborhoods, not only reflected tabula rasa planning orthodoxies of their time, but all of them used a mix of modern and imperial styles and themes to portray a progressive vision of America rooted in classical ideals...

Yet this period produced powerful efforts to create a new model for the post-cold-war American city. The most obvious of these is Chicago’s Millennium Park, a somewhat traditional arrangement of cultural buildings and sprawling lawns built on top of a derelict rail yard. Completed in 2004, the park is mobbed with office workers and tourists on an average weekday. It feels as if it has been part of the city’s life for decades.

Its uncommon power, though, stems from the symbiotic relationship between opposing architectural visions: the rambunctious steel forms of Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion and Renzo Piano’s glass-and-steel addition to the Art Institute of Chicago. The two — one a vision of riotous emotions, the other of quiet serenity — square off directly across from each other. And they lock the park into a larger urban composition of mismatched late-19th-century and early-20th-century office buildings and 1980s towers."

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Indian firms shift focus to the poor

"Indian companies, long dependent on hand-me-down technology from developed nations, are becoming cutting-edge innovators as they target one of the world's last untapped markets: the poor."