At the End of the Century: 100 Years of Architecture

About the Exhibition

At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture offers a global panorama of the century's visions and achievements in architecture and urban design. Organized in twenty-one sections, the exhibition presents a dynamic sequence of episodes, movements, and thematic developments, such as the defining role of tradition and innovation in the century's architecture; the crucial significance of technology in the making of buildings; and the contrast between the large-scale urban vision and the intimate environment of the domestic sphere.

In documenting larger tendencies, movements, and directions, the exhibition includes well-known landmarks, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp, and the Sears Tower, alongside less famous yet equally compelling works. It places such works within related developments, from the worldwide proliferation of skyscrapers to the fantastic themed environments of Las Vegas and Disneyland, and considers the historical context within which such works were conceived.

The exhibition’s twenty-one thematic sections range from Grand Plans at the Turn of the Century: Mapping a World Order and Colonialism in the Early Twentieth Century to Modern Learning and Living at the Bauhaus and Politics and Monumentality in 1930s Architecture to The Edge of Utopia: Megastructures and Infrastructures, The Rise of Theory in the 1960s and 1970s, The Architecture of Ecology, The House as an Aesthetic Laboratory, and Structural Expressionism. The final section of the exhibition, The Skyscraper: A Twentieth-Century Building Type, features nearly sixty examples of these urban monuments, including several of Chicago’s most noteworthy skyscrapers. Works by architects and planners identified with Chicago including Daniel Burnham, Holabird & Roche, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marion Mahony Griffin, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Bertram Goldberg, Harry Weese, Stanley Tigerman, Helmut Jahn, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill are integrated throughout the exhibition, as are examples of additional buildings situated in Chicago ranging from Raymond Hood’s Chicago Tribune Tower to Rem Koolhaas’s design for the as-yet unbuilt McCormick Tribune Campus Center at IIT.

At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture began its international tour at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Japan, in Summer 1998. It also traveled to the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City and the Ludwig Museum/Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, Cologne, before making its first United States appearance at the MCA. The exhibition ends its tour at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in summer 2000.

The exhibition was conceived at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, by its former director Richard Koshalek and co-curated with Elizabeth Smith, prior to her appointment to the position of James W.Alsdorf Chief Curator at the MCA. It was developed in close collaboration with an international advisory team of architecture scholars, six of whom contributed to the exhibition’s accompanying book. Elements of the exhibition’s presentation were designed by Los Angeles architect Frank O. Gehry, while Chicago architect John Vinci designed the presentation at MCA.

At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture is organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA).