Contemporary Modern

Contemporary Modern is the general term for buildings since about 1990 that continue modernist forms with newer materials. Typical features are floor-to-ceiling glass, curtain walls (outer walls that hang on the structural frame and carry no load), facades of flat metal, terracotta, fiber cement or wood panels, asymmetrical massing, and cantilevers, sections that project beyond their supports. Several cladding materials are often mixed on one building, along with sunshades, green roofs and other energy-saving features.

Renzo Piano's New York Times Building (2007) in Manhattan has a glass curtain wall screened by rows of horizontal ceramic rods, and his Whitney Museum of American Art (2015), at the south end of New York's High Line, has a cantilevered entrance and steel-panel cladding. His Shard in London (2012) is clad in sloping glass panels. Compared with mid-century modernism, these buildings use more varied materials and less regular window patterns, but they keep rectangular and faceted forms rather than the curved metal shapes of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997).

Contemporary Modern has no single founder. In the 1990s, as postmodernism and its historical ornament lost favor, many architects returned to modernist forms. Computer-aided design allowed precise three-dimensional modeling and fabrication of complex facades and structures, and architects such as Renzo Piano built glass-walled offices, museums and airports around the world.

From the late 1990s, green building standards affected design. The U.S. Green Building Council, founded in 1993, introduced its LEED rating system in 1998, which scores buildings on energy and water use. Since 2000 the style has been built worldwide, with large projects in China, India and the Persian Gulf as well as Europe and North America. It is the usual language for new office towers, condominiums, museums and university buildings, as in the towers of New York's Hudson Yards, which opened in 2019.