Neo-Futurism

Neo-Futurist buildings make the structure the main visual element. Common features are white-painted steel or concrete ribs, cantilevered canopies (roofs supported at one end only), thin curved shells of concrete, and large areas of glass. Many examples are transport buildings, museums and concert halls, and some include moving parts such as opening sunscreens.

Eero Saarinen's TWA Flight Center at New York's JFK Airport (1962) has a curved thin-shell concrete roof carried on four Y-shaped piers. Santiago Calatrava's City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain (1998-2009), is a group of white concrete and steel buildings, partly faced with trencadís, a mosaic of broken ceramic tile. His Oculus in New York (2016) is a transit hall of interlocking white steel ribs with a skylight about 100 meters long, and his Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum (2001) has a steel sunscreen that folds open and shut.

The roots of Neo-Futurism are usually traced to the 1950s and 1960s: Saarinen's TWA Flight Center (1962), Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, and the London group Archigram, whose members included Peter Cook and Ron Herron and who drew proposals such as the Walking City and the Plug-In City. Cedric Price's unbuilt Fun Palace (1961), a building that cranes could rearrange, influenced Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano's Centre Pompidou in Paris (1977).

Santiago Calatrava (born 1951), a Spanish architect and engineer with a 1981 doctorate from ETH Zurich, brought the approach into wide use from the 1990s with transport buildings: Stadelhofen station in Zurich (1990), the Lyon-Saint Exupéry TGV station in France (1994) and the Oriente station in Lisbon (1998). The City of Arts and Sciences in his home city of Valencia followed from 1998. Later buildings described as Neo-Futurist include Zaha Hadid's Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku (2012). The TWA Flight Center was designated a New York City landmark in 1994, closed as a terminal in 2001 and reopened as part of the TWA Hotel in 2019.