The conjunction this season of four architecture exhibitions on Midcentury Modernism at its most promising and exuberant seems less a coincidence of timing than proof of a new attitude, telling us much about the present even while illuminating the past. This transcontinental grand slam began in New York in June with Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through September 21); continued in July with Between Heaven and Earth: The Architecture of John Lautner, at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum (through October 12), and Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, at the Museum of Modern

Even when Saarinen’s designs were gratuitously exhibitionistic, they never descended into mere styling, which cannot be said of the work of his year-younger contemporary John Lautner, who outlived him by more than three decades. Lautner has been posited as America’s answer to Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian master whose critical status has had its ups and downs during his hundred-year life span. Both these architects are superficially alike in their flair for creating sculpturally arresting structures that relate to dramatic natural settings without exactly accommodating them. Beyond that, it’s apples and guavas. Photo © Joshua White (top): Courtesy the Estate of

All those bollards and barriers are described as necessary for security. But in fact they’re dealing with only a single threat: car bombs. There are, obviously, other kinds of terrorism: biological; electronic (in which the enemy disables computer systems and records); or even, in the worst case, nuclear. When you lock the door against one kind of terrorism, another one may open. I’m not an expert in security, but I’d guess that the most useful antiterrorist weapons don’t require the defacing of architecture. These are, surely, intelligence, surveillance, and redundancy. Photos © Werner Huthmacher The embassy’s neighbors include Gehry’s DZ

Beyond the ephemeral glitter of a world's fair, the 2008 Zaragoza Expo, which runs through September 14th in the northern Spanish city, is architecturally memorable for only two or three innovative buildings. The compact 60-acre site along the Ebro River is designed to become a future urban district. Pavilions for participating countries (missing are Britain, Canada and the USA) and Spain's regions recede into the background with organic forms discretely designed by the Spanish firm ACXT. A landmark Water Tower structure by Enrique de Teresa, though organized as a double spiral of ramps around its central void, looks like an

“I do like the grandiose.” I had been to China frequently, but somehow, until a few months ago, never to Beijing. Like many cities in China, it’s intimidatingly vast and growing like Topsy. Unlike other cities, though, it is laid out with an orthogonal monumentality, with vast boulevards, widely spaced buildings, and a thick aura of imperium. Photos © Clifford Pearson Walls, courtyards, and lanes of different sizes define both the residential areas of the Forbidden City (top) and the common hutong (above). The prototype for the city as a whole is the famous Forbidden City, described by Marco Polo

The Chinese have a longstanding genius for domestic architecture, and a visit to the hutong of Beijing—the fast-disappearing neighborhoods of courtyard houses, laced with small lanes and commerce, sanctuaries of both intimacy and variety in the midst of a city too rapidly doing away with the best of its public character—affirms the singularity and brilliance of their historic accomplishment. Such places offer an alternative vision to the Modernist constructs that shape the city today and provide an irreplaceable element in the urban repertoire that demands not simply to be conserved but extended. Photo © Clifford Pearson Hutong are places of

The cherry blossoms were at their peak on a Thursday in late March when I went for a stroll in Ueno Park in Tokyo. A nimbus of white glowing pink with dramatic dark branches etched through it floated above the crowds strolling, photographing, and picnicking on blue tarps spread beneath the trees. What could be more Japanese than such civic reverence for this short-lived phenomenon in all its tender aesthetic frailty? Of course, everyone’s behavior was exemplary, not a scrap of litter and no one disrespecting the pedestrian flow. Photo © Christian Richters (top); Jimmy Cohrssen (above) Herzog & de

Checking out the goodies Okay. Enough of this self-righteous rant. What about the architecture? There is some marvelous work. Herzog & de Meuron’s Prada is striking at the scale of the cityscape, jutting appealingly just above its roofline context. The diamond-gridded structural wall, with its mix of bubbled and flush glass panels, is a lovely thing, and the interior is luminous and dramatic. Circulation is suave, carpet is white, clerks are impeccable in gray. At Tod’s down the row, Ito claims inspiration from the angularity of the branches of the trees out front and creates a facade of big, irregular

A few random field notes on Renzo Piano’s new Broad Contemporary Art Museum building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). I assumed RECORD would already have an article on the Broad in the works, but I’m told that no, because Piano is designing so many museums and has also just won the AIA Gold Medal, the magazine is going to hold off for a while. Photo © 2008 Museum Associates/LACMA Renzo Piano’s new Broad building at LACMA features a sawtooth roof of skylights (top) that bounce northern light into the top-floor galleries (above). I suppose the goal