The Wall in Recent Architectural Form: A Pattern of Evolution Toward Autonomy

Architectural design during the past twenty-five years has exhibited an increasingly pronounced tendency to treat the building wall as an autonomous designed object, independent of the building volume with which it is associated. There is a continuum of approaches, ranging from surface elaboration of the wall through low relief and high relief, to full design autonomy. Architects employ two main strategies toward this end: the expanded frontal wall plane, which exaggerates the building's monumentality, and the concentric shell or colonnade, which tends to the opposite result of an elaborated and more approachable design. In this article, I explore and illustrate these points with the support of an extensive series of specific examples.