Submitted by Ryan Witte, Dec 30, 2007 12:57

You may know this already, but some of Wallace Harrison's earliest drawings for the new Met were very sculptural, not all that different from Sydney's opera house, in fact, or Saarinen's work. But he was commissioned by an extremely old and traditionally-minded institution that little by little, nudge by nudge, got themselves a more traditional building, and a classical forecourt originally meant to mimic the one at the Paris Opera. While you're right, that the ideas were not quite fully developed at the time, I nonetheless consider Lincoln Center to be some of the very first Postmodern Architecture. Standing in the magical courtyard of Lever House, which I did recently, it's not difficult to see why the style felt so stunningly exciting, took over everything, and got so unfortunately bastardized. I'm not all that surprised it lasted a whole generation, and actually, that's the mere blink of an eye in the span of all history.

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