Supermodernism

Supermodernism is a term coined by the Dutch architecture critic Hans Ibelings in his book Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization, first published in 1998, to describe a strand of late twentieth and early twenty first century architecture defined less by a fixed visual vocabulary than by a shared attitude toward place and meaning. Ibelings characterized Supermodernist buildings as smooth, often glass clad and deliberately neutral in appearance, avoiding the specific regional or cultural references that earlier architecture had traditionally carried, a condition he linked to the anthropologist Marc Auge's concept of the non place, the placeless, standardized environments produced by globalization such as airports, hotel chains and international corporate offices. This deliberate blankness distinguishes Supermodernism from the architecture of Postmodernism proper, which had instead leaned into historical quotation, ornament and ironic reference; Supermodernist buildings largely abandon such reference altogether rather than commenting on it. Ibelings framed the style as a genuinely global condition rather than one tied to any single country or architect, visible in the broadly similar glass and steel commercial towers, airports and corporate campuses that had begun appearing in strikingly similar form in cities across different continents by the turn of the twenty first century.