New Monumentalism in Contemporary Architecture

Abstract

This essay offers an overview of different conceptions of monumentalism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century architecture. It demonstrates in how much a new radical “Bigness” has become one of the central features of the new globalized architecture over the last two decades. Examining prime examples of contemporary architectural monumentalism, such as Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren’s CCTV-Tower and the Burj Khalifa (former Burj Dubai), as well as exploring examples of the new, worldwide emerging museum architecture, this essay detects a remarkable shift in architectural monumentalism from the paradigm of industrial aesthetics of the first six decades of the twentieth century towards a more liberated, joyful and bizarre architecture that started in the 1970s with postmodern and super-structure conceptions and which reached its climax in the work of Rem Koolhaas after 1990.