Originally known as the AT&T Building, this 1984 tower may be the prototypical postmodern skyscraper. Philip Johnson and then-partner John Burgee designed the 37-story tower with two particularly memorable features: a seven-story arched entryway and the “Chippendale” ornamental pediment on the apex, that recalled classic design flourishes. Clad partially in granite, it was a shocking rebuke to the glass-and-steel stereotype that dominated city skylines. Now landmarked, the building is currently the focus of a Snøhetta-led redesign effort that has been criticized for robbing the lobby of its iconic character.

Ringed with red granite and tubular steel, this telescoping 1986 tower, again by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, offers a distinctly playful shade of postmodern style. The unique cylindrical shape and triple-tier form results, in part, from zoning regulations that require setbacks to increase light at street level. Originally designed to be a standout on Third Avenue, it still strikes a unique silhouette.

This Late Modern landmark of Midtown Manhattan, designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates and landscaped by Dan Kiley, created the gold standard for corporate architecture way back in 1967. The Ford Foundation’s home, updated in 2018, beckons visitors with its 160-foot-tall atrium, encased by walls of glass, granite, and Cor-Ten steel.

It may have a monumental base on stilts, an imposing facade, and a signature 45-degree angled top that stands out in one of the world’s busiest skylines. But the 1977 Citicorp Center, a somewhat menacing metallic addition to the canon of Late Modernism, will always be most famous for skirting disaster. As recounted in a famous episode of 99 Percent Invisible, architect Hugh Stubbins and structural engineer William LeMessurier devised a unique support system for this skyscraper in part to work around a church on site that couldn’t be moved or knocked down. However, inaccurate structural calculations used in the design phase—discovered after-the-fact by an undergrad architecture student—had to be fixed after the building was completed.

Architect Robert Venturi designed this home in 1964 for his mother, and it’s filled with contradictions, including a functionless arch. It’s one of the earliest instances of pure PoMo, and one of the rare residential projects to win the 25-Year Award from the American Institute of Architects. Curbed architecture critic Alexandra Lange, who visited the home in 2016 after it had been added to the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places, wrote that it “is itself a gentle manifesto, the gable a blow against the aesthetic tyranny of the modernist flat roof; the square windows a blow against the aesthetic tyranny of transparent walls.” Supposedly, Venturi used to visit the house on a weekly basis, stopping to admire it, then blow it a kiss as he drove away.

Another subtle but significant design by Robert Venturi and his longtime work-life partner Denise Scott Brown. This addition to Independence National Historic Park has become a Philadelphia favorite. Atop the site where Benjamin Franklin once ran his printing shop, Venturi, Brown, and then-colleague John Rauch erected two “ghost houses,” representing the dimensions of the Franklin residence and office. The white tubular-steel outlines, award-winning examples of playful placemaking that allow visitors to reconstruct the buildings in their imaginations, have become icons and object lessons for architecture students.

Postmodernism designs usually draw from the classical era. Not so with this glittering, neo-Gothic corporate office completed in 1981, another Johnson-Burgee collaboration. Clad in nearly one million square feet of glass, this complex also served as an advertisement for the commissioning client, Pittsburgh Plate Glass. The 5.5-acre site offers an objewct lesson in the artistic potential of architectural glass: By focusing on its malleability and the sculptural nature of the material, instead of its translucency, PPG Place is a wholly different beast than traditional glass-and-steel towers.

A true example of Disney “entertainment architecture,” Michael Graves’s design for the 2,265-room resort, crowned with dolphin and swan statues and decorated in coral and aqua swirls, isn’t subtle. Chockablock with fountains and slathered in pastels, the playful building offers resort-goers an over-the-top fantasy. Graves supposedly based the dolphins, in part, on the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, but had to reverse the frowns typically found on the work of the Italian sculptor to fit in with the image and message Disney wanted to portray to its guests.

In addition to pastels and synth jams, this sleek, Arquitectonica’s reflective condo building in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood stands as a potent symbol of the city’s ’80s style—a reputation cemented when the building made an appearance in the opening credits for Miami Vice. The 20-story rectangle features a signature cutout in the center which reveals a 37-foot tall “palm court” that contains a jacuzzi and red spiral staircase. The firm’s approach was once described as “beach-blanket-Bauhaus,” and, true to form, this arresting addition to Miami’s skyline was first sketched on the back of a napkin in a Cuban restaurant.

Disney’s famous experiment in New Urbanism is both a utopian experiment in suburban development and a showcase for a number of postmodern designers. Robert A.M. Stern helped create the master plan for Celebration, a Pleasantville-like city built on Central Florida swampland that opened in 1997 with a focus on Southern character, residential diversity, and tree-lined streets. Two of the buildings stand out: a Michael Graves-designed post office (pictured), and Philip Johnson’s Town Hall, a riff on Classical architecture styles that fits an egregious number of columns on the cluttered porch.

Opened in 1967, the revolutionary Hyatt Regency Atlanta blew apart previous notions of boxy, rectilinear hotel design. The open, 22-story atrium was something very different indeed, and is in fact still attributable to architect John Portman today: a blend of Italian piazza, Neo-Futurist monumentality, and soaring balconies lined with ivy. Guests in the ’60s lined up by the hundreds just to ride the glorious glass elevators—at $35,000 per cab, the custom systems were, at the time, the most expensive in the world.

Named one of the best buildings of the decade by Time magazine, Michael Graves’s 26-story skyscraper was a revelation when it opened in 1985. Filled with contextual references to neighboring buildings, the tower’s most distinct feature may be its materials, a wealth of cut stone and marble that come together to create an energetic exterior from the street level to the building’s crown.

After taking over the office of midcentury great Eero Saarinen following the Finnish-American architect’s untimely death, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo formed their own firm. They continued Saarinen’s legacy of corporate work, perhaps most strikingly with this set of blue-glass pyramids for a midwestern insurance company, completed in 1971. The monumentality of this design has been criticized as an overtly muscular vision of corporate power, but it also showed the duo pushing the possibilities of glass-clad buildings forward, and elevating an abstract language of commercial design.

This Stanley Tigerman-designed parking garage in the business district of Chicago’s Loop has a facade that functions as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it joke. Closer inspection reveals a garage doubling as a Rolls-Royce, from tire treads as entrance awnings and license plate signage all the way to a statue-as-hood ornament at the building’s apex. It’s the absolute opposite of modernism’s self-seriousness, and a building with some of the highest whimsy-per-story in Chicago. Tigerman, known for his sharp zingers and acerbic wit—died this week at age 88.

Chicago’s brawny main library is overrun with exterior symbolism, including a series of corn-stalk pendants, a fitting facade for such a literary location. The team of Hammond, Beeby & Babka designed the stately building with a tripartite structure, topped with a metal-and-glass cornice and statues of owls perched along the roofline. The imposing brick structure, the largest library building in the country when it opened in 1991, arrived with a sense of monumentality and age, managing to meld the stateliness of Beaux-Arts design with the utility of modern materials.

These glass-covered conoidal domes have served as Milwaukee’s own set of retro-futuristic greenhouses for decades, recreating both arid and tropical climes year-round for residents of the lakefront Midwestern city. While these giant bubbles, created by hometown architect Donald Grieb, may seem like they owe a great deal to Buckminster Fuller, they have a number of unique structural characteristics, including a cast-in-place concrete undercarriage. Gelb’s striking concept has become a massive maintenance headache, and was closed in 2016 for repairs. In 2018, it was named a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which should hopefully help secure more resources for repair.

An open, immaculate welcome center designed for the historic utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana, this Richard Meier work reflects both optimistic impulses and Le Corbusier’s influence. Named after the iconic Greek temple dedicated to the goddess of wisdom, the building tells the story of the town, explaining its legacy of historic architecture while showcasing the community’s philosophy through its soaring, open interior.

Considered a seminal example of postmodern landscape design, this joyful, earnest celebration of Italian design was conceived of as a tribute that rises far above Disney-style kitsch. Architect Charles Moore was tasked with creating public space that touted the achievements of the large Italian-American community in New Orleans. The resulting set piece is filled with colonnades, a clock tower, a minimalist Roman temple, and a public fountain in the shape of the Italian peninsula. Conceived of as a redevelopment project for the city’s Warehouse district, the space initially fell into disrepair after it opened to the public in 1978, but has since been preserved, in a recent series of renovations that wrapped last year.

Pei’s inverted pyramid, made with a special concrete mix meant to reflect the colors of the local landscape, slopes at a 34-degree angle, providing additional space for office for public workers on the top floors and a civic porch that offers shelter and shade to visitors during the day. Pei’s design for this civic enter so unnerved then-Mayor Erik Jonsson, who felt the gravity-defying form would cause people to assume it would fall down, that a series of oval columns were added for reassurance (the purely cosmetic additions still don’t bear any of the weight of the upper floors). Pei’s overall site design, which includes a seven-acre plaza with a Henry Moore sculpture and large reflecting pool, conveys strength, serenity, and the pride of the citizens of Dallas, and to some, a bold look at the future (hence its cameo in Robocop).

A series of small, interconnected dwellings built by architect Charles Moore and Arthur Andersson beginning in 1984, this village-like compound in the Texas Hill Country is considered an exemplary postmodern residence. Referencing elements of both Spanish courtyards and backyard shacks, the unique residence was awarded the 25 Year Award from the Texas Society of Architects, a rare honor that awards a projects legacy and longevity. It is still home to the Charles Moore Foundation, which hosts visiting scholars and architects, and houses Moore’s library, part of the architect’s archives now owned by the University of Texas.

A mysterious, Late Modernist fortress, this seven-story addition to the Denver Art Museum is the only building in the United States designed by Italian architect Gio Ponti. Castle-like and clad in glass tiles, the 24-sided slate gray structure is enigmatic, befitting a space of creative expression and contemplation. The architect said of his design, “Art is a treasure, and these thin but jealous walls defend it.” Last January, the museum broke ground on a $150 million renovation of the campus, timed to finish in 2021, the 50th anniversary of Ponti’s design.

Who says scientific buildings just have to be functional? Well, likely those working inside, but that didn’t stop architect I.M. Pei from designing this artful, site-specific masterpiece in Colorado, which opened in 1961. While still meeting budget and layout constraints required for such important research, Pei designed a series of towers inspired by Anasazi cliff dwellings. The maze-like layout and addition of crow’s nests encouraged interaction among staff while also allowing them to step away from the lab and appreciate the magnificent surroundings.

When this John Portman-designed cylindrical hotel opened in LA in 1976, seemingly transported from a city of the future, it was an immediate attention-getter. The Brutalist base, signature Portman elevator-and-atrium combo, and rotating rooftop restaurant made this a visual standout that would soon have a career in film and movies befitting its Tinseltown locale. Like the best of Portman’s work, the bold exterior draws passersby into the hermetically sealed, utopian vision inside, more than 40 years old but still looking like the future.

One of the best-known buildings by Arata Isozaki, this fortress of red sandstone in downtown Los Angeles showcases his elegant take on the forms of postmodernism, and may have helped spark a wave of museums and cultural institutions in this part of Los Angeles. As Curbed’s Alissa Walker explains, since it was built in 1987, MOCA is not included in Survey LA, the citywide initiative to locate and protect historic or significant landmarks built before 1980.

This trio of striking, colorful glass towers, set along Santa Monica Boulevard, had been a dream of the Argentinian-born architect Cesar Pelli, who spent decades pushing to realize his initial vision. The trio of abstract structures, designed to look like oversized fragments fallen to Earth, started to take shape in 1975 with the Blue Whale, a 750,000-square-foot building on the 14-acre site that looks a bit like a piece of extruded metal. The Green Building arrived in 1988, and the Red Building, comprising two curved towers, completed the site in 2013. Part of the reason the Red Building took so long to finish was that glass technology needed to advance and find a safe method of recreating that striking color (previously, a toxic dye would have been required to create such a rich shade of red).

One of the many mall-based masterworks of Southern California architect and designer Jon Jerde, who arguably played a key role in shaping how we shop today, Horton Plaza Mall stands as a key postmodern public space and an anchor that helped reignite San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter. Jerde labeled the project “experience architecture,” and the combination of mismatched levels, bold graphics (via Deborah Sussman and Paul Prejza), and untraditional layout live up to the term. Nearly vacant of any retail tenants in recent years, the mall was just approved for demolition in late May and may be turned into a tech campus. Down the coast, Jerde’s Del Mar Plaza, another postmodern landscape, transposes the visual elements of a Tuscan piazza onto coastal California via stonework, trellised archways, and colorful tiles.

This Venice Beach landmark, originally built for advertising firm Chiat/Day and now home to Google, features a Frank Gehry-designed main structure, highlighted by a twisting web of columns. But the highlight, of course, is the large sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, which frames the entrance to an underground parking structure. The eyepieces on top even contain two small meeting rooms.

Considered the first major work of postmodernism when it was completed in 1982 (not to be confused with earlier, example-setting buildings like the Vanna Venturi house), the Portland Municipal Services Building exemplified the style’s playful re-interpretations of classical design elements. Architect Michael Graves saw the project as a ”symbolic gesture” to reclaim design from Modernism’s staid, boxy, glass-and-steel grip. Wrapped in several colors and featuring bold design flourishes—including keystones, pilasters and belvederes—the 15-story building made a case for creativity in architecture. The debate still rages on: Is such a design choice engaging recontextualization, or whimsy light on symbolism? Currently, the building is in the process of a contentious $195 million “reskinning,” which city officials say will remove, strengthen, and replace the facade; preservationists feel many of the materials used in the replacement will compromise the form and facade of the building.