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...driveway of the emergency entrance. Stretchers were set up in rows outside, as if at an emergency medical center in a battle zone, while volunteers with megaphones shouted instructions to the drivers. The casualties were a microcosm of the revolutionary movement itself: a fashionably dressed woman in her 20s with knee-high beige plastic boots; a seven-year-old boy dressed inexplicably in a blue track suit; a frail old man with a grizzled beard; countless young men and women in the cotton shirts and faded blue jeans that are the unisex uniform of the city streets...
...certainly a shift from Modernism, but to where? Apparently, to "Manhattanism"-that fantasy-laden, Promethean language of shaped towers that produced the great monuments of the '20s and '30s: Rockefeller Center, Empire State, the Chrysler Building. As the architect Rem Koolhass has argued in his brilliantly suggestive book, Delirious New York (Oxford, 1978), these were the definitive fantasy-structures of American capital, the cathedrals of a "culture of congestion" that finds its apogee in the 1,244 blocks of Manhattan Island. No glass slab could hope to be as rich in imagery as the work of an architect like Raymond...
...masters of the Modern Movement all tended to share this messianic tone. Architecture would produce the millennium: a perfect society, implicitly legislated by architects. In Le Corbusier's view, architecture would transcend even politics. "Architecture or revolution!" he wrote, at the turbulent beginning of the '20s. Consequently men like Mies, Gropius and Le Corbusier were prone to see themselves not only as prophets but as lawgivers, and their tracts were filled with a lofty utopianism. The dream was neatly parodied by John Betjeman...
...than abstract space.) Meier's architecture is highly abstract, but it is not inhospitable. A project like his Bronx Development Center in New York City, with its suavely detailed metal walls, certainly alludes to the Corbusian machine look; but it would not have been built by contractors in the '20s, and its rigorous attention to scale and finish amount to a degree of luxury that has almost vanished from public building since the 19th century...
...assault on Joan, with Anne Bancroft tentatively booked to play Bad Mama. Broadway has not escaped the trend, and there are plans for plays based on the lives of Dorothy Parker, United Mine Workers Czar John L. Lewis, Singer Josephine Baker and Marie Dressier, a star of the '20s...