Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...admit symbolism in architecture. As form, the strip is ugly and amorphous. As symbols, it works." In this way, Venturi gave architectural thinking the most angular shove it had received in half a century: away from beautiful, unitary, abstract form, toward linguistic variety and an ironic, mildly dandified awareness of history and how to quote it. The strip was the tool that opened a most curious can of worms...
Moore wants buildings to "freshen one's perception of the familiar," rather than turn Pop into a sequence of quotations à la Venturi. He uses space with originality. It is not the "universal" grid-space, the abstract Raum-with-a-view of Bauhaus thought, but a choppily processional medium, full of ambiguities and kinks, stagy...
...metaphor of clarity, order and singularity set against the enveloping otherness of nature. (If Mies and the grid-internationalists have ceased to be quotable, Le Corbusier has not; and the difference is due to the richness of Corbu's ideas, his use of volume and surface rather 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...
Charles Gwathmey relates the purity of Meier's buildings, and his own, to direct expression rather than a longing for the abstract or Utopian form: "Our work has been called very abstract, but we wanted the exterior and interior of the building to be simultaneous. The form is derived
...dissembling themselves. The trouble with such high colloquial slickness is that since the walls do not even have the visible grid of columns, lintels and glass to lend them scale, they take on an even more remote and intimidating look than those done in the International Style. They are "abstract shimmering things," as one critic, Robert Jensen, wrote, "sealed from all memory...