Word: architect
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...designed by Wallace Harrison, Max Abramovitz and by Philip Johnson, whose building was the New York State Theater. All the historical allusions in this corporate style (and there were plenty of them) were seriously trotted forth as an antidote to International Style purity. But they tended to escape the architects' control. Buildings mean things; sometimes they convey meaning in highly complicated ways, but they can also be very blunt, and unconsciously so. The silliness of many of the biggest recent official architectural projects in America flows from this. No doubt when Gordon Bunshaft and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the vast...
...building. It was a book, published in 1966 by an obscure architect and theorist from Philadelphia named Robert Venturi. Its title was Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture...
...believe," Venturi's group announced, "a careful documentation and analysis of the commercial strip is as important to architects and urbanists today as were the studies of medieval Europe and ancient Rome and Greece to earlier generations." Why? Because the strip was there; it was what the dominant American machine, the car, had actually done to cities. The architect's job was not to ignore the strip (it would not go away, whether Modernism liked it or not), but to learn to do the strip well. And this meant tolerating variety: of style, of lingo, of message. "For the artist...
Carried further, mannerism turns into jokes. One exponent of the building as sight gag is Chicago Architect Stanley Tigerman. His best-known visual joke is the Daisy House in Porter Beach, Ind. The house is in the shape of a phallus; a flight of white concrete steps, cascading down to the lake shore, represents the semen. Tigerman can also be serious, as in his award-winning Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped at the University of Illinois' Chicago Circle campus. Since most blind people are at least partly sighted, and can register color, the library is candied with bright...
...most confident example of the manner is by the Argentine-born architect Cesar Pelli, now dean of the college of art and architecture at Yale. His Pacific Design Center of 1976 has been assimilated into the local folklore of Los Angeles quicker than any building in recent memory, because it is so violently at odds with its flat suburban context. Known as the Blue Whale, it is an immense exhibition hall, the Crystal Palace of the West Coast, providing more than 750,000 sq. ft. of space. The surface is not mirror, but semitranslucent blue glass, which glitters and disappears...