Word: architecte
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Latest and handsomest building is the just-completed Bijenkorf ("Beehive") department store, designed by Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained Architect Marcel Breuer (TIME, Oct. 22). Last week its artistic companion piece and focal point was set into place: a massive (36 tons, 80 ft. tall), free-standing sculpture, placed on the sidewalk, that reaches up nearly to the top of the five-story department store. It is the most ambitious and successful combination of modern sculpture and architecture yet attempted...
...Beehive's director, Dr. G. Van der Wai, an unabashed enthusiast for things made in the U.S.A., turned naturally to the U.S. for an architect. Breuer responded with a clear, simple idea: "Essentially a department store is a big, empty box built around a central circulation core, with the walls closed to provide ample storage." In a move away from glass, he sheathed the box in travertine, employing hexagonal forms to give the façade the overall pattern of a honeycomb, set in slit windows (Rotterdam shoppers like to check materials in the sunlight). Here and there...
...major problem Architect Breuer had to solve was wished on him by a few fluke misses by the Luftwaffe and the decision of the Rotterdam planning commission to incorporate the beneficiaries of those misses-two surviving buildings-into the pattern of the widened street, making it necessary to bring the building line forward at each street corner. To avoid an L-shaped building, Breuer hit on the idea of letting sculpture take care of the bulge...
Elsewhere in The Netherlands, Architect Breuer was finding tougher going. His design for a modern U.S. embassy on the linden-tree-shaded Lange Voorhout in The Hague had the conservative Hagenaars up in arms. The building's slab fagade, with its overall pattern and trapezoid-shaped windows topped with matching panels of polished grey granite, looked to one of them like "a sponge cake," and, worst of all, had a suspicious resemblance to Rotterdam's new Bijenkorf...
...architect of victory in World War II? Churchill? Roosevelt? General Marshall? Eisenhower? None of those guesses hit the mark, according to British Historian Sir Arthur Bryant. His choice is a stooped, round-shouldered retired British officer who looks not unlike a solemn parrot, is addicted to bird watching, and lives quietly with his wife in the gardener's cottage of his estate in Hampshire. Most U.S. readers would stare blankly if asked to identify Field Marshal Alan Brooke, now Lord Alanbrooke. But Bryant's The Turn of the Tide, based on Alanbrooke's wartime diaries, has already...