Word: artfully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first sign of it, not much better than the original malaise, was "historicism,"-the rich, beautiful prose of corporate style, achieved with acres of white marble that somehow always ended up looking like plastic laminate. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art by William Pereira is an early Western example of the genre; its equivalent on the East Coast was Lincoln Center in Manhattan, a large, poor parody of Michelangelo's Campidoglio in Rome, 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...
...dark backside of history? Which do you choose? Now Venturi was arguing for the Either, the Or and the Holy Both, and his text reads rather like the litany that Claes Oldenburg, the most powerful American artist of his generation, had written five years earlier: "I am for art that coils and grunts like a wrestler. I am for art that sheds hair. I am for art you can sit on. I am for art you can pick your nose with or stub your toes...
...celebrated McDonald's Golden Arches, but I'd take bets he's never eaten a Big Mac." He has built no big commissions, so his intentions read best in his houses, most recently in a ski lodge at Aspen, Colo. It is a stew of historical references: "An Art Nouveau grandfather clock with arts-and-crafts overtones," says Venturi, and overlaid with suggestions of tree house, pagoda and the intimate precision of the Finnish master Alvar Aalto. Outside, it is an aggressive little building, with its oversize dormer windows, tight walls and thick compressive hat of a roof. Inside...
...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...
Before he was an architect, Johnson became the director of the architecture department of Manhattan's fledgling Museum of Modern Art. In 1936 he scandalized his colleagues by resigning from his post and, imbued with fervor for Nazi Germany, trying to start a splinter fascist party in America. This failed, and in 1940 Johnson entered architecture school. He had backed into the profession as a critic, but in the process he had helped bring Mies van der Rohe to America and fought bravely to shift avant-garde taste in the direction of the same Utopian machine culture he would...