Word: artfully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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America's contribution to the language of modern architecture has been immense. But little sign of that could be seen in its capital, Washington. Where were the modern designs to rival the dominant idioms of 18th century Georgian and 19th century Beaux-Arts by the Potomac? There was not much to see. The preferred manner, in a low-horizon city dominated by L'Enfant's neoclassical plan, was Beaux-Arts thinly covered with a "modernist" veneer: the cake minus the icing. From the postwar office blocks to the alternately coarse and mincing frigidity of the 1971 Kennedy Center...
...forms as carefully made as cabinets, and impregnated with marble dust, it becomes an extraordinarily subtle substance with a pink surface bloom. Though the building looks handmade throughout, it is reticently so. Nothing in its materials or their articulation interferes with the job in hand: to display works of art in tranquillity...
...galleries are flexible enough, with changing dry-wall partitions and even variable-height ceilings, to respond to any size art. For the show of mid-century Americans called "Subjects of the Artist" (one of six exhibitions opening this week), David Smith's Voltri sculptures are displayed in a room that provides witty drama: they are ranked on steps imitative of the Italian amphitheater at Spoleto where they were first shown...
...keynote of the building is a kind of nobility and finesse that, one might have thought, were all but lost to architecture, there is nothing intimidating about the East wing. It is hospitable, welcoming both to art and to its audience, and condescending to no one. Neither snooty nor tackily populist, it is a lesson in civic good manners. "The aim of architecture is to build well. Well-building hath three conditions: commodity, firm ness and delight." Sir Henry Wotton's maxim is as true today as it was 350 years ago, and Pei's building reminds us that...
...week the entrance to that gallery is flanked by two life-size figures of armored jousting knights on horseback. They introduce the huge exhibition titled "The Splendor of Dresden," an assembly of objects borrowed from the East German city, which for centuries has been famed for its collections of art and other treasures. Observed one 19th century writer: "Heaven and earth were moved in order to bring together on the Elbe whatever could still be pried loose...