Word: aspenization
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...sure isn't. While abstraction still survives in art, the vision of the city as an abstract work of art and of houses as "machines to live in" is widely ridiculed and rejected today. Shivers went through Aspen's packed music tent last week (and not only because of the 30° F weather) when Peter Blake, chairman of the department of architecture and planning at Catholic University of America, showed slides of the future as envisioned in the past. The "ideal cities" of Leonardo da Vinci or Etienne-Louis Boullée, although devoid of people, were...
Some of the 1,200 architects, film makers and graphic and industrial designers who assembled at Aspen are leaders in an emerging, spontaneous coalition of preservationists, ecologists and artisans who are making our cities more livable and human. Peter Blake, for example, wrote a much noted polemic against the modernist vision. Benjamin Thompson is the architect of Faneuil Hall and other festival markets. Israeli-born Canadian Architect Moshe Safdie is a pioneer in the search for a new architecture of humanism. "Out here in this wonderful countryside," Safdie said last week, "I don't feel that I want...
...Aspen conference would seem to be an ideal place to focus this notion into a vision. It was started by Walter Paepcke, chairman of the Container Corp. of America, as part of an effort to turn the half-forgotten Rocky Mountain mining town into a chic culture and vacation resort. Paepcke was one of the few U.S. industrialists who believed in design excellence in architecture, industrial products and graphics. With Herbert Bayer, the Bauhaus designer, he created the corporate image of his company and set the tone for the Aspen conference. Imperceptibly, the conference, in turn, set the tone...
...this year perhaps it was Aspen that was not what it used to be. Rather than dealing with our loss of an imaginable future-or, rather, our yielding it to the futurologists with their projections, megatrends and future shocks-the conference evaded the issue it raised. Two programs offered escapes into bittersweet nostalgia. One was an enchanting evocation with slides, film clips and live theater of "Vienna: A Moment of Greatness." Another was a seminar on "Designing the Corporation's Future," which returned to the prescription of the first Aspen conference and of every one since: that a designer...
...Writer Ralph Caplan put it, "Designers today are caught between market research and their creative instincts. The trouble is, we don't have a choice. Non-design is also a form of design." If the future is not what it used to be, perhaps next year's Aspen conference should consider what it ought...