Word: bauhaus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Keaton fingers the corners of his mouth into an awful grimace. But this blank visage was a versatile comic instrument. The giant eyes spoke all manner of emotions: ardor, terror, despair, sheer mulishness. The Keaton deadpan is stoic, heroic and as thoroughly modernist as a Beckett play or a Bauhaus facade. Next to him, Chaplin is a Victorian coquette, Lloyd a glad-handing politician...
While HRE is in such a vehement spring-cleaning mode, we at dartboard would like to offer a few more suggestions of the types of items which HRE Ministry of Justice can make "disappear." Start with a ridicules "shops" themselves, and then the gray, pseudo-Bauhaus, bureaucrat-infested, architectural travesty known as "Holyoke Center." Then move across the yard and snatch up cell blocks A-D of the Canaday Penal Colony. Finally, squash Le Corbusier's odious bug of a building, the ineptly named "carpenter center...
...like old skyscrapers. Almost every suburb has a shopping center decorated with phony arches, phony pediments, phony columns. Two decades after Venturi proposed, with the intellectual's standard perverse quasi-affection, that Vegas could be a beacon for the nation's architecture, his manifesto had transformed America. Forget the Bauhaus and your house -- it is the Vegas aesthetic, architecture as grandiose cartoon, that has become the American Establishment style. And so the splendidly pyramidal new Luxor and cubist new MGM Grand (both the work of local architect Veldon Simpson) do not seem so weird, since equally odd buildings now exist...
...urges that we "properly appreciate an enriching body of work that can be called `celebratory modernism,' and that we do so before the works in question have grown even dimmer or have disappeared entirely behind the newest academic fog banks." And his point is well taken. After all, Bauhaus vests trust in our aesthetic judgement and hopes for the future. It is a positive statement of mankind's ability to engineer his environment and there's something to be said for that, even if it is responsible for those monstrosities on Memorial Drive...
There's no guarantee the Kaus' forced Civic Liberalism will be any more successful than the class-blind Pruit-lgoe apartment complex. Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe built this vast concrete block, devoid of the tenements' decaying wood and the bourgeois curves, angles and bay windows. But people resented the ugly, socially-engineered building, and the housing authority that paid for the place ended up dynamiting...