Word: bauhausization
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...tremendous enthusiasm that Kahn's teaching-no less than his buildings-evokes in other architects is partly explained by the decay of the socalled International Style. That system of curtain-wall, frame-and-fill architecture came to America from the Bauhaus, and has dominated the nation's cityscapes ever since. But the past decade has not been kind to the International Style. As the last "rational" abstract mode of building, it has been much attacked as unresponsive to human needs. The architect as master planner, exerting in his structures a pressure, both functional and ethical, on the messy...
Marble Foyers. It was not the fault of the Bauhaus that its formal lessons were so quickly vulgarized by American business. Most architecture is parody, and the International Style's problem, paradoxically enough, was not so much that it failed in the U.S. but that it hardly got a break. For every pure and major act of creation, like Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson's Seagram Building (1958), there have been a hundred ripoffs: bland, scaleless crates with their $50 per sq. ft. marble foyers and 100 Sheetrock offices, their eggbox planning, insipid detail and graceless...
From the first, Breuer showed an original spirit; he slept on top of a bathtub in an apartment he shared with two women. He quickly questioned the Bauhaus slogan of "Art and Technology-a new Unity." It implies, he said, that "art is wonderful, technology is wonderful, so the two together must be twice as wonderful. That is not so." As for the famous tag-"form follows function"-Breuer wryly added: "Not always." What he aimed at was "something simpler, more elemental, more generous and more human than a machine...
...second period, a sort of architect's odyssey, began in 1928, when he left the Bauhaus to set up his own practice in Berlin. The school had pioneered in what is now known as the "international style" of building-lean, elegant structures whose interior steel skeletons allowed architects to create airy and light façades of glass. Breuer took this cold idiom and domesticated it in his first building, a house in Wiesbaden. Flat-topped, generously windowed and raised on stilts above the ground, it used contrasted materials to give a feeling of warmth and porches to extend...
...most commercially successful period began in 1953, when he was barely into his 50s. Though he was practicing on his own in New York by that time, his breakthrough came with a major commission in France: the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. With it, he burst out of the Bauhaus box and turned to concrete, becoming more adventurous in its use than any other U.S. architect except perhaps I.M. Pei. He faceted façades with angled, deep-set windows, niches and geometrical shapes-all enlivened by the play of sunlight against shadow. At his IBM research center in La Gaude...