Word: bunshaft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...they tended to escape the architects' control. Buildings mean things; sometimes they convey meaning in highly complicated ways, but they can also be very blunt, and unconsciously so. The silliness of many of the biggest recent official architectural projects in America flows from this. No doubt when Gordon Bunshaft and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the vast concrete drum of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington they had in mind the "ideal," unbuilt funerary monuments to heroes dreamed up by the French Revolutionary Architect Etienne-Louis Boullée. That does not stop the thing looking like a set for The Guns...
...bumper year for presidential monuments. One, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, designed by Gordon Bunshaft for the University of Texas campus in Austin, opened last spring. The other, the much-heralded John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, was created for Washington by Edward Durell Stone. It officially opens this week with a Mass by Leonard Bernstein, which he composed at the request of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Together, the two buildings cost some $76 million, and they afford some unique evidence about official architectural taste...
Hubristic Album. Architect Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill produced the requisite design. From the outside, the L.B.J. Library has an undeniable force, rhetorical though it is: massive blind side walls and a lowering, heavily shadowed facade that sucks the tourists through its deep slot of an entrance. It looks both secretive and ostentatious. The absurdities start within, on the thick travertine stairs that rise to the main hall (officially called the Hall of Achievements). At their top is a high black marble monolith, inscribed with four of L.B.J.'s axioms. (Sample: "A President's hardest task...
...architects did even better. They designed two strikingly handsome buildings, and hardly disturbed the rest of the site. One is a lean, elegant little concrete and glass container for top management. The other, says Gordon Bunshaft, S.O.M.'s partner in charge, "has real guts." From the main approach, this building looks quite small-three stories tall and 255 ft. wide. A view of its profile reveals much more. The building stretches 525 ft. from end to end, spanning a deep natural ravine. By filling that ravine, the brawny structure acts as a dam for a two-acre lake...