Word: bunshaft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...prize has never before been shared, but the pairing seems apt. Both Niemeyer, 80, and Bunshaft, 79, are really being honored for their pioneering work of 25 and 35 years ago. Bunshaft is the Miesian. As the chief design partner at New York City's Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, he was the creator in the 1950s and early '60s of humane, impeccable steel-frame-and-glass-skin office towers, among the best built anywhere. Niemeyer is the prolific Corbusian, a quirkier and more perilously romantic builder of singular, often bombastic objects -- most notably the major public buildings of Brasilia, the utopistic...
Both men designed buildings for the 1939 New York World's Fair. Bunshaft conceived his best and best-known work, Manhattan's Lever House, just as the United Nations headquarters, designed in large part by Niemeyer, was going up a few blocks southeast. Both men were the quintessentially Establishment architects of their generation. And, with success, both tended toward mannerism, became immune to tempering influences and got carried away with the thrills of go-go grandiosity...
...reputations at once. Neither prizewinner is interested in making a pretense of mellowness. In the acceptance speech he prepared for his daughter to read, Niemeyer disparaged a "minor architecture made with a ruler and square" and, a bit self-servingly, endorsed the "search for the spectacular." The more plainspoken Bunshaft dismisses apostates and revels in his sense of vindication. "I think the committee is saying that modern architecture is pretty good," he reckons. "Young architects are turning away from postmodernism, and I think they're going to turn toward precision even more than modernism did. It'll make Lever House...
...department we introduced six months ago to provide word portraits of compelling personalities. This week's Profile, written by Washington Correspondent Ted Gup, is about North Carolina's often contentious, always colorful Senator Jesse Helms. Then there is the Design section, which showcases the work of Architects Gordon Bunshaft and Oscar Niemeyer, 1988 co-winners of the prestigious Pritzker Prize. Some stories can be told only in words, but this one must also be seen to be understood. The gallery of color photographs, accompanied by Contributor Kurt Andersen's description, catches the essence of the architects' accomplishments. Then there...
...Pritzker Prize goes to a pair of apostles of the International Style, lately profoundly out of fashion. The U. S.' s Gordon Bunshaft, 79, designed humane, impeccable office towers, notably the Lever House in Manhattan. Brazil' s Oscar Niemeyer, 80, was the singular creator of the major public buildings of Brasilia. Both say they would do it all the same way again...