Word: bunshaft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...1920s, but it took architects of the next generation, working in the wide-open, up-and-at-'em Western hemisphere, to make European functionalism a ubiquitous International Style during the 1950s and '60s. Two of the most fluent and influential New World apostles were the U.S.'s Gordon Bunshaft and Brazil's Oscar Niemeyer. This week in Chicago the two unrepentant old modernists will share the tenth annual Pritzker Architecture Prize. The Pritzker is by far the field's most prestigious award and, with its $100,000 honorarium, the most generous. The tribute, says Bunshaft, "is the nicest thing that...
...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...
...Bunshaft's Lever House consisted of two glass slabs. A one-story horizontal slab, partly on stilts, is laid parallel to Park Avenue. A 24-story vertical slab intersects the horizontal one and faces East 54th Street. The openings under the stilts lead to an interior court. The building occupies only 25% of the permissible space, for dramatic effect and to let light into the offices...
...retrospect, Bunshaft's abstract sculpture reflects the anti-urban bias of the early modern movement. Its vertical slab interrupts the building line along East 54th Street. Such disruption is now considered detrimental to an orderly street pattern. And the court Bunshaft created is uninviting and mostly empty...
...these insights came later. In 1952 Lever House was universally praised. On Park Avenue at present, its quality is surpassed only by Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, one block away. Said Architect Eero Saarinen: "Bunshaft should be covered with laurels. He has created one of the finest buildings of our time...