Word: cartesians
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...abstraction was the language of modernity, and the grid was one of its most powerful instruments, a formal system that could confine Expressionist excesses. In the catalog to the MOMA show, which was organized by curators Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, there's a color photograph of Gropius' righteously Cartesian office, with a right-angular chair resting on a grid-patterned carpet and a grid-patterned tapestry hanging on one wall...
...would be hard to imagine two architects more unlike each other than Foster, the meticulous inheritor of the principles of High Modernism, and Koolhaas, who has spent a lifetime sorting through those principles to see which ones had to go. Foster's buildings tend toward the serene and Cartesian. Koolhaas is apt to arrive at the ruptured and irregular. Foster is given to sleek materials and finely honed finishes. Koolhaas isn't above slapping what looks like AstroTurf on an outdoor terrace at the Wyly. Both of them have scored the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honor...
...goes without saying that Gehry's pinwheeling band shell in Millennium Park couldn't be more unlike Piano's firm Cartesian box. Seeing them across from each other makes you think of those neighborhoods in Rome where the Baroque rubs shoulders with the classical, but with the difference that the Gehry and the Piano were built just a few years apart. Now they face each other as signs of the immense range of architectural practice these days - and of the fact that there's more than one road to the peak...
...tried to understand the intellectual challenges of their day. The landscape of Europe—and of the entire globe—has dramatically changed since the correspondence of Leibniz, Arnauld, and Malebranche took place; most ideas that were dangerous for them to disseminate, such as an adherence to Cartesian philosophy, no longer hold the same risks. But in reproducing the debate that was at the center of 17th-century scholasticism, Nadler not only recalls the arguments that the three philosophers made but also recreates the rigor and the intellectual curiosity with which they approached the fundamental questions of their...
...what appears from the outside as a serene Cartesian box gives way inside to something ever more complicated. On either side of the building's interior "piazza" are two giant spheres, both sliced at the bottom. One is an opaque steel ball that encloses the 290-seat planetarium. The other, a glass globe, holds a multistory re-creation of a rain forest. This globe in turn sits against a wide glass wall that looks onto the cultivated woodlands of Golden Gate Park, mingling views of rain forest and parkland until this very rational building seems just about overtaken...