Word: constructivist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...National Gallery -the austere and nearly functionless square of glass and black steel that was Mies van der Rohe's chief legacy to Germany. This Prussian pantheon, overlooking the bombed-out paddocks where Hitler's chancellery once stood, is as perfectly suited to a constructivist show as St. Peter's is to Bernini's papal tombs; box and contents are one. The idealism, the formal absolutism and the faith in a new social order, coupled with the abstracted indifference to verifiable human needs that lay at the core of the constructivist enterprise, are all written large...
...constructivist impulse to pure didactic form began before World...
...theme of constructivism: a design like J J Pieter Oud's Cafe Restaurant De Unie, 1925, is not to be imagined with a scintilla of city grime on it. Steel, chrome, tile, gloss paint were the rudiments of utopia, but, above all, glass. Paeans were written to the constructivist cathedral, the transparent tower. "Life is a burden without a glass palace," rhapsodized the poet and designer Paul Scheerbart...
...This Constructivist landmark, in art and architectural development, is well exemplified in a show entitled "Search for Total Construction (U. S. S. R. 1917-1932)," on exhibit until February 14 at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. A rather flat show, consisting mostly of photographic and pictorial representations of architectural structures (which is unfortunate since this group has had such an influence in spatial concepts), but an important record in visual historical thought. Some of the best examples have come out of Harvard's own museums: the basements of the Busch-Reisinger, the Fogg, Carpenter Center, etc. (e.g., Malevitch...
...change from the Constructivist "avant-garde" back to Realism is dynamically shown in photos of the Competition for the Palace of Soviets in 1932. All Constructivist entries were rejected in preference to a "social realist" structure, not unlike a giant birthday cake with the crowning one candle to-grow-on in the shape of Stalin...