Word: constructivist
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...goes nuts in the tropics, battles with spotted fluorescent snakes but does find El Dorado, opens with a group of eccentrically geometrical wall reliefs done in 1971-73. They were inspired by photos of the wooden architecture of Polish village synagogues obliterated in World War II. They were essentially constructivist, based on the relation of parts rather than (as in his earlier work) the repetition of units. They looked complex, clean and rather dull, and one could not have deduced from them the stylistic convulsion Stella was readying...
...American sculptor who tried to make metaphors of technology, not even Calder, came up with an object as striking as Walter Teague's "Bluebird" radio, 1937-40, whose integration of a spartan constructivist design ethic into an American sense of technology as spectacle -- the big blue glass disk suggesting the ether from which broadcast signals were gathered -- shows how little truth there is in the idea that design is condemned to lag behind "high" art in expressive clarity. We certainly need more shows as thorough and intelligent as this one, to counteract the vulgar mania for "art stars" and remind...
Gehry, 57, has lived in Southern California almost continuously since he was a teenager, and his buildings are Californian -- brash, unpretentious, ad hoc, construction-worker constructivist. For him, imperfect construction details and urban sprawl are now American givens: the challenge is to make buildings that are compelling in spite of off-the-rack materials and confused, banal surroundings...
...From 1950 to 1960, years of heedless American growth, cars multiplied and the great fast-food empires were born: McDonald's, Tastee Freez, Jack-in-the-Box, Burger King, Dunkin' Donuts, Mister Donut, Pizza Hut, Burger Chef. The architecture that resulted was a sort of Sunbelt peasant modernism, simple constructivist cartoons in steel and glass, designed to catch the attention at highway speeds. Usually, as Langdon says, it was a case of "form faking function." Cosmetic A-frames were slapped onto plain boxes; McDonald's golden arches never supported anything. The "modernism" of the fast-food stands was superficial...
...which the scraps of paper and little objects surface and vanish, overlapping like leaves on a forest floor. He called them all "Merz" constructions: the name was a fragment of a printed phrase advertising the Kommerz-und Privat-Bank, but it became generic. In these works, cubist ambiguity, constructivist utopianism and a sweet irreverence that was entirely Schwitters' own are knotted together as a gift to the future. The idea of the urban poet as a scavenger was by no means new. It had been around since Baudelaire's ragpicker in the 1860s; in 1882 Van Gogh praised the city...