Word: derfully
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Unlike their counterparts today, the Modernists-Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Wright and Gropius-cared about meeting the real needs of mankind. If they are guilty of utopianism, at least they dreamed of relieving and uplifting the urban masses that lived in congested, unhealthy and degrading conditions. Modernism may have failed to remake the world, but it dared greatly...
People have read everything from Marxist philosophy to Jungian depth psychology into Richard Wagner's operatic cycle Der Ring Des Nibelungen. Not least among the difficulties of untangling its 16 hours of music and text are the contradictions which Wagner, bursting with knowledge in many fields and expert in none, wrote into his own libretto. Yet Wagner always insisted that his "poetry" was the important thing and that his music existed only to serve...
...might say that the essential subject matter of the International Style was the end of history. Its "functionalism," which correctly saw that mass production was destroying handcraft and, with it, ornament, was always colored by this millenarian fantasy. Johnson, whose relationship to Mies van der Rohe is complicated and Oedipal, argues that "Mies believed in the ultimate truth of architecture, especially of his architecture: that it was closer to the truth than anyone else's because it was simpler and could be learned. He felt it could be adapted on and on into the centuries, until architecture bloomed into...
Being rich, he could travel. Johnson scraped through a degree course in philosophy at Harvard-with interruptions because of nervous collapses, it took seven years-and set off to Germany in 1930 to see the new architecture. He met its founding fathers, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, Le Corbusier, and in 1932 he and his friend Henry-Russell Hitchcock published a book that named the new phenomenon: The International Style...
...resigning from his post and, imbued with fervor for Nazi Germany, trying to start a splinter fascist party in America. This failed, and in 1940 Johnson entered architecture school. He had backed into the profession as a critic, but in the process he had helped bring Mies van der Rohe to America and fought bravely to shift avant-garde taste in the direction of the same Utopian machine culture he would delight in poking fun at 40 years later. During his long association with the International Style, he built some of its canonical late buildings, notably his own glass house...