Word: dream
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...possessed by an impossible dream: to create as quickly as possible a modern industrial nation in the ancient sands of Persia. It was his advantage, but perhaps also his undoing, that he had the petrodollars to pursue that goal. He carried out some land reform, but the big money went to such projects as petrochemical factories and nuclear plants. Hundreds of thousands of peasant farmers moved to the cities to get jobs. Skyscrapers soared, as did inflation-to an estimated 50% last year...
...anyone doubts the potential for export, let him consider the case of China. Not long ago, that market seemed hermetically closed. Now Western businessmen dream of selling just one handkerchief to each of the 1 billion Chinese; that would be enough to keep two or more big textile plants rolling for a year. Lyet got onto that new frontier rather early. He visited the Middle Kingdom more than a year ago, and soon thereafter Peking placed with Sperry one of its first significant orders for Western computers...
...view, architecture would transcend even politics. "Architecture or revolution!" he wrote, at the turbulent beginning of the '20s. Consequently men like Mies, Gropius and Le Corbusier were prone to see themselves not only as prophets but as lawgivers, and their tracts were filled with a lofty utopianism. The dream was neatly parodied by John Betjeman...
Influenced (as it profoundly was) by the chaos of World War I and the Utopian dreams of postwar social reorganization, internationalism and communality, Modernist architecture was obsessed with the blank slate. Le Corbusier was thus able to dream...
...that asceticism may also be quoted. The work of Richard Meier in particular, and to a lesser extent that of Charles Gwathmey and Michael Graves, is permeated by the Corbusian dream of the "white world," the building as a metaphor of clarity, order and singularity set against the enveloping otherness of nature. (If Mies and the grid-internationalists have ceased to be quotable, Le Corbusier has not; and the difference is due to the richness of Corbu's ideas, his use of volume and surface rather than abstract space.) Meier's architecture is highly abstract, but it is not inhospitable...