Word: fa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...youth who lived in it, but to architects it was a milestone; it became the model for countless other slabs before and since the U N Building. In all his work, Corbu had lifted his prisms on high to reclaim the land underneath. His columned structures had freed the façade for inventive sculpturing, opened up interiors, surrendered the long dark walls to light. And as a grace note, he had added the roof garden. These devices, which he imperiously declared to be the basis of a "fundamentally new esthetic," seem simple in retrospect-but then, so does...
...Louis Sullivan had long since pioneered the skyscraper, and his famous "Form follows function" was the slogan of a new "democratic architecture" that wanted to do away with classic façades, which had nothing to do with a modern building's purpose. His young associate, Frank Lloyd Wright, was already famous for low-slung geometric prairie houses that were so carefully wedded to the landscape that building and nature seemed one. In Germany, 28-year-old Walter Gropius, freshly graduated from Peter Behrens' studio, had put up his steel-and-glass Fagus factory, which was the most...
...folklore or to the history of art," said Corbu, "can 'be taken into consideration in such an enterprise." The city is universal, ancient, and wholly modern; its major buildings are orchestrations of pillars and brises soleil, of soaring archways and intertwining ramps, of random openings and tense façades that dance like notes on a musical score. They are princely and crude at the same time-both beautiful and brutal...
...classicists, whether he knew or not, was House Speaker Sam Rayburn, who three years ago pushed through the proposal to "correct" the perspective by moving the east front wall 32½ ft. forward. To end the crumbling, he wanted a new façade of longlasting marble, and he rubbed his hands at the thought of additional space for congressional offices, a new restaurant, a tourist-free corridor. Cost for the overhaul: $17 million...
Seeing the new façade, most architects and others who were critical of the change tend to accept it peaceably. The new marble, plus the creamy paint on the dome, undoubtedly are an improvement over the flaked-sandstone look. And the forward shift of the front is so comparatively slight that visitors hardly note a significant change in the relationship of dome and wall...