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What has happened? The fact is that the world of the cube, the cage and the austere glass façade has begun to look pretty stark to the men who have been perpetuating it. The trouble is lack of richness, variety and delight, and the result is monotony. Architects and designers who recognize the problem are checking on themselves, re-examining the very style against which they once rebelled. They are searching for clues to the missing elements in much of mid-20th century architecture and design...
Even in his native Catalonia, Antoni Gaudi, who died at 73 in 1926, was considered unique and eccentric. His weird and wonderful gatehouses, animal or vegetable apartment-house façades and phantasmal parks that out-Disney Disneyland delighted Barcelonians, even when they were surfaced for economy's sake in broken tiles, old pots and broken glass. Gaudi's greatest problem was that his designs demanded a craftsman's skill to execute and his on-the-spot presence to construct...
...restatement of Gaudi, but by restatement of his method of approach. He has brought home the value of architecture as sculpture." Critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who with Architect Philip Johnson kicked off in 1932 the boom for the International Style of wrap-around ribbon windows, flat roofs and stripped façades, came close to disowning his own offspring: "Not the least value of studying Gaudi's work is the exhilaration that comes from realizing how vast, how unplumbed, are the possibilities of architecture in our time. The dead hand of academicism in the 1950s seems to be closing...
...Family Façades. Predictably, most of the girls had miserable childhoods; three-fourths came from homes broken by separation or divorce. The rest had viewed their homes as façades, papier-maché creations erected to cover a desiccated relationship, devoid of love between father and mother. Since most had seen their fathers leave home, their mothers had never made them feel welcome but had always emphasized the burden of parenthood. In rage and desperation, some girls turned hopefully to their fathers-not in an Oedipal attachment, but in hopes of nurture which, again, was denied them...
...damned near knocked off three cars looking the other way." Now it was opening day. With Architect Stone, Owner Hanisch rode up to his brand-new, three-acre, $3,000,000 combined office and plant in Pasadena. He saw a dazzling, 400-ft.-long, low, white-and-gold façade, faced with an airy grille of masonry, half given over to a carport spaced by hanging saucer-gardens. Black-bottomed reflecting pools reached under the cantilevered grille-wall to give the building a hovering effect. Five evenly spaced jet fountains splashed aerated water in the sun. The whole structure...