Word: forme
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...essence of the International Style, or the Modern Movement (the two phrases are almost synonymous by now), was its dogmatism. The years 1900 to 1930 bristle with formulas and coercive epigrams: "Form follows function," "The house is a machine for living in," and so forth. Mies van der Rohe's "Less is more" was prefigured by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos' belief, published in Vienna in 1908, that ornament was crime: "We have outgrown ornament!" Loos exclaimed. "See, the time is nigh, freedom awaits us. Soon the streets of the City will glisten like white walls, like Zion, the holy...
...York today." The universal glass box, cut-rate Mies (for real Mies was real architecture, and too expensively finished for most developers to tolerate), would cover any function: airport, bank, office block, church, club. It tended to be what the Germans labeled Stempelarchitektur, rubber-stamp building. Thus a debased form of Modernist dogmatism, what Charles Jencks called "the rationalization of taste into clichés based on statistical averages of style and theme," turned out to be the official style of the '50s and '60s. When repeated ad nauseam by architects all over the U.S. during the building boom...
...admit symbolism in architecture. As form, the strip is ugly and amorphous. As symbols, it works." In this way, Venturi gave architectural thinking the most angular shove it had received in half a century: away from beautiful, unitary, abstract form, toward linguistic variety and an ironic, mildly dandified awareness of history and how to quote it. The strip was the tool that opened a most curious can of worms...
...suggestions of tree house, pagoda and the intimate precision of the Finnish master Alvar Aalto. Outside, it is an aggressive little building, with its oversize dormer windows, tight walls and thick compressive hat of a roof. Inside, the Mission style takes over, providing an enveloping timber womb in the form of a vaulted sitting room on the top floor-one of the most romantic and picturesque spaces, like an old Polish synagogue, that recent architecture has to offer. Nothing in this building could be called revivalist;, everything is quotation and proposition, exaggerated detail held in parentheses. Venturi seems...
Charles Gwathmey relates the purity of Meier's buildings, and his own, to direct expression rather than a longing for the abstract or Utopian form: "Our work has been called very abstract, but we wanted the exterior and interior of the building to be simultaneous. The form is derived