Word: functionalists
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...living") tries to be functional, but only succeeds in destroying privacy. "The 'living area' becomes an echoing cavern reverberating with every sound from children's yelling to the vacuum cleaner's whine. The open serving hatch [becomes] a television screen, showing a disheveled would-be functionalist trying to cope with a multiplicity of electric contrivances that report their broccoli and onions way beyond their allotted zone." The dining room "where families and friends got to know each other is now ... a counter behind which parents and soda jerks are indistinguishable...
When the new graduate school housing center is completed in 1950, it will represent a revolution in architectural design, at least as far as conservative Harvard goes. For the dormitories are a product of the seven members of Architects Collaborative, all of whom are disciples of the functionalist school of design...
Between meetings, such world-famed architects as Harvard's functionalist Walter Gropius, Finland's elfin Alvar Aalto, California's machine-minded Richard Neutra, and Brazil's hot-eyed Marcelo Roberto invaded the bar of the mock-colonial Princeton Inn to swap anecdotes about their worst frustrations and snapshots of their favorite jobs. Princeton itself came in for some sly digs. Philadelphia's George Howe, with an eye to the architecturally mixed but mainly neo-Gothic campus, observed that "collegiate Gothic and collegiate Georgian buildings are neither Gothic nor Georgian nor collegiate, but charnel houses...
Since then, bobbing up. for the third time, Frank Lloyd Wright has done per-haps his most amazing work. In 1929 he designed for Manhattan an apartment house of concrete, steel and glass more radical and inventive than any even proposed in functionalist Europe. This and a grander design for a desert resort in Arizona were kept off the ground by Depression. Wright's desert camp of canvas and boxwood, built by his apprentices in 1929, stands as one of his most brilliant pieces of geometrical design. Still ignored by conventional architects, never invited to take part...
That buildings should look like what they are meant to be is an architectural first principle whose modernistic practice is currently labeled "functionalism." The same label can be applied to the literary practice of certain contemporary poets whose poems, like "functionalist" buildings, are constructed with a marked weather eye on the modern living conditions they are meant to reflect or relieve. As distinct from the Symbolist, Surrealist, Imagist or Metaphysical poets, who seem to borrow from Music, Psychology, Painting and Mathematical Physics their respective poetic first principles, these poets seem to borrow theirs from the demotic art of Architecture. Most...