Word: gaudi
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...building ever -- too big and too expensive, his critics say. Even more disconcerting to many of Tange's peers is the building's design: with its split tower, ersatz campaniles and creme brulee surface of glass-and-granite panels, it would be a postmodern monument -- Notre Dame redesigned by Gaudi and enlarged to monstrous proportions. "Tange's city hall is garish," says Architect Takefumi Aida, "so much so that it would end up looking like a symbol of Japan as a nouveau riche state. I can't stand...
...finish what is, after all, a kind of fairy-tale church. The picturesque asymmetry, however, saves the palace from seeming grave. "Ours was not a modernist solution," said Karl Ermanis, the palace's chief architect, as if there were any doubts. The designers borrowed from King Ludwig II, Piranesi, Gaudi, Maxfield Parrish and Walt Disney. There are some fetching small touches: off to one side is an ersatz ice ruin and a skull-shaped ice cave...
...best-known name in Art Nouveau (Rizzoli; 247 pages; $60). Some 350 illustrations, 125 of them in color, trace its genealogy from the 1870s to the outbreak of World War I, a journey that manages to bridge 19th century formalism and Bauhaus severity. Although Tiffany's lamps and Gaudi's facades are archetypal examples of art nouveau, the author widens artistic horizons, and readers' eyes, by demonstrating that fine artists from Whistler to Picasso were influenced by its rhythmic, serpentine style...
...Yamasaki of the World Trade Center, or spokesmen of cultural grandeur like I.M. Pei. Indeed, given the architecture Americans have had for 40 years, such a description virtually deprives Post-Modernism of living father figures. There are, of course, dead grandfathers, from the Catalan master of Art Nouveau, Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926), to the English imperial architect Sir Edward Lutyens, whose richly coded and sometimes wildly illogical structures were left wherever the British army marched, from the Somme battlefields to New Delhi...
...luck--Antonioni isn't really interested in guns--or anything else for that matter--so Nicholson simply wanders through Europe in an existential search for self-identity and the Meaning of Life, picking up a languid Maria Schneider en route. Only the film's visual beauty--Spanish landscape and Gaudi architecture shot in lush Italian style--in any way redeems this tedious monstrosity...