Word: gaudy
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DESIGN: Antoni Gaudi meets Frank Lloyd Wright...
...Like his fellow Catalan Joan Miro, Dali was deep-dyed with images of place, among them the contorted rocks and flat beaches of the coast near the town of Figueras, where he grew up, and the flowing, bizarre buildings of Barcelona's master of art nouveau, Antonio Gaudi...
...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...