Word: glassed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cheaper than I did it for you last year, because now I have a religion. We have a flat roof and simple factory-made curtain walls. It was a justification for cheapness that took over our cityscapes, and that is what you see in New 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...
...rich. Can one see a similar shift in corporate buildings? Not yet. The "new" corporate look, however, is strongly mannered. It was developed by Johnson-Burgee in the IDS Center in Minneapolis (1972) and, more successfully, in their Pennzoil Place in Houston (1976). Johnson calls it "shaped modern"-the glass slab with shears and cuts. Sometimes it is combined with mirror glass. This fashion for veiling the mass in shine, or dissolving it in reflections, can be seen in the polished aluminum skin of Hugh Stubbins' Citicorp Building in Manhattan...
These structures retreating behind glitter are like elephants coyly dissembling themselves. The trouble with such high colloquial slickness is that since the walls do not even have the visible grid of columns, lintels and glass to lend them scale, they take on an even more remote and intimidating look than those done in the International Style. They are "abstract shimmering things," as one critic, Robert Jensen, wrote, "sealed from all memory...
...recent memory, because it is so violently at odds with its flat suburban context. Known as the Blue Whale, it is an immense exhibition hall, the Crystal Palace of the West Coast, providing more than 750,000 sq. ft. of space. The surface is not mirror, but semitranslucent blue glass, which glitters and disappears and re-forms against the dusty blue sky. In form, it resembles an extruded architectural molding: one single block. Its scale is its success; a vast illusion built for the luxury interior-decoration industry, plunked firmly down in Dreamsville...
...Rohe to America and fought bravely to shift avant-garde taste in the direction of the same Utopian machine culture he would delight in poking fun at 40 years later. During his long association with the International Style, he built some of its canonical late buildings, notably his own glass house on his estate at New Canaan (1959) and, with Mies, Manhattan's Seagram Building (1958), which survives as the virtual Parthenon of glass-grid architecture. But unlike some other men of his generation, Johnson kept his restless, stylish sense of incongruity and his loathing of repetition...