Word: glassful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...inspired by French Poet Paul Claudel's statement: "A church is God's hangar on earth." But to Belo Horizonte's Roman Catholic archbishop, Niemeyer's hangar looked more like the devil's bomb shelter -a parabolic vault of glass and stucco, with an emaciated Christ glaring from a huge fresco by Painter Candido Portinari. Worse, Architect Niemeyer and Painter Portinari were godless Communists. Despite protests by Belo Horizonte's Mayor Juscelino Kubitschek, Archbishop Dom Antonio dos Santos Cabral called the structure "unfit for religious purposes...
...brave new world than in the 20th century. Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie houses were meant to open on a new democratic vista, where individualism and variety could prevail. In Germany, the Bauhaus scrapped pilaster, pediment and ornaments and created buildings with flat roofs and walls of glass. In France, Le Corbusier prophesied skyscraper cities where man's habitation would be "a machine to live...
...Much Glass. As building after building in the exhibition shows, the major debt of the U.S.'s younger architects is owed to Chicago's German-born Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. His bronze-sheathed Seagram Building, shown glowing against Manhattan's skyline, is a masterful exposition of how the steel cage can, by the very economy of its means and richness of its texture, become a masterpiece. But in the most advanced projects, it is equally clear that few architects now consider themselves blind Mies followers...
...reaction is recent, caused in part by the miles of glass facades that have resulted from Mies's approach in the hands of less talented practitioners. Says Architect Philip Johnson, a onetime Mies collaborator: "Mies is such a genius. But I grow old and bored." Eero Saarinen quietly insists: "There does not have to be as much glass as Mies says." Says Edward D. Stone: "I am beginning to long for a feeling of permanence and monumentality." To all of this, Mies rumbles: "They say they are bored with my objectivity. Well, I am bored with their subjectivity...
Ornament, once equated with tattooing, now reappears in building after building in the form of screens, grilles and even finials. In place of reflected skyline and cloud patterns bouncing back from vast glass slabs, architects are tucking glass back and out of sight, concentrating on giving back to architecture the play of light and shadow. Symbolism and historical evocation are suddenly staging their first comeback in over a quarter of a century...