Word: gridding
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...taste into clichés based on statistical averages of style and theme," turned out to be the official style of the '50s and '60s. When repeated ad nauseam by architects all over the U.S. during the building boom of the 1950s, to the point where the curtain-wall grid had become the "rational," cost-account face of capitalism itself, it was bound to provoke a reaction...
Moore wants buildings to "freshen one's perception of the familiar," rather than turn Pop into a sequence of quotations à la Venturi. He uses space with originality. It is not the "universal" grid-space, the abstract Raum-with-a-view of Bauhaus thought, but a choppily processional medium, full of ambiguities and kinks, stagy...
...work of Richard Meier in particular, and to a lesser extent that of Charles Gwathmey and Michael Graves, is permeated by the Corbusian dream of the "white world," the building as a metaphor of clarity, order and singularity set against the enveloping otherness of nature. (If Mies and the grid-internationalists have ceased to be quotable, Le Corbusier has not; and the difference is due to the richness of Corbu's ideas, his use of volume and surface rather than abstract space.) Meier's architecture is highly abstract, but it is not inhospitable. A project like his Bronx Development Center...
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...
...still the principal carrier of totalitarian disease, and that, as a result of the default of the American liberal elite, it has now gained the upper hand. To Moynihan the challenge is that clear-cut, and all the more so because he imposes upon it an essentially aristocratic grid. The real duel is not people to people or belief-system to belief-system; it is elite to elite, with the masses on both sides serving alternately as spectators and pawns...