Word: gropius
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Unlike their counterparts today, the Modernists-Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Wright and Gropius-cared about meeting the real needs of mankind. If they are guilty of utopianism, at least they dreamed of relieving and uplifting the urban masses that lived in congested, unhealthy and degrading conditions. Modernism may have failed to remake the world, but it dared greatly...
...1970s may turn out to be the largest revision of opinion about buildings-what they mean, what they do, how they should look-since the first third of our century, the "heroic years" of Modernist architecture, when its terms were shaped by such men as Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier...
...Modern Movement all tended to share this messianic tone. Architecture would produce the millennium: a perfect society, implicitly legislated by architects. In Le Corbusier's view, architecture would transcend even politics. "Architecture or revolution!" he wrote, at the turbulent beginning of the '20s. Consequently men like Mies, Gropius and Le Corbusier were prone to see themselves not only as prophets but as lawgivers, and their tracts were filled with a lofty utopianism. The dream was neatly parodied by John Betjeman...
Being rich, he could travel. Johnson scraped through a degree course in philosophy at Harvard-with interruptions because of nervous collapses, it took seven years-and set off to Germany in 1930 to see the new architecture. He met its founding fathers, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, Le Corbusier, and in 1932 he and his friend Henry-Russell Hitchcock published a book that named the new phenomenon: The International Style...
Wolfe blamed Gropius for today's "hotel rooms that look like the inside of a Westclox alarm clock box" and homes that resemble "the engine room of the Grand Coulee...