Word: gropius
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...relentlessly curious and something of a loner, but his dissent has firmed. With a growing minority of other highly gifted American architects, Johansen is engaged in what amounts to the first rethinking of the architectural commandments handed down years ago by the late Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. His new approach has crystallized in one challenging building: the Mummers Theater in Oklahoma City...
...only way to order, and that the legacy of the Beaux-Arts tradition, which Johansen scornfully calls "the tasteful arrangement of compositional elements," is dead because it cannot provoke fresh responses. "Most modern building," he adds, "is just an extension of the Beaux-Arts tradition." The idiom of Gropius or I.M. Pei is eloquence; that of corporate architects like Edward Durell Stone is rhetoric; what Johansen now seeks is "a kind of slang ... I want my things to look brash and incisive and immediate. They should respond to what people actually need, the way slang and jargon respond to quick...
...service of technology." Architectural construction, of workers' clubs or radio stations rang with the Constructivist cry, "Art into life!" (Vladimir Tatlin) an antecedent to the Bauhaus declaration, "That design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of life" (Walter Gropius). And growing from these ideas of incorporation of art in life, came "an architecture whose function is clearly recognizable in the relation of its form" (Gropius). Constructivist experiments in typography and layout led to Bauhaus block lettering. Non-objective paintings-Malevitch's Suprematist black squares on white backgrounds, and white on white, or black...
...young architect setting out to imitate Johnson. He is an architect of sensibility, not polemics, and his work has no discernible core of aesthetic theory. It is all taste, exemplary in its detailing and finesse of decision. Though he was trained in the strict, functionalist idiom of Mies and Gropius, Johnson believes such purism "is winding up its days." "Structural honesty," he declared in 1961, "seems to me one of the great bugaboos that we should free ourselves from very quickly...
Eames (along with his wife and 30-member Office) is a contemporary Bauhaus. To the architect, Eames' self-designed Santa Monica home is as important a landmark as any Gropius house. The Eames Lounge Chair holds its position in design as well as Miles van der Rohe's Barcelona Chair. He has integrated the plastic arts with crafts and industry as the Bauhaus did, and what pedestal there was for art to stand on, Eames has replaced with the "everyman's" chair. The Bauhaus was a school; Eames is an educator...