Word: gsd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While the GSD remained true to the spirit of reinforced concrete and the right angle during Sert's tenure--as evidenced in Peabody Terrace or Boston City Hall--orthodoxy was being questioned at schools like Pennsylvania (homebase of the influential architect and teacher Louis Kahn) and UCLA (where Charles Moore blended high design with neon glitz...
Even though Dean Hudnut coined the phrase "post-modern" in 1946, the GSD was not associated with any of the movements that sought alternatives to Modernism in the late 1960s and 1970s...
During the 1960s other schools like Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell began to pose a serious threat to the hegemony of Harvard. Newly-founded architecture departments, often staffed by Harvard graduates, rapidly attained parity with the GSD...
This relocation of the academic cutting edge did not seem to impair the education of graduates. According to Alan J. Plattus, a visiting professor of architecture at Yale, the GSD has tried hard to introduce variety into coursework. "Harvard has always been scared...of becoming too monolithic," he says, adding that sometimes the students "are benificiaries of more diversity than they can handle...the variety can dilute the experience...
Dean Gerald M. McCue believes that the GSD has regained its avant-garde position. "We are among the leaders, I think, in schools that are really probing how one blends the best of Modernism and the best of other classical periods at the same time," he says. "We are trying to rediscover the theoretical propositions which created architecturee at various eras," McCue says, "instead of copying the manifestations of that, trying to rethink what was being thought at that time...