Word: mained
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...peculiar rather than radical. Its main element is a 660-ft. glass slab laced into a Beaux-Arts, Manhattanist corset of pinky-gray granite. This shaft sits on an entrance block that is an enormous pastiche of the courtyard front of Brunelleschi's 15th century Pazzi Chapel in Florence. One cannot guess from drawings or models how well this will work. To take a small, private Renaissance chapel and inflate it to nearly the size of the Baths of Caracalla is the kind of perversity Johnson enjoys but has never been allowed to do on such a scale before...
Most of these architects are under 50, which is young in a profession whose only guarantee of big jobs is the slow growth of practical reputation. Apart from age, the main thing they have in common is a fascination with architecture as language. When tradition (including the Modernist tradition) appears in their work, it is quoted rather than adhered to. There is no common style. Above all, they have no uniting ideology, as the Bauhaus or, on a less exalted level, the corporate American architects of the '50s had. Yet they are regularly grouped under one umbrella phrase: Post-Modernism...
...very phrase recognizes the end of a tradition. Its main definer, if not exactly its inventor (it is one of those phrases that crept out of the woodwork in the art world in the middle '70s and attached itself to buildings), is the English architecture critic Charles Jencks. In his latest book, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), Jencks complains that "any building with funny kinks in it, or sensuous imagery" has come to be labeled Post-Modern, and suggests that the term should be restricted to hybrid, "impure" buildings that are designed around historical memory, local context, metaphor...
...tradition, only irony can control quotation; and irony would become one of the main features of Post-Modernism. When Johnson decreed that "you cannot not know history," orthodox Miesians were scandalized. Johnson had allowed himself private ironies when building for himself; the gazebo on his lake in New Canaan, Conn., is scaled down to the proportions of the famous dwarves' quarters in the Gonzaga Palace in Mantua, a complete antifunctionalist joke. But for a long while Johnson was too embedded in the world of high taste and big money to permit himself large public ironies: that...
These inflections of form, historical allusion and context work well in small buildings; so far, their main testing ground has been houses for the rich. Can one see a similar shift in corporate buildings? Not yet. The "new" corporate look, however, is strongly mannered. It was developed by Johnson-Burgee in the IDS Center in Minneapolis (1972) and, more successfully, in their Pennzoil Place in Houston (1976). Johnson calls it "shaped modern"-the glass slab with shears and cuts. Sometimes it is combined with mirror glass. This fashion for veiling the mass in shine, or dissolving it in reflections...