Word: mid-20th
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...brighter brights, whiter whites, and have a nice day, O.K.? No other people in history have placed a greater premium on sheer, sunny perkiness than mid-20th century Americans. In the objects they buy and make, that post-Puritan inclination has been expressed by splurges of color. From the jazz age onward, pop culture has gone polychrome in a big way: color, brilliant and various, has been almost obligatory in all things, from clothing to kitchen appliances to automobiles to furniture. What was not cotton-candy pink was smile-button yellow; if not sunset orange, then avocado green. Black, however...
...backdrop for much of what appears in "Archilab" is the mid-20th century triumph of consumer capitalism and what was then its house style, classic Modernism. By the late 1950s the iconic Modernist building?an unadorned box, made of glass and concrete or steel, typically perched upon an empty plaza?was springing up in every part of the developed world. It was a style that could produce individual works of great beauty, but in the aggregate could transform whole city centers into visual and spiritual dead zones...
...mid-20th century, a slightly more sophisticated approach had come into vogue, whereby critics attempted to locate meaning within the work of art rather than in a set of external conventions. Known as “formalism” because of its emphasis on formal qualities, this approach posited that the more you pay attention to the formal characteristics of a given piece, the harder it becomes for you to simply regard that piece as a transparent vehicle for conventional meaning. The ultimate problem with formalism, however, was that its emphasis on formal qualities did not amount to genuinely granting...
Since the mid-20th century, the South African Nationalist government had implemented an official policy of racial segregation and white supremacy, forcing over a million South Africans to move from urban to designated rural areas...
Let’s be honest: in the mid-20th century New Haven got the stuffing kicked out of it. The factories and the department stores closed. A huge chunk of downtown was gouged out to make room for a freeway connector, but it couldn’t stop the migration to the suburbs. Mayor Richard Lee, a giant of ’60s-style urban liberalism, steered hundreds of millions of federal dollars into town but succeeded only in wiping out entire neighborhoods in the name of “urban renewal.” New Haven sprouted...