Word: miesian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...prize has never before been shared, but the pairing seems apt. Both Niemeyer, 80, and Bunshaft, 79, are really being honored for their pioneering work of 25 and 35 years ago. Bunshaft is the Miesian. As the chief design partner at New York City's Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, he was the creator in the 1950s and early '60s of humane, impeccable steel-frame-and-glass-skin office towers, among the best built anywhere. Niemeyer is the prolific Corbusian, a quirkier and more perilously romantic builder of singular, often bombastic objects -- most notably the major public buildings of Brasilia, the utopistic...
...Clark, 44, came of age professionally during the decline of blank-box modernism. It is a nice irony that the small hotel he and his partner, Charles Menefee, 32, designed for a river-bluff site outside Charleston, S.C., is such an unapologetically modernist work. The Middleton Inn, elegant and Miesian in the best senses, is complicated but not overwrought, decorous but not formulaic...
Even his passing, in 1969, came in the nick of time. The American architect Robert Venturi had just published his influential rejection of less-is-more Miesian modernism ("Less is a bore," Venturi punned), and younger colleagues were starting to grumble that the inspirational rigor of the International Style had turned to rigor mortis. Death spared Mies both from seeing any of the lush species of postmodernism and from the ignominy of a public rejection in 1985, when British authorities denied a die-hard Miesian builder permission to put up a high-rise that Mies had designed for the City...
...utopian, Mies pursued rather luxurious ideas about appropriate modern style. It was his insistence on exquisite materials and craft that made his best work sublime rather than plain or mean. The pavilion in Barcelona was the apotheosis of posh Miesian austerity: slender chrome-plated columns, travertine floors, slabs of Algerian onyx (which alone accounted for 20% of the construction cost), green Tinian marble, etched glass, a grand red curtain. The big leather-and-steel Barcelona chair remains a popular modern icon. The pavilion was small and stood for only eight months, which makes its feat--converting the world...
...planar H-beam box floating over a floodplain outside Chicago, was Mies' last modest building, and the most affectingly American one. (Alas, his project for an Indiana fast-food stand never got built.) Farnsworth looks like a house, just barely. After it came almost nothing but true Miesian "universal space": high-rises, modeled on his twin apartment slabs (1951) on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive, that were supposed to serve any purpose--living, working, learning--in any region of the world...