Word: miesians
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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...
...critics fault the building for its failure to blend with its neighbors, especially the colonnaded City/County Building, built in 1911, and the Richard J. Daley Center, a Miesian steel high-rise completed in 1965. They also charge that it is too frivolous for a government office. Although its inverted-bowl silhouette evokes the traditional rotunda, Jahn has transcended the two styles that dress most government structures: neoclassicism, with its air of judicious civic doings, and modernism, with its sober grids that speak of rectitude and rationality...
...simplicity of the overall scheme--in plan, and later in elevation, the houses were based on a nine-square grid--allowed Hejduk to focus on detail. The spirit, and genius, of the study lies in the subtlety of the architect's persistent, Miesian attention to detail. Hejduk never breaks from the basic grid or initial program; he develops his ideas by adjusting column widths and positions, by fluctuating between compartmentalization and unification and by changing the relationship of part to part...