Word: modern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
Moreover, at MOMA one does not see any work of Mies' legion of followers, the modern architects who have remade and ravaged downtowns from Los Angeles to Riyadh. Mies was personally taciturn, but his vision was evangelical. He claimed that he had the answer, that his modern style was an architectural ultimate. "With Mies," wrote MOMA's Drexler in 1960, "architecture leaves childhood behind." In fact, it seems that Mies' example, brilliant in itself, provoked a prolonged architectural adolescence, a period when a stylistic conformism was enforced. To be modern, a building was obliged to wear what Critic Reyner Banham...
...Gray's Inn Road in London, just north of Fleet Street, the modern office buildings that once housed the Times and the Sunday Times are nearly abandoned, their lobbies dark and locked. One mile away, in a seedy dock area called Wapping, deep in the shadow of the Tower of London, stands the imposing, boxlike building that is the new home of the two papers, as well as of the tabloids the Sun and the News of the World. Ringing the Wapping compound are surveillance cameras, fences 8 ft. high and thick coils of concertina wire studded with razor blades...
...Burmah Endeavour is a modern supertanker that can carry 458,000 tons of crude oil, enough to fuel all of Britain for two days. But for the past three years, the great ship has been out of work. It lies at anchor in the port of Southampton, manned only by two security guards who walk its 5 1/2 acres of decks. Meanwhile, 17 more big tankers stand idle in fjords along the coast of Norway. At the port of Fujairah, near the mouth of the Persian Gulf, Harbor Master Roger Turnbull begins each day in his control tower by counting...
...easier payment terms. The demand for cargo ships has been slackening since the mid-1970s, when oil prices went up and industrial countries began cutting back their imports. At the same time, shippers were taking delivery of huge fleets of carriers they had ordered when times were better. These modern craft, which feature highly automated loading gear, aggravate the surplus because they spend less time in port...