Word: modern
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There are many who see Y6B as a splendid accomplishment, one that reflects progress in the arenas of birth control, medicine, and technology. Thanks to modern healthcare, people have a longer life expectancy than ever before. A drastic reduction in the birth rates of most industrialized nations indicates that population growth is rapidly slowing. Moreover, although scientists long predicted that the earth could never support the numbers of people alive today, the ability of the human race to adapt to their environment seems (so far) to have debunked that theory. From this perspective, it would seem that we have truly...
...wrote Walter Lippmann a few days after Radio City Music Hall opened its doors in 1932, "a pedestal built to sustain a peanut." Describing the entire Rockefeller Center complex in which the Music Hall sat, Lewis Mumford called it "the sorriest failure of imagination and intelligence in modern American architecture." And they were among the kinder critics...
Given that Deskey had first been inflamed by the idea of the modern at the epochal Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs in 1925--whence the term (and style) Art Deco--the clothing he draped over the muscular lines of the Music Hall was surprisingly American. He commissioned paintings from America's leading modernists, designed hundreds of furniture pieces in novel forms and added new materials--tubular steel, Bakelite, aluminum foil--to the design vocabulary. Up to that point, the fashion in theater decoration might have been characterized as Italian Baroque Moorish Greek Renaissance Pagoda. Pick...
Oddly, the two finest works that Deskey commissioned and Hardy has reinstalled haven't been on display for years. Stuart Davis' witty Men Without Women was exiled a few blocks north to the Museum of Modern Art in 1975, when the Music Hall was in such a state of desuetude that at some performances less than 10% of the seats in the immense auditorium were filled. Hardy had a potent ally in his effort to yank the Davis painting back from MOMA. Jerry I. Speyer, the manager and co-owner of Rockefeller Center, is vice chairman of the museum...
Your article seems to make "risk takers" the modern equivalent of Greek heroes [ADVENTURE, Sept. 6]. But such enthusiasm is an assault on the legions of young Americans striving to build a family and career based on something deeper and more enduring than a dopamine surge of pleasure. The risk takers represent a fringe of our society, and while interesting to a point, they are hardly the leaders of a movement. SEAN P. MAZER New York City...