Word: modernistically
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After decades of played-out Modernist formulas and goofy PostModern replies, we have entered a moment of exciting American architecture. Richard Meier has refined the rules of Modernism to high brilliance. Frank Gehry has exploded those same rules to make some of the great buildings of our time. Why should Holl, at 53, be counted the best of them all? Because his buildings epitomize an architecture alert to emotional needs and the spiritual properties of space. Because he conforms his designs so adroitly to their surroundings. Because he knows how to speak through understatement. For all those reasons, his work...
Even people who hate modern architecture--all those featureless skyscrapers bunched along heartless avenues!--can have a soft spot for Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the most steadfast Modernist of them all. In his later years, he proposed variations of the same building for every purpose. For office towers and museums, a black steel-and-glass carton. For symphony halls and convention centers? Ditto. For houses? O.K., for houses, something more domestic--a steel-and-glass carton in white. All the same, the best of what he did is still utterly beautiful. Around the lobby of the Seagram Building...
...Mies is back, in a big retrospective that opens this week at two New York City museums. "Mies in Berlin," at the Museum of Modern Art, covers the years when he and other European Modernist pioneers, especially Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, slashed away at the history of architecture until they arrived at Platonic refinements of geometric form. "Mies in America," at the Whitney Museum of American Art, picks up the story after he fled the Nazis, eventually to settle in Chicago as head of what became the Illinois Institute of Technology. From there, through his teaching and his flourishing...
...charged with hostility to history, to imagination and to What People Really Want. Now it's Postmodernism that's in trouble. For anyone tired of whimsy, streetscapes modeled after the Magic Kingdom and office towers topped by medieval crenellations, the dry pieties of Modernism are looking good again. Classic Modernist furniture, including the perennial Barcelona chair that Mies designed in 1929, is back once more as retro chic. And last month the state of Illinois acknowledged the landmark status of the Farnsworth House by agreeing to buy it for $6.2 million from the British Lord Peter Palumbo...
...style forged in the devastation of Europe after World War I, a place where every kind of authority, including inherited style, was discredited by the disaster of the trenches. The Modernist response was another battle cry: "Back to zero." Style for its own sake was a lie, like the official rationales for the Great War. What the new age demanded was that the appearance of any building conform to the trusty realities that construction might dictate. Those were usually flat roofs, exposed structural elements and sheet glass--a material loved for its associations with transparency and honesty. Mies called ornament...