Word: modernists
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...belief that art could assist social change was a central idea of the Modernist enterprise. It pervaded the revolutionary idealism of the Russian constructivists, the Bauhaus designers, the Dadaists and Surrealists, even the Abstract Expressionists. It has now ended, and instead of the old faith in a heroic future, we have an institution: the Mausoleum of the Briefly...
...mean more. When they occur, clearly something is up. What happened to architecture in the 1970s may turn out to be the largest revision of opinion about buildings-what they mean, what they do, how they should look-since the first third of our century, the "heroic years" of Modernist architecture, when its terms were shaped by such men as Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier...
...among the architects themselves there is an undeniable ferment, unlike anything in "classical" Modernist architecture. The receding tide of orthodoxy has left all manner of different organisms exposed on the reef. At one taxonomic extreme is California's Frank Gehry, 49. Gehry prefers materials-corrugated iron, chain-link fence, asbestos shingles, raw plywood-that allude to the commonplace substance of 1960s sculpture, and his formal interests frankly lie with what he calls "a fascination with incoherent and illogical systems, a questioning of orderliness and functionality." At the other
...smoking crematoria are among the singular documents of the early Industrial Revolution. That a building should have a top was, of course, anathema to Johnson's mentor, Mies van der Rohe; the glass prism required a flat roof, finished in one clean cut. But since all the great pre-Modernist Manhattan buildings have tops-finials, breadbaskets, cornices, towers-the first big Post-Modernist one must have...
Then, around 1922, he made a complete volte-face. He was only 34 then, and the desire to be an old master seized him; the modernist experiment was too uncertain, and history, he thought, would condemn it. "I have seen," he wrote to André Breton in 1922, "yes, I have finally seen, that terrible things are happening today in painting." Amid hoots of derision from his former surrealist admirers, he marched firmly to the rear guard and took up an irritably defensive stance, maintaining it for the next half-century...