Word: modernists
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Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier may have dreamed up modernist architecture in Europe during the 1920s, but it took architects of the next generation, working in the wide-open, up-and-at-'em Western hemisphere, to make European functionalism a ubiquitous International Style during the 1950s and '60s. Two of the most fluent and influential New World apostles were the U.S.'s Gordon Bunshaft and Brazil's Oscar Niemeyer. This week in Chicago the two unrepentant old modernists will share the tenth annual Pritzker Architecture Prize. The Pritzker is by far the field's most prestigious award...
Both, too, were profoundly out of fashion for most of the 1970s and '80s, during the era of ferocious antimodernist reaction. But now the pendulum is swinging back again, which may account for this week's eleventh-hour attempt to rehabilitate two modernist reputations at once. Neither prizewinner is interested in making a pretense of mellowness. In the acceptance speech he prepared for his daughter to read, Niemeyer disparaged a "minor architecture made with a ruler and square" and, a bit self-servingly, endorsed the "search for the spectacular." The more plainspoken Bunshaft dismisses apostates and revels in his sense...
...point out that, as a Dane, he brings a European view to his work. "To me America is the most eclectic country in the world," he says. He carried his quest for variety into his choice of outside choreographers: two of them -- Paul Taylor and Lar Lubovitch -- are modernists who shun pointe work. Although she has choreographed some ballet, Laura Dean is a modernist -- or post-modernist. Martins' decision is controversial; N.Y.C.B. dancers can dance decently barefoot, but why not display them in what they do best? There are some much noted omissions from the roster, including such innovators...
...tanned, fit, intense) and sometimes sounds like a Jungian therapist ("I get clients to explore their fantasies"). He lives in neither of the two U.S. Architect Belts (Boston-New York- Philadelphia, Los Angeles-San Diego), but in plain, out-of-the-way Albuquerque. His work is not strictly modernist or postmodernist, classical or avant-garde; the pigeonholes do not apply. Predock, a self-described "cosmic modernist" who senses the "emanations" of a particular building site and says only half jokingly that he "would rather talk about UFOs than Palladio," is nevertheless creating a remarkable body of work -- tough and sensual...
...least the buildings planned for the Times Square area are eclectic. Two are glassy towers designed by late-modernist architectural stars -- one a rather awkward quasi-spiral by Kevin Roche, the other a larger, more elegant tower by Charles Gwathmey. Both, although not their architects' best work, look to be at least as good as the run of new commercial buildings in Manhattan...