Word: modernize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...RECENT, highly publicized show of American photography at the New York Museum of Modern Art called "Mirrors and Windows," an attempt was made to distinguish two ideas of what a photograph is: either "a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it...or a window, through which one might better know the world." (This from the show's catalogue essay, written by the museum's director of photography, John Szarkowski). In reviewing "Mirrors and Windows" for The New Republic, John Canaday wrote a reactionary two-part article entitled "Polluted Birthright." "The pollutant I am referring to," Canaday explained...
...John Wayne Gacy. Newspapers thrive on images--especially the sensationalistic kind that can dislocate even a City of the Big Shoulders like Chicago. So when Gacy catapulted past Elmer Wayne Henley, Dean Corll and Juan Corona last month to become the most prolific accused mass murderer in modern history, the story was a big one for Chicago, the biggest since Mayor Daley died two Christmases...
...rich. Can one see a similar shift in corporate buildings? Not yet. The "new" corporate look, however, is strongly mannered. It was developed by Johnson-Burgee in the IDS Center in Minneapolis (1972) and, more successfully, in their Pennzoil Place in Houston (1976). Johnson calls it "shaped modern"-the glass slab with shears and cuts. Sometimes it is combined with mirror glass. This fashion for veiling the mass in shine, or dissolving it in reflections, can be seen in the polished aluminum skin of Hugh Stubbins' Citicorp Building in Manhattan...
Before he was an architect, Johnson became the director of the architecture department of Manhattan's fledgling Museum of Modern Art. In 1936 he scandalized his colleagues by resigning from his post and, imbued with fervor for Nazi Germany, trying to start a splinter fascist party in America. This failed, and in 1940 Johnson entered architecture school. He had backed into the profession as a critic, but in the process he had helped bring Mies van der Rohe to America and fought bravely to shift avant-garde taste in the direction of the same Utopian machine culture he would...
...break the existing pattern of dependence and put an end to the erosion of competence, citizens will have to take the solution of their problems into their own hands. They will have to create their own 'communities of competence.' Only then will the productive capacities of modern capitalism, together with the scientific knowledge that now serves it, come to serve the interests of humanity instead. In a dying culture, narcissism appears to embody-in the guise of personal 'growth' and 'awareness'-the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment. The custodians of culture hope, at bottom...