Word: pedimental
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...have invented (and then chucked away) a virtually full-blown postmodernism a decade before the movement was officially born. An office building for Kay Jewelers (1963) is a handsome pastiche of Japanese forms and concrete columns with capitals of redwood; a Kay shop (1964) makes use of the voided pediment and pitched drywall ceiling that became shopping-mall cliches 20 years later...
Among the 1983 buildings that reconnect functional modern architecture with classic and familiar gestures, the best is Philip Johnson and John Burgee's AT&T building in New York City. Many critics who earlier chattered indignantly about the building's Chippendale pediment now realize that in fact it tops a slender, handsomely articulated granite tower best described as noble. Nor does it just stand there. It rises impressively out of the confusion of Madison Avenue and gives that teeming thoroughfare a much needed lift...
...destroying 14 of its exterior columns, when Turkish gunpowder stored inside it was hit by true-eyed artillery men of the Venetian Republic, firing near by from the Hill of the Muses? Or that in the 19th century, the seventh Earl of Elgin would carry down from the hill pediment statues and one maidenly caryatid, all doomed to sail in ships made of wood to a foreign place not loved by thundering Zeus, the British Museum...
...strategies of Claes Oldenburg. What A T & T will eventually make of this high-camp, post-Pop irony performing as status monumentalism is anyone's guess, but that is what Johnson has produced, and the fact is emphasized by the top of the building-the now famous "grandfather clock" pediment with its round operculum, through which the heating system will issue clouds of steam on cold days. This is yet another historicist joke, alluding to one of Johnson's favorites from the past-Boullée, whose vast panoramas of pyramids, masonry globes and smoking crematoria are among the singular documents...
...from Rome that Palladio got his most typical device: the temple-like portico in front of his buildings supporting a triangular pediment. He had seen it on temples like the Pantheon; in an odd but characteristic misapprehension, Palladio guessed that this stately entrance had come from the lost dwellings of antiquity. "I thought it most convenient," he explained, "to begin with the houses of private persons, as thinking it reasonable to believe that these in time gave rise to public edifices." So if the temple was a magnified house, a house could look like a temple. No solution could have...