Word: purism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That delight in line continued. But after World War II, Aalto abandoned crisp functionalism-"inhuman dandy-purism," he called it. His freestanding works became more complicated and took on steadily more mysterious, evocative forms (TIME, Aug. 25). His grand public structures-most notably Finlandia House, Helsinki's conference and concert center-stir an exhilarating sense of place and occasion. Aalto's town halls, designed for Seinäjoki, Säynätsalo and other small Finnish cities, use light and space to create a kind of civic intimacy. No concept was too large for his attention...
...that certezza that was the goal of high Renaissance planning. When arguing that the ideal church plan should be circular-"the most proper figure to show the unity, infinite essence, uniformity and justice of God"-Palladio echoed a longstanding Renaissance fascination with absolute geometric shapes as metaphor. His purism was extreme. It is strange, for instance, to find an architect in 16th century Venice, a contemporary of Veronese (who frescoed the Barbaro villa), objecting to murals in churches-"Among all colors none is more suitable to temples than white; by reason that the purity of this color. . . is highly grateful...
...geometrical shape--and thus close to the ambiguous line between living and non-living--and are set in regular rows. The light which makes them grow is too diffuse and dull to be sunlight; the forms seem to be machined flat in a manner that is occasionally reminiscent of Purism and its lathed still-lives...
Secondly, Kopkind labels radio rock, record rock and TV rock dehumanizing simply by association when he claims their combination lessens the quality of the art. This is the worst kind of purism. There has never been a time when wide-accessibility imitations of live rock weren't the foundation of the industry. The whole concept of live performances grew out of a popular desire to see what we were listening to Finally, "an upbeat emotional experience" isn't the issue; appreciating the music is. Here Kopkind shows his own ignorance of the industry. Because it is the audience performer music...
...imitate Johnson. He is an architect of sensibility, not polemics, and his work has no discernible core of aesthetic theory. It is all taste, exemplary in its detailing and finesse of decision. Though he was trained in the strict, functionalist idiom of Mies and Gropius, Johnson believes such purism "is winding up its days." "Structural honesty," he declared in 1961, "seems to me one of the great bugaboos that we should free ourselves from very quickly...