Word: riche
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Laredo is the hub of the trade. Poor Mexicans make many small purchases, but large amounts of goods are bought by the rich, a number of whom buzz into town in their Lear jets from as far away as Mexico City. Sometimes they are met at the airport by a 1939 Rolls-Royce belonging to Joe Brand, who owns three Laredo clothing stores. Other wealthy Mexicans fill empty suitcases with $195 suede handbags or $105 men's loafers from the Gucci boutique in the Frost Bros. department store. Says Gary Payne, general manager of the Laredo Chamber of Commerce...
...Koolhass has argued in his brilliantly suggestive book, Delirious New York (Oxford, 1978), these were the definitive fantasy-structures of American capital, the cathedrals of a "culture of congestion" that finds its apogee in the 1,244 blocks of Manhattan Island. No glass slab could hope to be as rich in imagery as the work of an architect like Raymond Hood (chief architect of Rockefeller Center, designer of the old McGraw-Hill Building and the Chicago Tribune Tower). This point was not lost on Johnson. Fantasy veiled as history: such is the message of A T & T. In the process...
...first sign of it, not much better than the original malaise, was "historicism,"-the rich, beautiful prose of corporate style, achieved with acres of white marble that somehow always ended up looking like plastic laminate. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art by William Pereira is an early Western example of the genre; its equivalent on the East Coast was Lincoln Center in Manhattan, a large, poor parody of Michelangelo's Campidoglio in Rome, designed by Wallace Harrison, Max Abramovitz and by Philip Johnson, whose building was the New York State Theater. All the historical allusions in this corporate style...
These inflections of form, historical allusion and context work well in small buildings; so far, their main testing ground has been houses for the 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...
...Being rich, he could travel. Johnson scraped through a degree course in philosophy at Harvard-with interruptions because of nervous collapses, it took seven years-and set off to Germany in 1930 to see the new architecture. He met its founding fathers, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, Le Corbusier, and in 1932 he and his friend Henry-Russell Hitchcock published a book that named the new phenomenon: The International Style...