Word: rohe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Loop and Lake Michigan are already being developed. There, the Illinois Center Corp. is building $1.5 billion worth of offices, apartments and parking garages and hotels. Important as an extension of the business district, the project also upgrades the city with good architecture (buildings by Mies van der Rohe) and good urban design (pedestrian malls, plazas). It uses two levels of underground streets to separate trucks and autos from pedestrians, who will have the normal street level largely for themselves...
...architect as master planner, exerting in his structures a pressure, both functional and ethical, on the messy, changing lives of their inhabitants, now seems to some critics an elitist figure, and obsolete as well. And certainly much of classical modern architecture as descended from Gropius and Mies van der Rohe was conceived in a spirit of lofty indifference to social patterns...
...were so quickly vulgarized by American business. Most architecture is parody, and the International Style's problem, paradoxically enough, was not so much that it failed in the U.S. but that it hardly got a break. For every pure and major act of creation, like Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson's Seagram Building (1958), there have been a hundred ripoffs: bland, scaleless crates with their $50 per sq. ft. marble foyers and 100 Sheetrock offices, their eggbox planning, insipid detail and graceless proportions. The International Style expended itself in these shallows, not in its masterpieces...
...Marcel Lajos Breuer wears 50 years of achievement as easily as one of his old tweed jackets. Indeed, he seems almost cherubic, a stocky, gentle man with a merry twinkle in his blue eyes. The more celebrated Walter Gropius was a teacher; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe built crystalline monuments to a formula of his own devising. Unlike them, Breuer has touched and warmed contemporary American life by following a simple philosophy: "Architecture is a social art. It has an obligation to people...
Dead Space. Kaufman does not hesitate to preach what he practices, irking conventional architects. "Handsome details and elegant proportions are meaningless," he says. "No one notices them; they fade into the canyon walls." He therefore deprecates Manhattan's architectural landmarks-Lud-wig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram building and Eero Saarinen's CBS building, for example-calling them "gigantic sculptures that do nothing for the city. Look at their plazas. Dead spaces!" Their tragic flaw, he insists, is that the architects designed the ground floor to relate to the building rather than to the street, where...