Word: rohe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...during the late 1950s or '60s is likely to be an oil-thirsty white elephant, particularly the glass-box skyscrapers that sprouted in New York and other big cities. "Cheap oil made us very lazy," admits the illustrious Philip Johnson, 73, who with the equally illustrious Mies van der Rohe designed Manhattan's Seagram Building. Conceived by their creators as formal abstractions, such austere structures bore out the "less is more" precept in an unintended way: they used far more heating and cooling energy than the buildings they replaced. Now owners are scrambling to make skyscrapers more energy efficient with...
Less is more, said Mies van der Rohe. Oddly, at this concert, more was less. Pieces like Gottschalk's The Siege of Saragossa, a "grand symphony" for ten pi anos, or his arrangement of Rossini's William Tell overture for 20 players at ten pianos may have rung the rafters, but their massive sonorities tended to be mushy. The effect, especially when the scoring ranged into the silvery upper octaves favored by Gottschalk, was like a giant hurdy-gurdy...
Unlike their counterparts today, the Modernists-Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Wright and Gropius-cared about meeting the real needs of mankind. If they are guilty of utopianism, at least they dreamed of relieving and uplifting the urban masses that lived in congested, unhealthy and degrading conditions. Modernism may have failed to remake the world, but it dared greatly...
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...
...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 delight in poking fun at 40 years later. During his long association with the International Style, he built some of its canonical late buildings, notably his own glass house...