Word: ronchamp
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...dean of international architects are German-born, Chicago-based Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 73, whose skin-and-bones style (Manhattan's Seagram building) has spread the vogue for glass-curtain walls across the U.S., and France's prickly, Swiss-born Le Corbusier, 72, whose dramatic structures (Ronchamp Chapel) qualify as large-scale sculptures in concrete. Last week "Corbu," who has long been rankled by the fact that U.S. clients have fought shy of his turbulent genius, landed his first U.S. commission-a $1,500,000 Visual Arts Center for Harvard University...
...fascinating to observe how these men, the master "form givers" of our century, have in recent years produced buildings that fulfill the promise of their varied styles perhaps as never before. The only work of Le Corbusier's shown is his Chapel at Ronchamp. The brooding, heaving forms of roof and walls have such complexity that even the many fine photographs by Life photographer Ezra Stoller do not even begin to reveal all their sculptural possibilities...
...surely more significant than those of Wallace K. Harrison, who exhibits buildings for Alcoa that seem to have been designed for the sole purpose of discovering uglier and uglier ways of using aluminum. If Harrison's experiments turned out to be disastrous failures, those brave new forms at Ronchamp and Bear Run resulted in magnificent accomplishments. It is achievements such as these which have given our century the most exciting buildings since the Renaissance...
Pace Setters. With the quickening in the architectural air even the oldtimers, once content merely to refashion their own styles, have turned innovators again. Le Corbusier's small French chapel at Ronchamp shows that the man who first put the box on stilts now leads in the move toward sculptural plasticity. Redoubtable Frank Lloyd Wright, who once made his houses hug the earth, built Manhattan's still unfinished Guggenheim Museum of reinforced concrete in the form of a giant snail shell resting on its smallest point. Even the austere Mies van der Rohe, in his proposal...
Gypsy Blessing. But as dedication day approached, excitement steadily mounted in Ronchamp. A steady stream of famous visitors had replaced the villagers' early doubts with growing pride. Said Dominican Father Regamey, whose order sponsored Matisse's chapel at Vence: "Le Corbusier's modulated chapel in reinforced concrete is hard and soft at the same time, like the Gospels." Swiss Architect Hermann Bauer praised it as "more like sculpture than a work of architecture." A band of gypsies, adept at mind reading, decided they liked the new chapel "because of its pure form and white color." Even...