Word: set
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...when Gordon Bunshaft and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the vast concrete drum of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington they had in mind the "ideal," unbuilt funerary monuments to heroes dreamed up by the French Revolutionary Architect Etienne-Louis Boullée. That does not stop the thing looking like a set for The Guns of Navarone, minus the guns: an unwitting parody of museum security...
...sensibility of the architecture school, a trait also found in Robert Stern's work. Stern's remarkable house in Armonk, N.Y., is like an assembly of delicately related fragments. One seems to be looking at a stage set that represents a villa. Instead of coalescing in the strong cubical masses of Italian country architecture, the walls are like screens, separated, undulating, shearing away from one another; the effect resembles painting as much as it does building, in its dematerialization and purity of effect-down to the smallest detail of a skylight...
...school of architecture, and he ran Yale's from 1965 to 1975, giving the students a lively and eclectic program that was oriented more toward the Beaux-Arts inventiveness of the late Louis Kahn than toward the International Style. In his book Body, Memory and Architecture (1977), Moore also set forth his ambition for a more humanistic mode of building, the "dwelling" or "nest" as opposed to Corbusier's "machine...
...inflected by supergraphics as by walls. Moore's latest project, with which he is "thrilled," is really a stage set. The Piazza d'ltalia fountain in New Orleans was commissioned as a celebratory space for the local Italian community. Moore dismissed all thought of "unitary" Tuscan directness and produced a razzmatazz design, a caprice resembling the gaudy, papier-mâché fair sets of Sicilian festa decor: fragments of Roman and Renaissance buildings around an 80-ft.-long stone map of Italy, like the masterpiece of a megalomaniac pastry cook. A fountain spurts out of Moore's Sicily, and its water...
...that asceticism may also be quoted. The work of Richard Meier in particular, and to a lesser extent that of Charles Gwathmey and Michael Graves, is permeated by the Corbusian dream of the "white world," the building as a metaphor of clarity, order and singularity set against the enveloping otherness of nature. (If Mies and the grid-internationalists have ceased to be quotable, Le Corbusier has not; and the difference is due to the richness of Corbu's ideas, his use of volume and surface rather than abstract space.) Meier's architecture is highly abstract, but it is not inhospitable...