Word: utilitarianism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Disney's patronage of famous architects has produced many entertaining buildings. Now it has produced a great one. Arata Isozaki's office block at Walt Disney World manages to be both utilitarian and whimsical, to convey a sense of gravitas and architectural boogie-woogie. For a company that prides , itself on extreme frugality and makes a virtue of simplemindedness, Isozaki's building is happily improbable. After entering via a large red granite cube punched with dozens of not exactly functional windows, the army of bean counters who work there pass through a 120-ft.-tall, open-to-the-sky cylinder...
Disney's patronage of famous architects has produced many entertaining buildings. Now it has produced a great one. Arata Isozaki's office block at Walt Disney World manages to be both utilitarian and whimsical, to convey a sense of gravitas and architectural boogie-woogie. For a company that prides itself on extreme frugality and makes a virtue of simplemindedness, Isozaki's building is happily improbable. After entering via a large red granite cube punched with dozens of not exactly functional windows, the army of bean counters who work there pass through a 120-ft.-tall, open-to-the-sky cylinder...
...members. To dramatize the break from the communist -- and before that, Russian imperial -- past, the Presidents decided that the commonwealth's coordinating bodies, yet to be formed, would be based not in Moscow, the Soviet capital, nor in the czarist capital of St. Petersburg, but in the plain-Jane, utilitarian Belorussian city of Minsk...
Consider the screwdriver. Simple. Utilitarian. And hopelessly out of date. Few people who have put together a cabinet with a cordless screw turner will ever happily go back to driving Phillips-heads by hand. The most advanced power screwdrivers even come with built-in computer systems that sense when a screw is running into resistance and turn up the torque accordingly...
Establishing a post-Soviet monarchy in such a utilitarian spirit may seem to undermine the emotional aura that would be the new czar's chief benefit. But that aura can coexist with practical considerations. Shakespeare's tragedy of kingship, Richard II, contrasts Richard, an immoral and incapable king, yet one who believes he was divinely appointed, with his deposer and successor, Henry Bolingbroke, who, for all his cunning and competence, is haunted by the knowledge that he is a usurper. Shakespeare presents the shift from Richard to Henry as a changing of the guard, a clean break from one style...