Word: whose
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Most of these architects are under 50, which is young in a profession whose only guarantee of big jobs is the slow growth of practical reputation. Apart from age, the main thing they have in common is a fascination with architecture as language. When tradition (including the Modernist tradition) appears in their work, it is quoted rather than adhered to. There is no common style. Above all, they have no uniting ideology, as the Bauhaus or, on a less exalted level, the corporate American architects of the '50s had. Yet they are regularly grouped under one umbrella phrase: Post-Modernism...
...like I.M. Pei. Indeed, given the architecture Americans have had for 40 years, such a description virtually deprives Post-Modernism of living father figures. There are, of course, dead grandfathers, from the Catalan master of Art Nouveau, Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926), to the English imperial architect Sir Edward Lutyens, whose richly coded and sometimes wildly illogical structures were left wherever the British army marched, from the Somme battlefields to New Delhi...
...with luxury. Johnson's critics see him as a brilliant opportunist capable of adapting to any regime of taste: in effect, the Anastas Mikoyan of architectural ideology. Certainly Johnson has, with dazzling skill, traversed the whole range of 20th century manners: from the idealistic severities of the International Style (whose name, as an architecture critic in tandem with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, he coined in 1932), through various essays in neo-historicism, to Post-Modernism...
...might say that the essential subject matter of the International Style was the end of history. Its "functionalism," which correctly saw that mass production was destroying handcraft and, with it, ornament, was always colored by this millenarian fantasy. Johnson, whose relationship to Mies van der Rohe is complicated and Oedipal, argues that "Mies believed in the ultimate truth of architecture, especially of his architecture: that it was closer to the truth than anyone else's because it was simpler and could be learned. He felt it could be adapted on and on into the centuries, until architecture bloomed into...
...Angeles County Museum of Art by William Pereira is an early Western example of the genre; its equivalent on the East Coast was Lincoln Center in Manhattan, a large, poor parody of Michelangelo's Campidoglio in Rome, designed by Wallace Harrison, Max Abramovitz and by Philip Johnson, whose building was the New York State Theater. All the historical allusions in this corporate style (and there were plenty of them) were seriously trotted forth as an antidote to International Style purity. But they tended to escape the architects' control. Buildings mean things; sometimes they convey meaning in highly complicated ways...