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New Architectural Trend Rejects Black Boxism |
| Section: THE ARTS / PERSPECTIVES |
| Author: Gregory Speck |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/1986 |
| Size: 2,267 Words, 13,813 Characters |
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Architecture, the most enduring of the art forms humanity has devised in its role as creator, is perhaps also the most eloquent silent witness of the way life is lived in the civilizations we build and destroy.
Towering, sprawling New York City is today far more populous than the great centers of millennia past. It has many more grandiose buildings, and far more complicated activities undertaken in and around them. As an expression of the societal system which it was built to support, this modern metropolis is nevertheless at least as articulate as its vanished antecedents in revealing the values and aspirations of the people who erected the architecture in which to live and work.
The forty years following World War II have been characterized by nondescript but immense towers, most of which are still standing within the heart of America's biggest city. Only recently has the Bauhaus-inspired devotion to the so-called "international style" come under legitimate scrutiny and challenge by independent thinkers who realized that the architecture of alienation served no good purpose.
Just as the dominance of abstract expressionism in postwar painting gradually collapsed under a reexamination of its perverse celebration of nihilism, so now the trend in building is steering away from the hideous forest of minimalist boxes now looming over the aven...
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... Gothic gestation, or a classical conversion, but there is strong evidence that the age of Bauhaus-generated black boxism is at last over. If future generations look back upon the architectural fossils we leave them, as we do the Greeks and Romans, they will surely wonder how so advanced a culture could for so many years have been so content with so little that was so overstated by so many.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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