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New Architectural Trend Rejects Black Boxism
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10663 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1986 |
2,267 Words |
| Author
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Gregory Speck
Gregory Speck is a freelance arts writer based in New York
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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 avenues of New York City. The commendably bold effort to break free from the influence of Gropius, van der Rohe, Breuer, and their fellow refugees has been called "post-modern;" but that term does little more than tacitly admit that "modern" means only "current," and was coined by people who felt that
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