Peter Blake
It is not too difficult to figure out what has gone wrong: The theorists of modern architecture simply promised too much. They promised that modern buildings would be cheaper to build, solve the problems of war and peace, and put an end to social and economic injustice. Modern architecture promised bliss. But the so-called Modern Movement, the clean-lined, often massive, essentially urban, "skin-and-bones" architecture that developed in Europe and the United States between...
rovements in building materials, such as steel, glass, and concrete, have allowed architects to erect structures never before thought possible. The results have been mixed. Some modem buildings complement their environments while remaining aesthetic treats in themselves. Others seem to have been conceived by architects bent on erasing the distinction be- tween art and parody.
The Wihon QuarterlyIWinter 1979
120
The Swiss urban planner Le Corbusier regarded his own brand of high-rise, mass-produced...
HITECTURE
"Murky chaos" is how Philip Johnson saw the condition of architecture in 1960. But even one of America's most thoughtful architects could hardly have foreseen how much murkier the prospect would become.
Almost half of the qualified architects in the most depressed architectural centers, such as New York and San Francisco, are reckoned to have been unemployed in recent times. The profes- sion has yet to recover fully from the 1975-76 slump, when the value of all new construction...
GROUND BOO
Architects and builders have always had more in mind than mere shelter or work-and-storage space. Old and new buildings celebrate the glory of religions (the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, Chartres Cathedral); of gov- ernments (Britain's Houses of Par- liament, the Kremlin, the U.S. Capitol); of families (the Marl-boroughs' Blenheim Palace, the Rockefellers' Japanese house in Pocantico Hills, N.Y.).
Renowned designers and unknown masons have collaborated o...
public agencies and private institutions
"Winner Take All: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Reform of the Presidential Election Process"
Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 30 Irving Place, New York, N.Y. 10003. 82 pp.
$12.50 (cloth), $5.75 (paper). Author: William R. Keech.
U.S. presidential elections should be fair and democratic and should "max- imize the likelihood" that the candi- date with the most popular votes wins; they should encourage competi- ti...
ing the last decade, art sales have made headlines-the $5.54 million purchase of Velazquez's Juan de Pareja by the Met- ropolitan Museum of Art, for example. In 1970, it was the high- est price ever paid for a painting. Last June's $13.4 million sale of masterpieces from the Robert von Hirsch collection of Gothic, Romanesque, and Renaissance art was described as the largest one-day receipt in the history of art auctions. But in the late 1920s and '30s,a series of art sales of still unequalled magni-...
LECTIONS
Martin Droeshout's engraving of Shakespeare from the title page of the First Folio (1623).At the time, Ben Jonson was satisfied with the picture as a likeness, but some critics have since dubbed it a "pudding-faced effigy," asserting that the playwright appears to have two right eyes.
Shaw despised him, Lamb revered him, Freud didn't think he existed. William Shakespeare himself paid scant heed to pos- terity; he put a greater value on his contemporary status as the hometown...
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20
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conservative Republicans.
"Political Parties and Presidential Ambi- tion" James W. Ceaser, in The Journal of ~olitics (Aug. 1978), University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla. 3261 1.
Political parties, long a central feature of America's form of govern-
ment, are exercising a waning influence over both the selection of Pres-
idents and their behavior once in office, thanks in part to recent party
reforms instituted in the name of "direct democracy" and greater
"fairness"...
Walter Dean Burnham, in Welfare Stale The Washington Ra'iav of Strategic and
International Studies (July 1978), Trans-
action Periodicals Consortium, Rutgers
University, New Brunswick, NJ. 08903.
The specter of "ungovernability" has come to haunt Western politi-
cians and intellectuals in the 1970s.
Today's predicament in the United States, Britain, Italy, and other
Western countries is ultimately the by-product of severe strains in ad-
vanced capitalist societies, says Burnham, an M...