Word: architect
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...seriously committed to Communism. To most Vietnamese intellectuals, Communism was mostly the means of creating a revolutionary political force against French colonialism. Those few who were attracted are out in the jungle now: among them are Lawyer Nguyen Huu Tho, president of the National Liberation Front, and Architect Huynh Tan Phat, president of the Communists' recently proclaimed provisional revolutionary government...
...surgery. There was no funeral in the usual sense. "Wear no signs of mourning," he had instructed. "It would be beautiful if my friends would get together drinking, laughing, loving-all more fruitful than graveyard oratory." And so, 70 friends gathered last week to feast and recall the great architect...
...Make a Baby. Gropius always resisted being credited with any style. Architecture, he believed, had to be a collaborative process, with the architect as natural leader of a team including manufacturers of building materials, artists, scientists and sociologists. This was of course contrary to the old idea of the architect as solitary creator and was hard to accept. Frank Lloyd Wright, a noted individualist, once snapped: "Gropius, I suppose that if you were planning to have a baby, you would turn to a neighbor for collaboration." "I would," replied Gropius, "if my neighbor was a woman...
...though, Gropius lived to be disappointed. Rationality in architecture, which reached its peak with the highly disciplined, exquisitely refined towers of Mies van der Rohe in the 1950s, has been cheapened by the slick, boxy, formula buildings that proliferate in every city like frozen dinners in a supermarket. The architect's imagination is now captured by bold, brutal structures of raw concrete; or intricate multilevel structures, designed with the help of a computer; or "pop" buildings that seem to revel in the chaotic interplay of roof lines, angles, windows, colors. Yet all the architects who rebel against Gropius...
...this is just water off the oil skins of François Spoerry, the man responsible for the Riviera's most spectacular new marina. Spoerry, 56, is an Alsatian architect and boat nut. He bought his swamp (for $600,000) in 1966; he dredged it and built the quays; he designed the houses and has been putting them up ever since. "I have tried to integrate the boat into the life of the vacation house," he says. "I built Port Grimaud for people who love sailing and the sea." And naturally, for profit...