Word: modernist
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...momentary fame was secure, his long-term reputation was unstable. To rigorous Modernists, there was something slack and accommodating about his work. The swelling lines of his TWA terminal at what is now JFK International Airport - weren't they a bit too delicious, too far from the square-shouldered Modernist grid? The bright blue exterior of his IBM facility in Rochester, Minn. - since when did austere Modernists do big color...
Over the past few years, however, there's been a Saarinen reappraisal. Set free by computer-aided design, contemporary architects like Santiago Calatrava, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid have moved quite a distance from Modernist orthodoxy. And a great deal of Saarinen's work, especially his adventures in fluid geometry, today looks as if it's the predecessor of theirs. It's easier now to regard his expressive buildings as a principled attempt to reconcile the Modernist drive to purify and clarify with the abiding human desire for something that strikes other, warmer and no less essential chords. (See pictures...
...pictures of modernist houses...
...Drama of Powerful Forms Saarinen was a Modernist by birthright. His father Eliel was a Finnish architect whose radically clean-lined entry in the 1922 competition to design the Chicago Tribune Tower took second place in the contest but first place in history. For a rising generation of architects, that unbuilt proposal was an arrow pointing straight to the future and a strong influence on the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center. The fame it brought the elder Saarinen in the U.S. persuaded him to emigrate the following year from Finland to Chicago. A few months later, his wife...
...Modernist architecture in the desert reflected the interest in new technology after World War II, and materials like glass, steel and concrete block used in construction were integral to the design of a building," explains Sidney Williams, daughter-in-law of E. Stewart Williams and curator of architecture and design at the Palm Springs Art Museum. "The city was an ideal laboratory because of the climate and the use of indoor and outdoor space. And because people had their second homes here, they were more open to being experimental with them...