Word: 1920s
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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's life was well timed. He was born at the right moment (100 years ago next month) and in the right place (prosperous middle Europe) to lead the radical transformation of architecture during the 1920s and '30s. He left his native Germany just ahead of probable persecution by the Nazis, arrived in Chicago just as his austere vision was catching on among U.S. architects and developed his pragmatic skyscraper design just as the war ended and corporate America found itself instantly in need of such a prototype for acres of new high-rise office space...
...also invented a new surname by appending Rohe, his mother's maiden name. (Less is more be damned: in German, mies means lousy, more or less.) Mies van der Rohe, invigorated by Weimar Berlin, spent most of the 1920s designing gorgeous industrial exhibits and handsome, blocky villas descended from Frank Lloyd Wright. Well into the decade, however, Mies the modernist was not scrupulously practicing what he preached: a neo-Georgian country house appeared as late...
...magnifying glass, to reveal themselves. One thinks of the buds and pods that crop up in Paul Klee's watercolors, some of which are fanciful illuminations of Goethe's ideas about the Urpflanze, or "primal plant"; or of the extraordinary images of tiny natural structures taken in the 1920s by photographers like Karl Blossfeldt, in which a seedcase can rear up like a Gothic tower, suggesting all manner of analogies to architecture. But Winters' paintings evoke this quintessentially Romantic idea of the very small as metaphor of the very large without being very explicit about it. The paint surface...
...resulting images are like windows into a distinctly shaped but largely unrecognizable world. They have more than a little in common with surrealism; one thinks of the Pandora's box of little involuntary creatures, buzzing and defecating and copulating, that Joan Miro opened in the 1920s. And like those dreambugs, Winters' fungi and spores have a distinctly human air. In their aggregation, they refer to social structures: hives, crowds, nests, colonies. They suggest hierarchies and sometimes conflict. But all this is decidedly muffled, submerged so far in the paint that it hardly works as allegory. Winters does not want...
Many dealers across the country agree, noting that since 1980 their sales of home equipment have been rising about 30% to 65% a year. Sears, Roebuck, which advertised a primitive rowing machine in its 1920s mail-order catalogs, has devoted 31 pages of its fall-winter catalog to home-fitness devices. Says Richard Williford, a Sears spokesman: "This has been the strongest-selling merchandise in our sporting-goods department this year." Among the favored items, say equipment dealers: rowing machines ($75 to $3,000 for the computerized, gadget-laden models), stationary bicycles ($75 to $3,000), treadmills...