Word: modernists
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...novelty, the Illinois Center is not new in all respects. It draws on ideas that have had currency among architects for more than a decade: the adventurous geometry of "late modernists" such as I.M. Pei and Edward Larrabee Barnes; the office atrium pioneered by Kevin Roche; the glass- , enclosed elevators popularized by John Portman's Hyatt hotel designs; and the spirited use of color epitomized by the Miami firm Arquitectonica. The German-born Jahn, 45, an architect celebrated--some would say notorious--for his arch flourishes with high-tech elements, had applied some of the same ideas...
...deception." The best novelists at work today, most notably the British, have satirized Freudian idealists and fools as ruthlessly as they attacked all the older stupidities. Lasch, however, might not find this literature entirely to his taste: a recurrent suggestion in these works is that the attempt to mix "modernist" with "traditionalist" values is at best messy and funny and at worst misguided and fatal. Iris Murdoch, to name only the most intelligent of these writers, has made a career of throwing Plato, Christ and Freud together like roosters in a ring...
With disarming intellectual and political innocence, Lasch writes on the teleogical assumption that the intellect is naturally suited for the ends to which modernist in tellectuals most often put it. He translates the misguided American trust in the innocence and perfectibility of nature into the goodness and universal applicability of rationality. His faith in this faculty is so strong that he overlooks the disadvantages of his genre. Lasch cannot explore the questions he raises nearly as well as novelists can. Nor can he, in contrast to the religious or ethical writer, and to politicians of all varieties, even pretend...
...century, artists and enlightened collectors were already beginning to do away with old-fashioned picture frames, with their gilded inlets and adamant pirouettes. Let painting be painting, they decided, without a competing spectacle at its own borders. This preference soon converged with Bauhaus notions of design, which enforced the modernist distaste for frills. By midcentury, the opponents of effusive framing had their ultimate triumph: the frameless wafers of abstract expressionism...
Wisely, Glazebrook keeps this sort of modernist baggage to a minimum. He knows what readers want from a travel book, and he does not disappoint them. His route, from the Aegean coast to the borders of Iran and the Soviet Union, stretches like an ancient weft on which history and legend are tightly knotted. This has a sumptuous effect on his prose: "We were surging through bright water off the promontory of Knidos, to which Praxiteles' Venus once drew all travelers . .. Here were the ramparts of Asia crumbling into a sapphire...