Word: posting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tradition, only irony can control quotation; and irony would become one of the main features of Post-Modernism. When Johnson decreed that "you cannot not know history," orthodox Miesians were scandalized. Johnson had allowed himself private ironies when building for himself; the gazebo on his lake in New Canaan, Conn., is scaled down to the proportions of the famous dwarves' quarters in the Gonzaga Palace in Mantua, a complete antifunctionalist joke. But for a long while Johnson was too embedded in the world of high taste and big money to permit himself large public ironies: that...
Thus the work that did most to precipitate the Post-Modernist attitude in America was not by Johnson...
This text has the same importance for Post-Modernism as Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture, published in 1923, did for Modernism. It is, in other words, one of the hinges of recent architectural history. In tone, Venturi's manifesto was almost diffident: "Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox modern architecture. I like elements which are hybrid rather than 'pure,' compromising rather than 'clean,' distorted rather than 'straightforward,' ambiguous ... and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for messy vitality over obvious unity ... I am for richness of meaning rather...
...only architect to apply the historicist metaphors of Post-Modernism to a large corporate structure, still unbuilt, is Philip Johnson. And only his age (72) and prestige have enabled him to get away with it. The building in question is the corporate headquarters of the world's largest business, A T & T, to be built in midtown Manhattan. Given its cost of $110 million and the prominence of its site, the building could scarcely fail to provoke argument. But in addition Johnson and Burgee designed it as a summing-up of Post-Modernist building. This prospect fills some architects with...
Before he was an architect, Johnson became the director of the architecture department of Manhattan's fledgling Museum of Modern Art. In 1936 he scandalized his colleagues by resigning from his post and, imbued with fervor for Nazi Germany, trying to start a splinter fascist party in America. This failed, and in 1940 Johnson entered architecture school. He had backed into the profession as a critic, but in the process he had helped bring Mies van der Rohe to America and fought bravely to shift avant-garde taste in the direction of the same Utopian machine culture he would...