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Design: A Boost for Good Old Modernism

3 minute read
Kurt Andersen

Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier may have dreamed up modernist architecture in Europe during the 1920s, but it took architects of the next generation, working in the wide-open, up-and-at-’em Western hemisphere, to make European functionalism a ubiquitous International Style during the 1950s and ’60s. Two of the most fluent and influential New World apostles were the U.S.’s Gordon Bunshaft and Brazil’s Oscar Niemeyer. This week in Chicago the two unrepentant old modernists will share the tenth annual Pritzker Architecture Prize. The Pritzker is by far the field’s most prestigious award and, with its $100,000 honorarium, the most generous. The tribute, says Bunshaft, “is the nicest thing that ever happened to me.”

The prize has never before been shared, but the pairing seems apt. Both Niemeyer, 80, and Bunshaft, 79, are really being honored for their pioneering work of 25 and 35 years ago. Bunshaft is the Miesian. As the chief design partner at New York City’s Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, he was the creator in the 1950s and early ’60s of humane, impeccable steel-frame-and-glass-skin office towers, among the best built anywhere. Niemeyer is the prolific Corbusian, a quirkier and more perilously romantic builder of singular, often bombastic objects — most notably the major public buildings of Brasilia, the utopistic Brazilian capital built all at once between 1957 and 1963.

Both men designed buildings for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Bunshaft conceived his best and best-known work, Manhattan’s Lever House, just as the United Nations headquarters, designed in large part by Niemeyer, was going up a few blocks southeast. Both men were the quintessentially Establishment architects of their generation. And, with success, both tended toward mannerism, became immune to tempering influences and got carried away with the thrills of go-go grandiosity.

Both, too, were profoundly out of fashion for most of the 1970s and ’80s, during the era of ferocious antimodernist reaction. But now the pendulum is swinging back again, which may account for this week’s eleventh-hour attempt to rehabilitate two modernist reputations at once. Neither prizewinner is interested in making a pretense of mellowness. In the acceptance speech he prepared for his daughter to read, Niemeyer disparaged a “minor architecture made with a ruler and square” and, a bit self-servingly, endorsed the “search for the spectacular.” The more plainspoken Bunshaft dismisses apostates and revels in his sense of vindication. “I think the committee is saying that modern architecture is pretty good,” he reckons. “Young architects are turning away from postmodernism, and I think they’re going to turn toward precision even more than modernism did. It’ll make Lever House look like a sentimental old lady.”

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