Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [140]
Johnson and Burgee, Pennzoil Place, 1976, Houston. Initially an advocate of the International Style, Johnson later designed buildings that broke from the white box format and added historical references.
BEAUBOURG: CONTEMPORARY CULTURE PAR EXCELLENCE. A building that fits no category except maybe futuro-fantasy is the Centre Pompidou, known as the Beaubourg, in Paris. If Johnson’s Pennzoil resembles Minimalist sculpture, the Beaubourg is a Dada funfest. Dedicated to putting Paris back at the helm of contemporary art, the Beaubourg houses labs and display spaces dedicated to modern art, industrial design, avant-garde (especially computer-generated) music, and film. After the Eiffel Tower, it’s the most popular attraction in Paris.
The building wears its technology on its sleeve, with all service functions turned inside out. Heating and cooling ducts, stairs, elevators, escalator, water and gas pipes crisscross the exterior steel skeleton. Color is a vital element, with components color-coded according to function: red for ramps and conveyances that move people, green for water, blue for air conditioning, and yellow for electrical wiring. Could anyone but Parisians make plumbing so stylish?
Its designers sought to create a radically new kind of building for an institution that goes far beyond ho-hum museum activities. Anyone wandering into the corridor where composers push buttons to create music of squawks and bleeps knows right away he’s entered a new French Revolution. The public plaza outside throbs with performers juggling, singing, miming, and breathing fire. “If the hallowed, cultlike calm of the traditional museum has been lost, so much the better,” said then-director Pontus Hulten. “We are moving toward a society where art will play a great role, which is why this museum is open to disciplines that were once excluded by museums....”
Piano and Rogers, Centre Pompidou, 1977, Paris. This building celebrates technology by putting beams, ductwork, pipes, and corridors on the outside.
GRAVES: THE TRIUMPH OF POST-MODERNISM. A Post-Modern American architect for whom color is a central component is Michael Graves (b. 1934). Instead of basing color on technical function as at the Beaubourg, Graves keys it to nature: to earth, foliage, and sky. “My color sense is very childlike,” Graves said. “I don’t want to upset the code.” Graves uses “representational” color, sheathing the base of buildings in earth hues like terra- cotta and dark green, graduating to sky tones above, like an azure-blue soffit.
In the late 1970s Graves converted to Post-Modernism and mixed Classical elements and fantasy (he designed the new Mickey Mouse-inspired Disney headquarters). Now he dots his multicolored facades with architectural flashbacks ranging from Beaux-Arts Classicism to Egyptian revival to streamlined Modernism. In his Portland Public Services Building (1983), dubbed “The Temple,” Graves divided the tower into three separate sections suggesting the base, shaft, and capital of a Classical column.
Dramatic entrances are a Graves trademark. Instead of the interior/exterior free flow of Modernism, he amplifies the passage between public and private, outside and inside. A typical device is the “voided keystone.” Where a traditional arch has a keystone at its apex, Graves places a window, heightening the drama of the central portal as focal point.
Graves, Clos Pegase Winery, 1987, CA. Graves reintroduced color and historical detail to architecture.
GEHRY: CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’. The most provocative Post-Modern architect working today is indisputably Frank O. Gehry (b. 1929). Canadian born, Gehry put himself through architecture school by working as a truck driver. Now he works