Thursday, December 6, 2012

Modern Bummerism


The Allegheny Campus in Pittsburgh is full of grim, modernist boxes. Stained concrete and gray glass. I love it. It's the historical end of the nostalgia spectrum--the ideologically righteous side of design. The rain darkened walls of the Pruit-Igoo housing complex inciting residents to violence, lashing out to assert themselves in an austere, impersonal space. It's absurd and amazing how modernist ideology in architecture backfired.

I love the stark chrome-plated sculptures in the public parks...artists unburdened by the concerns of pluralism or process art. You can just picture unsupervised kids slicing their sticky paws on the metallic surfaces.

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