Log24

Thursday, January 27, 2005

Thursday January 27, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:29 am
Crystal Night

From artbook.com:

Mies van der Rohe:
Mies in Berlin

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050127-Mies.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Winner of
The Society of Architectural Historians
2002 Philip Johnson Award
for Excellence

Exhibition Catalog

"Published to accompany
a groundbreaking 2001 exhibition at
The Museum of Modern Art, New York."

 

From Mies and the Mastodon,
by Martin Filler, The New Republic,
issue dated Aug. 6, 2001:

"It would have been wiser for the new MoMA catalog… to have addressed the issue of his politics…. By ignoring such a central subject… the show gives off a mild stench of cover-up…. Only the German-born Rosemarie Haag Bletter (full disclosure: she is my wife) alludes to the verboten topic in her [catalog] essay on Mies's flirtation with crystal imagery, drawing a sharp parallel between the architect's extensive use of Kristallglas (plate glass) and the ensuing devastation of Kristallnacht, which erupted just three months after he left for the States."

Also from Filler's essay:

"Mies's rigorously simplified structures, typified by grids of steel and glass and an absence of applied ornament, represented the Platonic ideal of modernism for many people."

For more on history, politics, and
Mies's disciple Philip Johnson,
who died Tuesday evening, see

"We Cannot Not Know History."

For more on aesthetics, see the
Log24.net entry of Tuesday noon,

Diamonds Are Forever.

For more on a Platonic ideal of sorts,
see the following figure in two versions:
 
Version A, from Plato's Meno and
Diamond Theory,

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and Version B,

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050125-Forever.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

from the date of Johnson's death
at his "famous crystalline box."

Was less more?

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