Architecture, the most enduring of the art forms humanity has devised in its role as creator, is perhaps also the most eloquent silent witness of the way life is lived in the civilizations we build and destroy.
Towering, sprawling New York City is today far more populous than the great centers of millennia past. It has many more grandiose buildings, and far more complicated activities undertaken in and around them. As an expression of the societal system which it was built to support, this modern metropolis is nevertheless at least as articulate as its vanished antecedents in revealing the values and aspirations of the people who erected the architecture in which to live and work.
The forty years following World War II have been characterized by nondescript but immense towers, most of which are still standing within the heart of America's biggest city. Only recently has the Bauhaus-inspired devotion to the so-called "international style" come under legitimate scrutiny and challenge by independent thinkers who realized that the architecture of alienation served no good purpose.
Just as the dominance of abstract expressionism in postwar painting gradually collapsed under a reexamination of its perverse celebration of nihilism, so now the trend in building is steering away from the hideous forest of minimalist boxes now looming over the avenues of New York City. The commendably bold effort to break free from the influence of Gropius, van der Rohe, Breuer, and their fellow refugees has been called "post-modern;" but that term does little more than tacitly admit that "modern" means only "current," and was coined by people who felt that they were at the end of the line.
Currently, we are looking farther back into the past, toward and beyond that last great flowering of architectural creativity, art deco, which had its antecedent in the style fostered in 1919 by the Bauhaus. We are moreover looking into the near future, now that high technology has separated the notion of "the space age" from the realm of fantasy. Modern architects increasingly recognize that both directions offer far more in design possibilities than does the no man's land that urban Americans have been forced to inhabit for four decades.
Eighty years ago monumental edifices were designed in homage to the traditions established in Europe during the last millennium, and banks and public buildings hearkened back to Greek and Roman styles. Though many such masterpieces have been torn down to make way for parking lots and grotesquely undistinguished apartment complexes, offices, and arenas (where the magnificent Pennsylvania Station once stood, now it crawls underneath), a few reminders of the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, baroque, rococo, neo-classical, and beaux-arts styles have weathered the threats of wreckers' balls to provide modest pleas for refinement in the shadows of black towers whose anaesthetic soullessness all but cripples the beauty of these precious vestiges.
Some of them are quite tall, such as Cass Gilbert's 1913 neo-Gothic Woolworth Building, Carrere and Hastings' 1925 Ritz Tower, or Schultze and Weaver's 1927 Sherry-Netherland. Some of them are relatively short, such as Henry J. Hardenbergh's 1884 Dakota, William B. Tuthill's 1891 neo-Romanesque Carnegie Hall, or Graves and Dolby's 1904 Ansonia. Some are tributes to beaux-arts
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