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Avant-garde architects have never been able to depend on the support of the establishment, since the customary patrons of this most conservative and slowly moving art form have historically been resistant to innovation and experiment.

Martin Filler

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Martin Filler
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: September 17
Journalist
Colorado Springs
Colorado
Martin Myles Filler
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Conservative
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Elevated locations imply elevated purposes, even in American cities departing as radically as Los Angeles does from the traditional planning patterns of the Eastern Seaboard.
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The skyscraper style first advocated by Louis Sullivan - a tower of strongly vertical character with clear definitions among base, shaft, and crown - has remained remarkably consistent throughout the history of this building type.
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The danger for any artist whose work is both recognizable and critically acclaimed is complacent repetition - the temptation to churn out easily identifiable, eagerly welcomed, and readily salable designs.
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During the modern period, the vanguard architect has usually relied on small residential jobs both to supply a steady income and to serve as 'sketches' for ideas that are often later translated to the larger scale of public commissions.
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By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades.
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High among the unpredictable variables that endanger the survival of worthy buildings are the vagaries of taste.
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What a museum chooses to exhibit is sometimes less important than how such decisions are made and what values inform them. To have the crucial role of museum professionals usurped by self-serving tycoons in the name of economic imperative threatens not only the integrity of individual institutions but the very principle of art held in public trust.
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The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.
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One of the stated goals of the postmodern movement in architecture was a greater sensitivity to the people who live in or use newly designed buildings.
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One of the Age of Enlightenment's most hypnotic images is Ledoux's rendering of his neoclassical theater of 1775 - 1784 in Besancon, surreally reflected in the colossal eye of an unidentified cosmic being.
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A turning point in the public's perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'An Autobiography' of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn't the slightest inkling of what architects actually did.
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Before the professionalization of architecture in the nineteenth century, it was standard for an aspiring mason or carpenter to begin his apprenticeship at fourteen and to become a master builder by his early twenties.
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The first half of the 1960s was the apogee of what might be termed the Age of Cool - as defined by that quality of being simultaneously with-it and disengaged, in control but nonchalant, knowing but ironically self-aware, and above all inscrutably undemonstrative.
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Always beware an unsigned architectural design.
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When Oscar Niemeyer died on December 5, 2012, ten days before his 105th birthday, he was universally regarded as the very last of the twentieth century's major architectural masters, an astonishing survivor whose most famous accomplishment, Brasilia, was the climactic episode of utopian High Modern urbanism.
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Truly great architecture always transcends its stated function, sometimes in unanticipated ways.
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Any set of decisions about design is inevitably influenced by cultural prejudice, no matter how intent an architect might be to avoid it.
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Despite the persistent image of the architect as a heroic loner erecting monumental edifices through sheer force of will, the building art has always been a highly cooperative enterprise.
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