Re: Re: reorganisation and destruction of irish catholic churches

You’ve posted too much stuff there Praxiteles, it would take a week to deal with those damning modernism / Corbusier passages alone.

We should probably split some of this off to a couple of new threads, but for the moment here’s a couple of quick points on the last two posts.

@Praxiteles wrote:

From the City Journal, Winter 2007

The Houses of Worship That Hallow New York

by David Garrard Lowe

A tour through three centuries of history and architecture

By the late eighteenth century, Stuyvesant’s old Dutch Reformed chapel was derelict, and in 1793 his great-great-grandson deeded the land to Trinity Church.

That original Dutch church in NewYork had a interesting profile. Eighteenth century views of the settlement show it dominating the little town with a large, barn-like, roof split near the apex into a pair of ridges and consequently a pair of simple close-coupled gables to front and rear. I don’t suppose anyone has any decent prints or drawings of the church?

@Praxiteles wrote:

And a final temptation from the City Journal for

Myron Magnet
Architecture’s Battle of the Modernisms
. . . and what it means for Gotham’s future

Modernist architecture almost from the start had two chief strains. The one that produced Manhattan’s greatest icons, the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, as well as Rockefeller Center, flows from Paris: from the classical massing, symmetry, and proportion that Gotham architects learned at the École des Beaux-Arts, and from the astonishing vocabulary of ornament that they learned from the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs that gave us the art deco style. The other current, the International Style, flowing from the Bauhaus art and design school founded in Germany in 1919, gave the world the glass and steel box, which arrived in New York at the start of the 1950s in the relatively refined forms of the UN Secretariat and Lever House on Park Avenue. For the next half-century, that style didn’t so much develop as degenerate, producing such creations as the Trump International Hotel at Columbus Circle, which we see to our left as we look south from 62nd Street.

Myron Magnet is the author of The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass. He is City Journal’s editor-at-large and was its editor from 1994 through 2006.

There was very nearly a third strain;):

Everybody knows the famous Adolf Loos [serious looking gent on the right] entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition of 1922, but it turns out that his Doric column was just a modernist, flat-roofed, version of earlier ‘Sky-column’ proposals by a Texan born architect, James Riely Gordon. Gordon was a high profile, and very successful, American architect who built dozens of courthouses across the states and was for a number of years president of the New York Institute of Architects. These schemes, the first one for a New York office block, the second for the New York County Court House [with clever plan], were widely published at the time [1910].

Nearly a third strain of skyscraper , . . . . but never quite happened