London - David Chipperfield has become a pre-modern architect. The Museum of Modern Literature at the German Literature Archive in the small town of Marbach am Neckar is a neo-Palladian temple, masquerading as an essay in austere minimalism. It revels in a thinly-concealed eclecticism of which James Stirling (architect of the Neue Staatsgalerie in nearby Stuttgart) would have been proud.
In fact, the pre-modern designation is borrowed from arch-postmodernist Robert Stern, who used it to describe himself while he was a professor at Columbia University in the 1980s. Although the minimalist left side of Chipperfield's architect brain might be horrified at the comparison, there is much to recommend it. Stern's buildings are a freak-show of pastiche postmodernism and quasi-contemporary styles. But Stern was a prolific teacher, a critic of the architecture made in his own country and a committedly high-brow figure. This description could easily fit David Chipperfield. cont'd.... http://www.europaconcorsi.com/db/rec/inbox.php?id=10583 _______________________________________________ in-enaction mailing list http://mail.architexturez.net/mailman/listinfo/in-enaction + Architexturez collaborative at http://portal.architexturez.org/
