Harry Weese, a 20th century
Chicago architect, designed thousands of buildings in the modernist
style, conducted many restoration and renovation projects in Chicago,
including Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Theater, the Field Museum of Natural History
and most successfully he designed Washington's hundred mile long
Metro system in 1967.
Weese's masterpiece, Washington, D.C's
Metro was built in the brutalist style with repetitive design
patterns on its vaulted ceilings supported by large amounts of
exposed concrete.
The work was described in the media as "the greatest public works of the history" and was said to"induce an almost religious sense of awe."
The brutalist style is the
David's Stephenson's “Heavenly
Brutalist and heavenly, these vaulted
manifestation of modernism without any ornamentation: it is plain,
cold and honest through and through.
Vaults” is a collection of photographs of the ceilings of 12th
to 16th century cathedrals, provides another perspective
on the architecture of vaulted ceilings. These romanesque to gothic architecture in photographs are
concrete examples of the genius of the human mind.
ceilings are beautiful!!
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Great post and love the comparison of Weese with Stevenson’s book. Had no idea that Weese was also a preservationist, but the “brutalist” description is dead on! Could also be used to describe Breuer’s design for the Whitney, which I have mixed feelings. http://whitney.org/About/BreuerBuilding. Am forwarding your to cousin who heads Landmarks Preservation Illinois. Thnx
cvk
Thanks for the Whitney/Breuer Building information.
I knew his connection to Bauhaus but his brutalist work escaped my attention.
In a future post, I would like to blog about Breuer.