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Corbett, Harvey Wiley  

(b San Francisco, Jan 8, 1873; d New York, April 21, 1954).

American architect, teacher and writer. He studied engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1895, and then went to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1896), where he entered the atelier of Jean-Louis Pascal and received his diploma in 1900. In 1901 he joined the New York office of Cass Gilbert as a draughtsman, later going into partnership (1903–12) with F. Livingston Pell and, until 1922, with Frank J. Helmle. His earliest major commissions were won in competitions, including those for the Maryland Institute (1908–13) in Baltimore, a variation on a Florentine palazzo, and the classical Municipal Group building (1916–17) in Springfield, MA. From 1907 to the mid-1930s he lectured at the Columbia School of Architecture, which followed the Beaux-Arts educational system. The vertically expressive Bush Terminal Tower (1920–24) on 42nd Street, New York, with its prominent position and slight setbacks in buff, white and black brick, marked his début as an influential skyscraper designer and he maintained his leading position through the 1920s and 1930s. Both in his work and writing for the media, Corbett explored the creative potential of the ‘setback’ restrictions of the New York zoning laws of ...

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Frankl, Paul  

Paul Crossley

(b Prague, 1879; d Princeton, NJ, Jan 30, 1962).

American art historian. He first trained as an architect but, in his early thirties, he turned to the study of art history and in 1911 submitted his doctoral dissertation at Munich University on 15th-century stained glass in southern Germany. Under the influence of his teacher, Heinrich Wölfflin, Frankl soon attempted a systematic definition of the formal principles underlying Renaissance and post-Renaissance architecture. His first theoretical work, Die Entwicklungsphasen der neueren Baukunst (1914), was strongly influenced by the visual formalism and philosophical idealism of German art history in the decades before World War I. It isolated four main categories of analysis, which were fundamental to much of his later investigations: spatial composition, treatment of mass and surface (‘corporeal form’), treatment of light, colour and other optical effects (‘visible form’), and the relation of design to social function (‘purposive intention’). His emphasis on spatial analysis as a determinant of style relied heavily on August Schmarsow’s works on Baroque and Rococo architecture. His concept of ‘visible form’ (sometimes called ‘optical form’), which presupposes that viewers derive their experience of a building kinetically, as the mental synthesis of many images from different viewpoints, owed much to late 19th-century theories of perception, in particular to Konrad Fiedler’s and Adolf von Hildebrand’s emphasis on the physiological and psychological processes of seeing, and to Alois Riegl’s notion of ‘haptic’ and ‘optic’ forms. Frankl’s principal debt, however, lay in his adoption of Wölfflin’s quasi-Hegelian model of style as a predetermined, supra-individual force, impelled onwards by its own immanent laws, and evolving from one art-historical period to another through the action and counter-action of ‘polar opposites’: the underlying formal principles of a style are diametrically antithetical to those of the styles preceding and succeeding it....

Article

Obregón Santacilia, Carlos  

Kathryn O’Rourke

Mexican architect. He graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Arquitectura, Mexico City, in 1924.

He was among the young architects who led the transition away from academic classicism in Mexican architecture in the 1920s and 1930s. In the early and mid-1920s Obregón Santacilia was the preeminent government architect and won commissions to design major projects intended to demonstrate federal efforts to improve health care and education, as well as to convey the country’s stability and commitment to strengthening national culture. His early works revealed a gradual progression away from historicist styles and reflected his absorption of the forms of Spanish colonial architecture and Art Deco, as well as the influence of Mexican popular arts. In several of his major projects Obregón Santacilia collaborated with sculptors and painters, most notably Roberto Montenegro, Diego Rivera, and Jorge González Camarena. In the 1940s his buildings increasingly reflected the influence of International Style modernism....

Article

Teague, Walter Dorwin  

Richard Guy Wilson

(b Decatur, IN, Dec 18, 1883; d Flemington, NJ, Dec 5, 1960).

American industrial designer and writer. Between 1903 and 1907 he studied at evening classes at the Art Students League in New York, while working as a sign-painter. He then worked as an advertising illustrator, in particular for Calkins & Holden, a pioneering agency that specialized in the use of art for illustrations and in advising clients on the appearance of their products. Between 1911 and 1928 Teague worked as a freelance illustrator and commercial artist and became known for his use of classical typography and decorative borders, as in the layout and borders for Time magazine (1923). In 1926, while travelling in Europe, he discovered the work of Le Corbusier and in particular his book Vers une architecture (1923). On his return to New York that year he decided to pursue a career in designing or restyling products and packages for manufacturers. In New York at that time a group of individuals including Teague, Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss began to establish industrial design as an independent occupation, promoted by the foundation of the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen in ...