‘Dancing About Architecture’ by Grant Snyder; Full image here

The last we featured one of Grant Snyder‘s clever comics, the illustrator took aim at iconic modernist houses, poking fun at the supposed (and admitted) inadequacies of the 20th century’s pre-eminent residential structures. The Villa Savoye’s aloof attitude, meant to exemplify the modernist “object in space” mentality, becomes indicative of the luxurious pursuits (in this case, polo) by the rich occupants who live there, while the exclusivity of pleasure enclaves that we all hope Fallingwater to be is made pointedly clear (“People who live over waterfalls should throw raging parties every night!).

Snyder’s latest, entitled “Dancing About Architecture”, pairs a dance to a trophy building of a particularly movement or aesthetic. William Pereira’s Geisel Library, a Brutalist gem at UC San Diego, leads off the comic, with Snyder likening the building’s formal and structural “lift-off” to the a couple of pirouetting ballet dancers. The horizontal layers and volumetric stepbacks of the Robie House inspires the invention of the “prairie style two-step”,while the “postmodernist pogo” can be added to the list of crimes committed or incited by Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building.  We may not know what “expressionist skanking”–provocatively paired with Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower–or how the Bauhaus bears any relation to “bounce”, but it’s all good fun. Our favorite: the “futurist robot” because who doesn’t love futurism or robots?

by Samuel Medina

posted in Uncategorized

tagged art deco, bauhaus, comics, einstein tower, futurism, Geisel Library, Grant Snyder, modernism, Robie House

more articles by Samuel Medina