MBA英语历年真题阅读理解及参考答案详解二
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MBA英语历年真题阅读理解及参考答案详解二
We tend to think of the decades immediately following World War Ⅱ as a time of prosperity and growth, with soldiers returning home by the millions, going off to college on the Gl, Bill and lining up at the marriage bureaus.
But when it came to their houses, it was a time of common sense and a belief that less could truly be more, During the Depression and the war, Americans had learned to live with less. and that restraint, in combination with the post war confidence in the future, made small, efficient housing positively stylish.
Economic condition was only a stimulus for the trend toward efficient living. The phrase “less is more\
popularized by a German, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Robe, who Like other people associated with the Bauhaus, a school of design, emigrated to the United States before World War 11 and took up posts at American architecture schools. These designers came to exert
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enormous influence on the course of American architecture. but none more so than Mies.Mies's signature phrase means that less decoration, properly organized, has more impacts than a lot. Elegance, he believed, did not derive from abundance. Like other modem architects. he employed metal, glass and laminated wood - materials that we take for granted today but that in the
194Os symbolized the future. Mies's sophisticated presentation masked the fact that the spaces he designed were small and efficient, rather than big and often empty.
The apartments in the elegant towers Mies built on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive, for example,were smaller - two-bedroom units under 1,000 square feet - than those in their older neighbors along the city's Gold Coast. But they were popular because of their airy glass walls, the views they afforded and the elegance of the buildings' details and proportions, the architectural equivalent of the abstract art so popular at the time.
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MBA英语历年真题阅读理解及参考答案详解二
