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  3. We tend to think of the decades immediately following World War II as a time

We tend to think of the decades immediately following World War II as a time

游客2023-08-26  54
问题     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 G.I. 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 truly could be more. During the Depression and the war, Americans had learned to live with less, and that restraint, in combination with the postwar confidence in the future, made small, efficient housing positively stylish.
    Economic condition was only one stimulus for the trend toward efficient living. The phrase "less is more" was actually first popularized by a German, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who like other people associated with the Bauhaus, a school of design, emigrated to the United States before World War II and took up posts at American architecture schools. These designers, including Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, came to exert enormous influence on the course of American architecture, but none more so than Mies.
    Mies’s signature phrase means that less decoration, properly deployed, has more impact than a lot. Elegance, he believed, did not derive from abundance. Like other modern architects, he employed metal, glass and laminated wood(胶合板)— materials that we take for granted today but that in the 1940s 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.
    The trend toward "less" was not entirely foreign. In the 1930s Frank Lloyd Wright started building more modest and efficient houses — usually around 1,200 square feet — than the sprawling two-story ones he had designed in the 1890s and the early 20th century.
    The "Case Study Houses" commissioned from talented modern architects by California Arts & Architecture magazine between 1945 and 1962 were yet another homegrown influence on the "less is more" trend. Aesthetic effect came from the landscape, new materials and forthright detailing. In his Case Study House, Ralph Rapson may have mispredicted just how the mechanical revolution would impact everyday life — few American families acquired helicopters, though most eventually got clothes dryers — but his belief that self-sufficiency was both desirable and inevitable was widely shared. [br] According to the passage, the apartments Mies built on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive
选项 A、ignored details and proportions
B、were built with materials popular at that time
C、were more spacious than neighboring buildings
D、shared some characteristics of abstract art
答案 D
解析 根据题干中的Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive将本题出处定位于第5段。该段首句提到，该公寓比周围的老公寓要小(smaller)。接着用But表转折，强调它们却很受欢迎，因为它们的通风玻璃墙、所提供的景观、典雅的建筑细节和比例(the elegance of the buildings’details and proportions)和当时流行的抽象艺术在建筑的应用。由此可知，D)是对该段末句中的the architectural equivalent of the abstract art的同义转述，故为答案。A)和C)与该段提供的信息相反，故都排除。该段末句提到abstract art很流行，未提到其建筑材料(materials)是否在当时流行的问题，故排除B)。
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