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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2024-05-20  22
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] The postwar American housing style largely reflected the Americans’______.
选项 A、efficiency and practicality
B、prosperity and growth
C、restraint and confidence
D、pride and faithfulness
答案 C
解析 根据题干中的The postwar American housing style将本题出处定位到第2段第2句。该句提到，在大萧条和战争时期美国人学会居住在小地方，克制和战后对未来的信心使得小而高效的住房成了一种时尚。由此可知，战后美国的住房反映了美国人的克制和信心。[C]restraint and confidence是对该句中的restraint，in combination with the postwar confidence in the future的同义转述，故为答案。[A]“有效和实用”、[B]“繁荣和发展”和[D]“骄傲和忠诚”均未在文章中提到，故都排除。
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