Decade: 1970 – 1980

Including –History, Fashion, Art,

Literature, Cinema, Music, Architecture,
Social & Economic Condition, Trends etc.

Subject: Elements of Design

Faculty: Ms. Susmita Das Pal
National Institute of Fashion Technology – Mumbai

Submitted by:
Ashish Singh (M/FMS/08/08)
Bhavik Gandhi (M/FMS/08/10)
Kanika Jain (M/FMS/08/12)
Namrata Momaya (M/FMS/08/15)
Poorna Doshi (M/FMS/08/19)
Shabri Wable (M/FMS/08/29)
1970s Art- Installation Art
Installation art uses sculptural materials and other media to modify the way a particular
space is experienced. Installation art is not necessarily confined to gallery spaces and can
be any material intervention in everyday public or private spaces.

Installation art incorporates almost any media to create an experience in a particular

environment. Materials used in contemporary installation art range from everyday and
natural materials to new media such as video, sound, performance, immersive virtual
reality and the internet. Some installations are site-specific in that they are designed to
only exist in the space for which they were created.

History

This genre of contemporary art came

toprominence in the 1970s. Many trace the roots of
this form of art to earlier artists such as Marcel
Duchamp and his use of the readymade or to Kurt
Schwitters' Merz art objects, rather than more
traditional craft based sculpture. The intention of the
artist is paramount in much later installation art
whose roots lie in the conceptual art of the 1960s.
This again is a departure from traditional sculpture
which places its focus on form. Early non-Western
installation art includes events staged by the Gutai
group in Japan starting in 1954, which influenced
American installation pioneers like Allan Kaprow.

Marcel Duchamp. 'Fountain, 1917

Installation as nomenclature for a specific form of art came into use fairly recently; its
first use as documented by the OED was in 1969. It was coined in this context in
reference to a form of art that had arguably existed since prehistory but was not regarded
as a discrete category until the mid-twentieth century. Allan Kaprow used the term
“Environment” in 1958 (Kaprow 6) to describe his transformed indoor spaces; this later
joined such terms as “project art” and “temporary art.”

Essentially, installation/environmental art takes into account the viewer‟s entire sensory
experience, rather than floating framed points of focus on a “neutral” wall or displaying
isolated objects (literally) on a pedestal. This leaves space and time as its only
dimensional constants. This implies dissolution of the line between art and life; Kaprow
noted that “if we bypass „art‟ and take nature itself as a model or point of departure, we
may be able to devise a different kind of art… out of the sensory stuff of ordinary life”
(Kaprow 12).
The conscious act of artistically addressing all the senses with regard to the viewer‟s
experience in totality made a resounding debut in 1849 when Richard Wagner conceived
of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or an operatic work for the stage that drew inspiration from
ancient Greek theater in its inclusion of all the major art forms: painting, writing, music,
etc. (Britannica) In devising operatic works to commandeer the audience‟s senses,
Wagner left nothing unobserved: architecture, ambience, and even the audience itself
were considered and manipulated in order to achieve a state of total artistic immersion. In
the book "Themes in Contemporary Art”, it is suggested that “installations in the 1980s
and 1990s were increasingly characterized by networks of operations involving the
interaction among complex architectural settings, environmental sites and extensive use
of everyday objects in ordinary contexts. With the advent of video in 1965, a concurrent
strand of installation evolved through the use of new and ever-changing technologies, and
what had been simple video installations expanded to include complex interactive,
multimedia and virtual reality environments”.(Themes, 199)

In “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried derisively labels art that acknowledges the
viewer as “theatrical” (Fried 45). There is a strong parallel between installation and
theater: both play to a viewer who is expected to be at once immersed in the
sensory/narrative experience that surrounds him and maintain a degree of self-identity as
a viewer. The traditional theatergoer does not forget that he has come in from outside to
sit and take in a created experience; a trademark of installation art has been the curious
and eager viewer, still aware that he is in an exhibition setting and tentatively exploring
the novel universe of the installation. A number of institutions focusing on Installation art
were created from the 1980s onwards, suggesting the need for Installation to be seen as a
separate discipline. These included the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh and the Museum of
Installation, London, among others.

The artist and critic Ilya Kabakov mentions this essential phenomenon in the introduction
to his lectures “On the “Total” Installation:” “[One] is simultaneously both a „victim‟ and
a viewer, who on the one hand surveys and evaluates the installation, and on the other,
follows those associations, recollections which arise in him[;] he is overcome by the
intense atmosphere of the total illusion” (Kabakov 256). Here installation art bestows an
unprecedented importance on the observer‟s inclusion in that which he observes. The
expectations and social habits that the viewer takes with him into the space of the
installation will remain with him as he enters, to be either applied or negated once he has
taken in the new environment. What is common to nearly all installation art is a
consideration of the experience in toto and the problems it may present, namely the
constant conflict between disinterested criticism and sympathetic involvement.
Television and video offer immersive experiences, but their unrelenting control over the
rhythm of passing time and the arrangement of images precludes an intimately personal
viewing experience (Kabakov 257). Ultimately, the only things a viewer can be assured
of when experiencing the work are his own thoughts and preconceptions and the basic
rules of space and time. All else may be molded by the artist‟s hands.

The central importance of the subjective point of view when experiencing installation art,
points toward a disregard for traditional Platonic image theory. In effect, the entire
installation adopts the character of the simulacrum or flawed statue: it neglects any ideal
form in favor of optimizing its direct appearance to the observer. Installation art operates
fully within the realm of sensory perception, in a sense “installing” the viewer into an
artificial system with an appeal to his subjective perception as its ultimate goal.

Interactive installation is a branch off the installation arts category. Usually, an

interactive installation will often involve the audience acting on it or the piece responding
to the user‟s activity. There are several kinds of interactive installations produced, these
include web-based installations, gallery based installations, digital based installations,
electronic based installations, etc. Interactive installations are mostly seen from the
1990s, when artists are more interested in the participation of the audiences where the
meaning of the installation is generated.

With the improvement of technology over the years, artists are more able to explore
outside of the boundaries that were never able to be explored by artists in the past. The
media used are more experimental and bold; they are also usually cross media and may
involve sensors, which plays on the reaction to the audiences‟ movement when looking at
the installations. By using virtual Reality as a medium, immersive virtual reality art is
probably the most deeply interactive form of art. At the turn of a new century, there is a
trend of interactive installations using video, film, sound and sculpture
1970s Art- Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism was a style of modern painting that emerged in the late 1970s and
dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. Related to American Lyrical Abstraction it
developed in Europe as a reaction against the conceptual and minimalistic art of the
1970s. Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognizable objects, such as the human
body (although sometimes in a virtually abstract manner), in a rough and violently
emotional way using vivid colours and banal colour harmonies. Overtly inspired by the
so-called German Expressionist painters--Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, George Grosz--
and other emotive artist such as James Ensor and Edvard Munch. Neo-expressionists
were sometimes called Neue Wilde ('The new wild ones'; 'New Fauves' would better meet
the meaning of the term)

1970s- Fabric Art 1970s- Graphic Art

1970s- Advertisements

1970s- Magazines
1970s- Photography

World in 1970s
In the western world, social progressive values that began in the 1960s, such as
increasing political awareness and political and economic liberty of women, continued to
grow. The hippie culture, which started in the 1960s, continued in the early 1970s and
faded towards the middle part of the decade, which involved opposition to the Vietnam
War, opposition to nuclear weapons, the advocacy of world peace, and hostility to the
authority of government. The environmentalist movement began to increase dramatically
in this period. Western countries experienced an economic recession due to oil crisis
caused by oil embargoes by Arab countries in the Middle East, while Japan's economy
boomed. The crisis saw the first instance of stagflation which began a political and
economic trend of the replacement of Keynesian economic theory with neoliberal
economic theory, with the first neoliberal government being created in the United
Kingdom with election of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

In Asia, affairs regarding the People's Republic of China changed significantly following
the recognition of the PRC by the United Nations, the death of Mao Zedong and the
beginning of market liberalization by Mao's successors. The economy of Japan witnessed
a large boom in this period. The United States withdrew its military forces from their
previous involvement in Vietnam which had grown enormously unpopular. In 1979, the
Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan which led to an ongoing war for ten years. The 1970s
saw an initial increase in violence in the Middle East as Egypt and Syria declared war on
Israel, but in the late 1970s, the situation in the Middle East was fundamentally altered
when Egypt signed a peace agreement with Israel which was followed by Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat being assassinated. Political tensions in Iran exploded with the
Iranian Revolution which overthrew the Iranian monarchy and established an Islamic
theocracy in Iran.

The economies of many third world countries continued to make steady progress in the
early 1970s, because of the green revolution. They might have thrived and become stable
in the way that Europe recovered after the war through the Marshall Plan; however, their
economic growth was slowed by the oil crisis.

Worldwide Trends
The first ethos of the 1970s emerged from a transition of the global social structure. It
reflected the transition from the decline of colonial imperialism since the end of World
War II to globalization and the rise of a new middle class in the developing world.

Globally, the 1970s had several features that were similar and definitive across economic
levels and regions. Some defining points of the 1970s were the Arab-Israeli war of 1973
and the subsequent oil shock of 1973, the economic strain caused by the rapid increase in
the price of oil and its influence on the Bretton Woods system of international economic
stabilisation, and the effect of the contraceptive pill on social dynamics.

Developing nations that were rich in oil experienced economic growth; others, not so
endowed, saw the economic strain of oil price hikes lead to economic decline,
particularly in Africa where a number of moderately democratic states became dictatorial
regimes. Many Middle Eastern democracies crumbled into chaotic regimes with pseudo-
democratic governments. Several Asian countries also saw the rise of dictators, including
South Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia.

As well, people were influenced by the rapid pace of societal change and the aspiration
for a more egalitarian society in cultures that were long colonised and have an even
longer history of hierarchical social structure.

The first face lifts were attempted in the 1970s.

The green revolution of the late 1960s brought about self sufficiency in food in many
developing economies. At the same time an increasing number of people began to seek
urban prosperity over agrarian life. This consequently saw the duality of transition of
diverse interaction across social communities amid increasing information blockade
across social class.

Other common global ethos of the seventies world include: increasingly flexible and
varied gender roles for women in industrialised societies. More women could enter the
work force. However, the gender role of men remained as that of a bread-winner. The
period also saw the socioeconomic effect of an ever-increasing number of women
entering the non-agrarian economic workforce. The Iranian revolution also affected
global attitudes to and among those of the Muslim faith toward the end of the 1970s.
The global experience of the cultural transition of the 1970s and an experience of a global
zeitgeist revealed the interdependence of economies since World War II, in a world
increasingly polarised between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Novelist Tom Wolfe coined the term Me decade in New York magazine in August 1976
referring to the 1970s. The term describes a general new attitude of Americans towards
self-awareness and, in clear contrast with the 1960s, away from history, community, and
human reciprocity awareness.

Economy
The 1970s were perhaps the worst decade of Western and American economic
performance since the Great Depression. Although there was no severe economic
depression as witnessed in the 1930s, economic growth rates were considerably lower
than previous decades. As a result, the 1970s adversely distinguished itself from the
prosperous postwar period between 1945 and 1973. Then, the world economy was
buoyed by the Marshall Plan and the robust American economy. However, the high
standing enjoyed by the American economy gradually became discomposed by years of
loose domestic spending (particularly the Great Society campaign) and funding for the
Vietnam war. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 added to the existing ailments and
conjured high inflation throughout much of the world for the rest of the decade. Soaring
oil prices compelled most American businesses to raise their prices as well, with
inflationary results.

The average annual inflation rate from 1900 to 1970 was approximately 2.5 percent.
From 1970, however, the average rate hit about 6 percent, topping out at 13.3 percent by
1979. This period is also known for "stagflation", a phenomenon in which inflation and
unemployment steadily increased, therefore leading to double-digit interest rates that rose
to unprecedented levels (above 12% per year). The prime rate hit 21.5 in December 1980,
the highest in history. By the time of 1980, when U.S. President Jimmy Carter was
running for re-election against Ronald Reagan, the misery index (the sum of the
unemployment rate and the inflation rate) had reached an all-time high of 21.98 percent.

In Eastern Europe, Soviet-style command economies began showing signs of stagnation,

in which successes were persistently dogged by setbacks. The oil shock increased East
European, particularly Soviet, exports, but a growing inability to increase agricultural
output caused growing concern to the governments of the COMECON block, and a
growing dependence on food imported from Western nations.

Oil crisis

Economically, the seventies were marked by the energy crisis which peaked in 1973 and
1979 (see 1973 oil crisis and 1979 oil crisis). After the first oil shock in 1973, gasoline
was rationed in many countries. Europe particularly depended on the Middle East for oil;
the U.S. was also affected even though it had its own oil reserves. Many European
countries introduced car-free days and weekends. In the U.S., customers with a license
plate ending in an odd number were only allowed to buy gasoline on odd-numbered days,
while even-numbered plate-holders could only purchase gasoline on even-numbered
days. The experience that oil reserves were not endless and technological development
was not sustainable without harming the environment ended the age of modernism. As a
result, ecological awareness rose substantially

Social movements
Environmentalism

The 1970s started a mainstream affirmation of the environmental issues early activists
from the 1960s, such as Rachel Carson and Murray Bookchin had warned of. The moon
landing that had occurred at the end of the previous decade transmitted back concrete
images of the Earth as an integrated, life-supporting system and shaped a public
willingness to preserve nature. On April 22, 1970, the United States celebrated its first
Earth Day in which over two thousand colleges and universities and roughly ten thousand
primary and secondary schools participated.

Feminism

Feminism in the United States got its start in the 1970s,many women started to become
hoes and not know what they were doing but began to take flight starting in the late 1970,
with the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United
States Constitution (which legalized female suffrage).

With the anthology Sisterhood is Powerful and other works, such as Sexual Politics,
being published at the start of the decade, feminism started to reach a larger audience
than ever before.

Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Betty Ford, Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Robin
Morgan, Kate Millet, Elizabeth Holtzman, and many other women-and men-led the
movement for women's equality.

Most efforts of the movement, especially aims at social equality and repeal of the
remaining oppressive, sexist laws, were successful. Doors of opportunity were more
numerous and much further open than before as women gained unheard of success in
business, politics, education, science, the law, and even the home. However there were
significant failures, most notably the failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution with only three more states needed to ratify it (efforts to ratify ERA in
the unratified states continues to this day and twenty-two states have adopted state
ERAs). Also, the wage gap failed to close, but it did become smaller (there is also action
still taken to ensure pay equality to this day).

The feminist era ended in the early 1980s with the new conservative leadership in
Washington, D.C., but American women created a brief, but powerful, third-wave in the
early 1990s which addressed sexual harrasment (inspired by the Anita Hill-Clarence
Thomas Senate Judiciary Committee hearings of 1991) and violence against women. The
results of the movement included a new awareness of such issues amongst women, and
unprecedented numbers of women elected to public office, particularly the United States
Senate.

Civil rights

While still around in the '70s, the African American Civil Rights Movement had achieved
its main goals, lost much passion with the deaths of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. and Senator Bobby Kennedy, and backed into the shadows, largely to make way
for the feminist revolution which it itself had overshadowed for most of the 1960s. The
seventies were seen as the "woman's turn", though many feminists incorporated civil
rights ideals into their movement. A courageous feminist who had inherited the
leadership position of the civil rights movement from her husband, Coretta Scott King, as
leader of the black movement, called for an end to all discrimination, helping and
encouraging the Woman's Liberation movement, and other movements as well.

Science and technology

The 1970s witnessed an explosion in the understanding of solid-state physics, driven by
the development of the integrated circuit, and the laser. The CERN super-collider was
constructed, and Stephen Hawking developed his theories of black holes and the
boundary-condition of the universe at this period. The biological sciences greatly
advanced, with molecular biology, bacteriology, virology, and genetics achieving their
modern forms in this decade. Biodiversity became a cause of major concern as habitat
destruction, and Stephen Jay Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium revolutionized
evolutionary thought. Space exploration reached its zenith in the 1970s with the
ambitious Voyager program aimed at outer planets in the solar system, though Apollo
lunar flights terminated in 1972. The Soviet Union developed vital involving long-term
human life in free-fall on the Salyut and later Mir space stations.

The birth of modern computing was in the 1970s, which saw the development of the
world's first general microprocessor, the C programming language, rudimentary personal
computers, pocket calculators, the first supercomputer, and consumer video games. The
1970s were also the start of fiber optics, which transformed the communications industry.
In automotive technology, United States and especially Europe turned toward more
lightweight, fuel efficient vehicles. Automotive historians have also described the period
as 'the era of poor quality control', though the integration of the computer and robot,
particularly in Japan, allowed unprecedented improvements in mass production. In
consumer goods, microwave ovens and Cassette tapes surged in popularity, and the first
consumer videocassette recorders became available. Genetic engineering became a
commercially viable technology.
Culture
Role of women in society

Isabel Martínez de Perón(left) becomes the

first woman President of Argentina in
1974 and the first woman non-monarch
head of state in the Western hemisphere.

Margaret Thatcher(right) shortly after

becoming the United Kingdom's first woman
Prime Minister in 1979. Thatcher's political
and economic agenda began the first government committed to
neoliberalism.

The role of women in society was profoundly altered with growing feminism across the
world and with the presence and rise of a significant number of women as heads of state
outside of monarchies and heads of government in a number of countries across the world
during the 1970s, many being the first women to hold such positions. Non-monarch
women heads of state and heads of government in this period included Isabel Martínez de
Perón as the first woman President in Argentina and the first woman non-monarch head
of state in the Western hemisphere in 1974 until being deposed in 1976, Elisabeth
Domitien becomes the first woman Prime Minister of the Central African Republic,
Indira Gandhi continuing as Prime Minister of India until 1977 (and taking office again in
1980), Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel and acting Chairman Soong Ching-ling of the
People's Republic of China continuing their leadership from the sixties, Lidia Gueiler
Tejada becoming the interim President of Bolivia beginning from 1979 to 1980, Maria de
Lourdes Pintasilgo becoming the first woman Prime Minister of Portugal in 1979, and
Margaret Thatcher becoming the first woman Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in
1979. Both Indira Gandhi and Margaret
Thatcher would remain important political
figures in the following decade in the 1980s.

Music
The early 1970s saw the rise of popular soft
rock music, with such legendary recording
artists as The Carpenters, Elton John, James
Taylor, John Denver, The Eagles, America,
Chicago, The Doobie Brothers, Bread and
Steely Dan as well as the further rise of such
popular, influential rhythm and blues (R&B) artists as multi-instrumentalist Stevie
Wonder and the popular quintet The Jackson 5.

Led Zeppelin performing in the early 1970s

The mid-1970s besides the ever present Grateful Dead , also saw the rise of disco music,
which dominated popular music during the last half of the decade. In response to this,
rock music became increasingly hard edged with artists such as Led Zeppelin and Black
Sabbath. Minimalism also emerged, lead by composers such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich
and Michael Nyman. This was a break from the intellectual serial music of the tradition
of Schoenberg which lasted from the early 1900s to 1960s.

Experimental classical music influenced both art rock and progressive rock as well as the
punk rock and New Wave genres. Hard rock and Heavy metal also emerged among
British bands Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Led Zeppelin and Judas Priest.
Australian band AC/DC also found its hard rock origins in the early 1970s. In Europe,
there was a surge of popularity in the early decade for glam rock. The mid-seventies saw
the rise of punk music from its protopunk/garage band roots in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Major acts include the Ramones, Blondie, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, and The Clash.
The highest-selling album was Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon (1973). It remained
on the Billboard Top 200 Albums Chart for 741 weeks. The rise of Disco music occurred
in the late 1970s; however, the first half of the 1970s saw many jazz musicians from the
Miles Davis school achieve cross-over success through jazz-rock fusion. In Germany,
Manfred Eicher started the ECM label, which quickly made a name for 'chamber jazz'.
Towards the end of the decade, Jamaican reggae music, already popular in the Caribbean
and Africa since the early 1970s, became very popular in the U.S. and in Europe, mostly
because of reggae superstar and legend Bob Marley. The late '70s also saw the beginning
of hip hop music with the song "Rapper's Delight" by Sugarhill Gang. Country music
remained very popular in the U.S. In 1977 it became more mainstream after Kenny
Rogers became a solo singer and scored many hits on both the country and pop charts

Cinema
In 1970s European cinema, the failure of the Prague Spring brought about nostalgic
motion pictures such as István Szabó's Szerelmesfilm (1970). German New Wave and
Rainer Fassbinder's existential movies characterized film-making in Germany. The
movies of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman reached a new level of expression in
motion pictures like Cries and Whispers (1973).

Asian cinema of the 1970s catered to the rising middle class fantasies and struggles. In
the Bollywood cinema of India, this was epitomised by the movies of Bollywood
superhero Amitabh Bachchan. Another Asian touchstone beginning in the early '70s was
traditional Hong Kong martial arts film which sparked a greater interest in Chinese
martial arts to the West. Martial arts film reached the peak of its popularity largely in part
due to its greatest icon, Bruce Lee.
Hollywood emerged from its early 1970s slump with young film-makers. Top-grossing
Jaws (1975) ushered in the blockbuster era of film-making, though it was eclipsed two
years later by the science-fiction epic Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977).

The Rocky Horror Picture Show bombed terribly (1974) only to reappear as a midnight
show (1977).

Television
In the United Kingdom, color channels were now available; three stations had begun
broadcasting in color between 1977 and 1979. UK dramas included Play for Today and
Pennies From Heaven. The science fiction show Doctor Who reached its peak. Many
popular British situation comedies (sit-coms) were gentle, innocent, unchallenging
comedies of middle-class life; typical examples were Terry and June, Sykes, and The
Good Life. A more diverse view of society was offered by series like Porridge and Rising
Damp. In police dramas there was a move towards increasing realism; popular shows
included Dixon of Dock Green, Softly, Softly, and The Sweeney.

In the United States, long-standing trends were declining. The Red Skelton Show and The
Ed Sullivan Show, long-revered American institutions, were canceled. The "family
sitcom" saw its last breath at the start of the new decade with The Brady Bunch and The
Partridge Family. Television was transformed by what became termed as "social
consciousness" programming such as All in the Family, which broke down television
barriers. With the women's movement reflected in new shows about single women in
'traditionally male' careers, such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Police Woman and
others. The television western, which had been very popular in the 1960s, died out during
the 1970s, with Bonanza, The Virginian, and Gunsmoke ending their runs. By the mid- to
late 1970s, "jiggle television"--programs centered around sexual gratification and bawdy
humor and situations such as Charlie's Angels and Three's Company--became popular.
Soap operas expanded their audience beyond housewives with the rise of All My Children
and As the World Turns. Game shows such as Match Game, The Hollywood Squares and
Family Feud were also popular daytime television. Match Game was wildly popular
during its run from 1973 to 1982, and the height of its popularity occurred between 1973
and 1977 before being taken over by Family Feud in 1978. Television's current longest-
running game show, The Price is Right began its run hosted by Bob Barker in 1972.
Another influential genre was the television newscast, which built on its initial
widespread success in the 1960s. Finally, the variety show received its last hurrah during
this decade, with shows such as The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and Donny & Marie.

Literature

Fiction in the early '70s brought a return to old-fashioned storytelling, especially with
Erich Segal's Love Story. The seventies also saw the decline of previously well-respected
writers, such as Saul Bellow and Peter De Vries, who both released poorly received
novels at the start of the decade. Racism remained a key literary subject. John Updike
emerged as a major literary figure. Reflections of the 1960s experience also found roots
in the literature of the decade through the works of Joyce Carol Oates and Morris Wright.
With the rising cost of hard-cover books and the increasing readership of "genre fiction,"
the paperback became a popular medium. Criminal non-fiction also became a popular
topic. Irreverence and satire, typified in Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, were
common literary elements. The horror genre also emerged, and by the late seventies
Stephen King had become one of the most popular genre novelists.

In non-fiction, several books related to Nixon and the Watergate scandal topped the best-
selling lists. 1977 brought many high-profile biographical works of literary figures, such
as those of Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Architecture

Architecture in the 1970s began as a the continuation of styles created by such architects
as Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Early in the decade, several
architects competed to build the tallest building in the world. Of these buildings, the most
notable are the John Hancock Center and Sears Tower in Chicago, both designed by
Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan and the World Trade Center towers that were in New
York by American architect Minoru Yamasaki. The decade also brought experimentation
in geometric design, pop-art, postmodernism and early deconstructivism.
In 1974, Louis Kahn's last and arguably most famous building, the National Assembly
Building of Dhaka, Bangladesh was completed.

The Sears Tower became the world's tallest building when completed in 1973.
The building's use of open spaces and ground breaking geometry brought rare attention to
the small southeast Asian country. Hugh Stubbins' Citicorp
Center revolutionized the incorporation of solar panels in
office buildings. The seventies brought further
experimentation in glass and steel construction and geometric
design. Chinese architect I. M. Pei's John Hancock Tower in
Boston, Massachusetts is an example, although like many
buildings of the time, the experimentation was flawed and
glass panes fell from the façade. In 1976, the completed CN
Tower in Toronto became the world's tallest free-standing
structure on land, an honor it held until 2007. The fact that no
taller tower had been built between the construction of the CN
Tower and the Burj Dubai shows how innovative the
architecture and engineering of the structure truly was.

But modern architecture was increasingly criticized, both from

the point of view of postmodern architects such as Philip
Johnson, Charles Moore and Michael Graves who advocated a
return to pre-modern styles of architecture and the
incorporation of pop elements as a means of communicating
with a broader public. Other architects, such as Peter Eisenman of the New York Five
advocated the pursuit of form for the sake of form and drew on semiotics theory for
support.

"High Tech" architecture moved forward as Buckminster Fuller continued his

experiments in geodesic domes while the George Pompidou Center, designed by Renzo
Piano and Richard Rogers, which opened in 1977, was a prominent example. As the
decade drew to a close, Frank Gehry broke out in new direction with his own house in
Santa Monica, a highly complex structure, half excavated out of an existing bungalow
and half cheaply built construction using materials such as chicken wire fencing.

Social Science

Social science intersected with hard science in the works in natural language processing
by Terry Winograd (1973) and the establishment of the first cognitive sciences
department in the world at MIT in 1979. The fields of generative linguistics and cognitive
psychology went through a renewed vigour with symbolic modeling of semantic
knowledge while the final devastation of the long standing tradition of behaviorism came
about through the severe criticism of B.F. Skinner's work in 1971 by the cognitive
scientist Noam Chomsky.

Sports

In the 1970s, the renegade sports leagues of the American Basketball Association
(founded in 1967), the North American Soccer League (also founded in 1967), the World
Hockey Association (lasting from 1972 through 1979), and the World Series Cricket
(lasting from 1977 to 1979) challenged older, established organizations. The "Battle of
the Sexes" tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, who proclaimed the
women's game to be inferior, was a turning point in sports during the decade; after King's
victory, the match was heralded as a major victory for women in athletics.

The 1972 Summer Olympics were marred by terrorism and Cold War-related
international controversy. Among the competition's highlights was the performance of
swimmer Mark Spitz, who set seven World Records to win a record of seven gold medals
in one Olympics. The 1976 Summer Olympics were highlighted by the legendary
performance of Romanian female gymnast Nadia Comaneci and the strong U.S. boxing
team.