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In Oklahoma City, John Johansen’s 1970 Mummers Theater has long been one of those love-it-or-hate-it buildings. Now called the Stage Center, the structure is a whimsical assemblage of brutalist concrete forms and brightly colored steel ramps. Hovering above it all are three corrugated metal boxes containing the building’s mechanical systems. A member of the Harvard Five, Johansen, now 95, called the theater “not a building as we have known it, but a fragment,” and claimed it was inspired by the complex beauty of electronic circuit boards. In 1971, Time magazine critic Robert Hughes praised it as “an exquisitely human building in its scale, organization, and intriguing unpredictabilities.”
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