Rothko visited Italy while planning them, was impressed by the blank windows of Michelangelo's Laurentian Library and the deep red paintings of Pompeii, but what they really resemble in their combination of painterly grandeur and raw reality is the art of Caravaggio.
Conceited, impatient, and breathtakingly arrogant, he took to the grandeur and the raw power of the job with unholy relish.
At best, as in "Days on Blue" (1974-77), in which a massive sheet of sea-green glass slants through a barn-door-size opening in an 18-foot sheet of raw steel, there is architectonic grandeur and Rothkoesque luminosity.
That plush, old-fashioned movie palace may seem like an incongruous setting for rough and raw encounters with reality, but the grandeur is also an appropriate reminder that even small movies deserve a big screen and a big audience.
And then there are the moments of individual grandeur, the flights of fancy and raw athleticism that leave us speechless.
Blending a raw industrial edge (and a rooftop pool) with the grandeur of the city's centro historico (historic centre), the brand new Downtown Mexico hotel celebrates minimalism among architecture from the 17th Century.
Lock does away with straight narrative, traditional gender roles, and grandeur, replacing them with arrow-sharp pointe work, raw athleticism, stark lighting, and highly suggestive film projections.
Seating eight people in comfort but with no standing room, the brass fittings and patterned carpet brought back the imperial grandeur that goes hand-in-hand with the raw industrial power of 19th century engineering.
These composite apartments can have great views, but the spaces tend to lack the flourish and grandeur of apartments on lower floors, because the raw ingredients were so very bare.
And in "Desert Grandeur," with its wave-like explosion of energy, the raw power of water as a sculptural force is nicely transformed into a pictorial motif.
