Word: architect
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Traced to its Greek foundations, the word architect comes from archi (chief) and tekton (builder). In the case of Catalan "chief builder" Antoni Gaudí, the derivation seems prosaic. For Gaudí, the word breaks easily into the three trademarks of his architecture: arches, technical brilliance and sureness, this last quality sometimes degenerating into rudeness and arrogance...
...Gaudí Year, Daniel Giralt-Miracle, says Catalans have had an uneasy relationship with the man they are now celebrating. "I think Barcelona has finally decided to have an entente cordiale with him," says Giralt-Miracle, who is director of the Gaudí Space, an area dedicated to the architect's works located in the vast attic of one of the best-known of them, the Casa Milà, in Barcelona's elegant Passeig de Gràcia. An example of this relationship is that Catalans unflatteringly dubbed the Casa Milà La Pedrera "the quarry," for its stone...
...says Giralt-Miracle. "He had his feet on the ground, but his imagination in the infinite, arriving at a time - the turn of the 19th century - when the Catalan bourgeoisie had lots of money and there was an atmosphere of ostentation, creating the need for an exuberant and emblematic architect...
...program of academic exchange with German universities, Harvard named Albert Speer as a visiting professor of architecture and urban planning. There was some controversy about this appointment: not only was Speer a member of the Nazi party, he was the Third Reich’s leading public architect and a close friend of the Fuehrer. Indeed, shortly after arriving at Harvard, Speer defended the Nazi regime in an interview with the Boston papers, saying that “Adolf Hitler is the glue that holds Germany together...
...specifics of Coyula-Cowley’s politics matter less than the fact that he is a willing, life-long functionary of a totalitarian state, and is therefore complicit in its crimes. If he is not directly responsible for them—well, in 1937, an architect named Albert Speer was not directly responsible for Nazi atrocities; indeed, he would always claim ignorance of them. But no one offered him a position at Harvard...