Word: axial
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...from another cultural world between the gray townscape and the green hills that rise behind it. Not since Joern Utzon's 1973 design for the Sydney Opera House has a building so dramatically imposed itself on a city. On the river edge of a town planned in terms of axial Beaux Arts order, architect Gehry, 68, has inserted a startlingly irregular building that defies every convention of axiality, including the right angle, of which there doesn't appear to be one, either inside his structure...
...behind that revolution is pure economics. Gamma-radiation knives, wondrous devices that focus tiny cobalt beams precisely on microscopic brain malignancies and malformations, cost $3 million each but may ultimately reduce the need for other costly therapies and thus afford a net saving to society. Sophisticated scanning devices--computerized axial tomography (CAT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and nuclear-imaging systems--cost hospitals millions of dollars, and patients (or their insurers) are typically charged thousands for their use. But by pinpointing hard-to-find tumors and other signs of disease, these machines save invaluable time and further diagnostic testing...
...nothing much. Suppose, France's Clottes suggests, that 20,000 years from now, after a global cataclysm in which all books perished and the word vanished from the face of the earth, some excavators dig up the shell of a building. It has pointy ogival arches and a long axial hall at the end of which is a painting of a man nailed to a cross. In the absence of written evidence, what could this effigy mean? No more than the bison or rhino on the rock at Chauvet. Representation and symbolism have parted company...
Some eras have been particularly critical for God's history. During the so- called Axial Age (800 B.C. to 200 B.C.), political and economic changes led to new religious ideologies throughout the known civilized world: Taoism and Confucianism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in India, the rational philosophy of Plato and Aristotle in Greece, differing concepts of monotheism in Israel and in Iran (Zoroastrianism). Common to all these ideologies was what Armstrong calls "the duty of compassion," meaning authentic religious experiences must be integrated into everyday life. The Axial Age was a time of prosperity, when power was passing from...