Word: basalt
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...since come to the conclusion that "architecture can be medicine, or at least part of the therapy." His answer is a long, low, $112,000 clinic building that bears no resemblance to standard medical surroundings. Patients arriving for their 50-minute hours last week were ushered through the Oregon-basalt entrance into the spacious waiting rooms, screened by a shoji. The long, sky-lit corridor (which has warm, hand-rubbed oak-flooring walls) leads to the ten consulting rooms, each soundproofed to silence, looks out through a full glass wall onto a serene, narrow garden court planted with vine maples...
Errant Actors. A bluff six-footer who served in the World War I navy, studied law and economics, Wiirmeling, 53, began a career in the German civil service but was fired by the Nazis (1939) and turned to mining (basalt). After World War II he pitched into Christian Democratic politics, was soon on the party's three-man executive board, the recognized leader of its strong Catholic right wing, and one of Adenauer's busiest campaign speakers. (Wurmeling, his wife recalls, campaigned so hard that "he used to give speeches in his sleep.") After the last election. Adenauer...
...materials in tension rather than walls bear the load of the building. [The] basic structural qualities [of building materials] are only two: resistance to compression and to tension stresses ... In all architecture before our time, only the compression strength of materials was taken into consideration. Rocks like granite and basalt were the strongest, and great feats were performed with marble, limestone, sandstone, travertine, and even with manmade stones-burnt brick and mass concrete . . . The builders who used the arch . . . merely carried the use of materials in compression to its ultimate capability...
...main masses: "Laurasia" (North America and Eurasia) and "Gondwana" (South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia), which were separated only by shallow seas (see map). During the Cretaceous period, 60 million years ago, both masses broke up and drifted slowly apart, their light granitic rocks floating on the heavy, plastic basalt that underlies both the oceans and the land...
...Continents Strayed. But the expedition may throw light on a more important mystery: the origin of the continents. Some geologists believe that the continents are masses of granite floating in the heavier plastic basalt which underlies both the land and the ocean basins. Since they are floating, they may drift, like infinitely slow-moving icebergs. One theory holds that North and South America have drifted away from Europe and Africa, and that the curving crack between them has widened to form the Atlantic Ocean...