Word: basalt
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...dream of architectural Modernism, which settled for lines of steel and glass up and down the front of a building. Herzog and de Meuron are always looking for something more complicated. For their first U.S. commission, a winery in Yountville, Calif., they constructed walls from chunks of basalt ranging in size from baseballs to boulders. But instead of being mortared together, the rocks are caged loosely behind a steel-mesh fencing so that light filters through them and into the building's interior. As with the de Young, their winery is a building with walls that are also not walls...
Thompson confounds the group by presenting a piece of “basalt, an igneous rock” that she dreamily relates to the movie Dante’s Peak...
Other sites are best enjoyed by car, like Ubehebe Crater, where winds scream over the rim of a stunning half-mile-wide, 500-ft.-deep crater formed 4,000 years ago, when rising molten basalt met cold, shallow groundwater. The mixture exploded violently, blowing off a massive lid of sedimentary rock and blasting cinders over 6 sq. mi. The multihued rocks that ring the interior of the crater were used for location shots in the original 1977 Star Wars...
...star of the museum's exhibition, though, is a 104-cm black basalt statue on loan from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. One of the best-preserved representations of a Ptolemaic queen, it has been identified as Cleopatra VII. The figure is holding a double cornucopia and wearing a headdress decorated with three cobras-symbols associated only with...
...Images of Cleopatra's great loves and political allies, Caesar and Antony, are included in the exhibition, but perhaps more interesting than any sculpted head is a joke in stone dating from 34 B.C. Inscribed in Greek on a basalt statue base found at Alexandria is a reference to "Antony, the Great, lover without peer." The text, says Higgs, contains a pun relating to the "Association of Inimitable Livers," which Plu- tarch wrote was a group established by the high-living Antony and Cleopatra in cosmopolitan Alexandria. Antony the inimitable liver became Antony the inimitable lover, both in the brothels...