Word: birching
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hospital, a heavily guarded facility seven miles northwest of the Kremlin in an exclusive, wooded suburban area known as Kuntsevo. Traffic police who may be KGB men are stationed every quarter-mile along the two-lane road that leads to the heavily guarded hospital, which is nestled among silver birch and oak trees and surrounded by an unpainted, 10-ft.-high cement wall...
...Washington Career Lobbyist Thomas H. Boggs Jr.: "They see people making a lot more money than they do, and they see lobbying as an opportunity. They weigh that against ten to 15 more years in politics." Ex-Congressmen who do not go home are a Washington tradition. Former Senators Birch Bayh and John Sherman Cooper have Washington law practices. Onetime Minnesota Congressman Clark MacGregor is a senior vice president of United Technologies, the manufacturing conglomerate. Some former members are more powerful than they were as Congressmen: James D. McKevitt was only a one-term representative from Colorado from...
Aalto was crazy about wood. His enthusiasm grew out of a national aesthetic. Finns take an intense, quasi-mystical pleasure in their forested countryside, and timber is the country's economic mainstay. The hard, featureless blond birch that Aalto favored had been standard material for Finnish domestic objects. But in the polemical years around 1930, his abandonment of modern, mass-produced tubular steel was a retograde act. Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier had based their famous chairs and couches on state-of-the-art tubing. Aalto became convinced that tubular steel was "not satisfactory...
Each arm and leg is a continuous piece of birch, slender treads bent into a pair of supple, bulging rectangles-no angular severity for Aalto. The continuous seat and back, like a toboggan doing gymnastics, is a sheet of birch plywood bent 110° in the middle and rolled at each end. It is a perfect conceit of a chair, at once lean and voluptuous. It is also reasonably accommodating to human beings: the scrolls are functional flourishes, each a great wooden spring. In this, more than in any other piece, Aalto's devotion to wood is its saving...
...cantilever is springy, like an athlete's crouch. Indeed, Aalto's cantilevered chairs have a cheerfully anthropomorphic profile. His most splendid variations on the theme also seem the most characteristically Scandinavian: after he had tried seats and backs of plain plywood and boxy upholstery, Aalto designed birch frames crisscrossed with black linen webbing. The effect is at once urbane and countrified, not unlike the designer himself...