Word: building
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ironically, the dramatic escape had been inspired by an East German television program on the history of ballooning. A onetime aircraft mechanic who had long been looking for a way to escape from his homeland, Strelczyk immediately set out to build a hot-air balloon in accordance with the principles established by France's pioneering Montgolfier brothers in the 1780s. Strelczyk and his friend Wetzel built a cast-iron platform with posts at the corners for handholds and rope anchors. Four propane cooking-gas cylinders were fastened to the center. Their wives stitched up a balloon...
...outwardly gregarious but intensely speculative, ascetic man, Erickson always sets out, as in the Vancouver courthouse, to build imaginatively around the activities of the people who will inhabit the building. Says he: "We must think of our cities as places to live in and enjoy rather than places to work in and get out of." He is a master of scale and placement and insists on a "dialogue between space and setting," in which site determines form. A handsome, blue-eyed bachelor, he is of Swedish-Irish descent, and both dour and mischievous strains can be detected in his designs...
Erickson has immersed himself in European and Japanese architecture, spending almost half his adult life abroad. He is currently putting up a new building for Saudi Arabia's ministry of foreign affairs and a whole new city in Kuwait, and he hopes to build in China a tourist hotel that will incorporate not merely Western technology but native talents, tastes and materials as well. Indeed, China's drab and joyless metropolitan centers may even be ready for a Great Wall of Erickson...
...that I could not have packed them; at this thought he became physically sick. I was aghast when, in the plane, I wanted to change shirts before arriving in Peking. In desperation I borrowed some white shirts from John Holdridge?a six-foot-two trim former West Pointer whose build did not exactly coincide with my rather more compact physique. Photos of my party in shirtsleeves show me smiling enigmatically, in garments that left me with the appearance of having no neck...
...Nixon, how the new President's distrust of the State Department led to secret missions to Peking and Moscow and the subtle nuances of conducting simultaneous summitry with the Soviets and Chinese. Included is a section remarkably a propos today: what the U.S. did when the Soviets tried to build a nuclear submarine base in Cuba in 1970. The entire second excerpt concerns what Kissinger caUs the agony of Viet Nam": the unannounced bombing of Cambodia and the attack on the sanctuaries there; the secret negotiations in Paris-how the premature "peace is at hand" statement came to be made...