Word: designators
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...branches provided shade for prayer and theological discussion. As the young religion spread, Arabs - and later Asians and Africans - developed their own ideas of what made a building a mosque. But that innovative spirit has slowed in recent decades, leaving most Islamic skylines dominated by the dome-and-minaret design that first appeared centuries...
That's now changing. A new generation of Muslim builders and designers, as well as non-Muslims designing for Muslim groups, often in Europe or North America, are updating the mosque for the 21st century, sparking not just a hugely creative period in Islamic design, but one riven by controversy. The disputes over modern mosques echo larger debates taking place in the Islamic world today about gender, power and, particularly in immigrant communities, Islam's place in Western societies. Even the simplest design decision can reflect questions that are crucial to Islam and its adherents: Should women be allowed...
...moment to pause and reflect before we begin building again. When big-time real estate development resumes, we can move beyond the incoherent, anything-goes paradigm of the postwar era and produce more places to live along the lines of the towns and cities everyone instinctively loves, communities designed to become true communities. "The days where we're just building sprawl forever," Obama said in February in South Florida, "those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats - everybody recognizes that that's not a smart way to design communities...
...were born during the malaise-y '70s, just as wit and humor - the New Yorker, the Marx Brothers, screwball comedy - flourished in the '30s. I'm even hopeful that the meltdown and resulting reset might jar the culture in deeper ways. For three decades, too much of art and design and entertainment has seemed caught in a cul-de-sac, almost compulsively reviving styles and remixing the greatest hits of the past. (Think: post-Modern architecture, pop music based on sampling, '60s-style shift dresses, pseudo-midcentury home décor.) Since we're now finished with...
...components and distribute these in Nano "kits" to independent entrepreneurs - trained and monitored by Tata Motors - for final assembly and distribution. "They will become our dealers," Ratan Tata explains. He hopes the Nano will push the auto industry toward fully outsourced manufacturing, leaving car companies to focus on design and marketing - a structure similar to that used in the highly competitive computer industry, where companies such as Apple create products but subcontract the actual manufacturing to specialists operating factories in China and other countries where labor costs are relatively low. "What I tried to describe on the Nano...