Word: domes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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With its stiltlike legs and bulging dome, the ungainly contraption looked like a basketball balanced on a bar stool. But the strange rocket that the Navy unveiled last week at its China Lake (Calif.) Ordnance Test Station comes closest yet to solving one of the most difficult problems of space travel: how to make a soft landing on the moon or some even more distant airless planet...
Photographs and models of the buildings will go on display in the festival's dome as part of the fine arts program...
Overshadowing the façade was the high dome, 8,909,200 lbs. of cast-iron ribs and plates so big at the bottom perimeter that an arc of it overhung the main wall-an engineering oddity concealed by the pediment topping the colonnade in front of the wall. Some critics prized this set-out look of the dome for the "cascade" effect it gave to a viewer standing close and looking sharply up. Classicists, however objected that the style varied too much from Old World models, whose domes are, set well back so that walls and roof can buttress...
Seeing the new façade, most architects and others who were critical of the change tend to accept it peaceably. The new marble, plus the creamy paint on the dome, undoubtedly are an improvement over the flaked-sandstone look. And the forward shift of the front is so comparatively slight that visitors hardly note a significant change in the relationship of dome and wall...
...this problem has arisen over the years : St. Peter's in Rome, as many as ten big chains have been stretched around the base of the dome...