Word: dourness
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BRIGHTEST star among the bright young architects of the 1930s was a dour-looking, dynamic Finn named Alvar Aalto. His TB sanatorium at Paimio, Finland, with its cantilevered decks, was a landmark in the new international style. Almost singlehanded he had made wood a "modern material," used it in a dazzling variety of ways-an undulating ceiling for a library in Viipuri, an undulating wall for the Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair-and the tastemakers of the era all sat in Aalto's curved plywood chairs. But as the glass-and-steel revolution...
Best-known Kremlin bureaucrat accompanying Khrushchev will be dour Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, 50, who, as the youngest counselor in the Soviet embassy in Washington at the age of 30, got dubbed "the oldest young man in the capital," became Stalin's Ambassador to the U.S. (1943-46) and then to the United Nations, where he set a U.N. walkout record of 13 days 21 hr. 46 min. Khrushchev says of Gromyko: "If I tell my Foreign Minister to sit on a block of ice and stay there for months, he'll do it without back talk." Gromyko...
President Quincy retired in 1845, and before his death at age 92, wrote voluminously. A History of Harvard, a biography of his father, and a History of Boston are among his major works. But the old, dour Puritan must have spent much time in contemplation, looking over a life filled with public activity...
...Khrushchev rambled on. Poland's Gomulka nodded continually in pleased agreement. At midweek the dour Gomulka found even more to smile about. Gomulka, while beset by peasantry, church and intellectuals who want no part of Communism, is sniped at inside his party by a doctrinaire Stalinist group that deplores his every concession. Speaking in the gigantic Palace of Culture and Science, Russia's tasteless contribution to the war-ragged Warsaw skyline, Khrushchev abruptly pulled the rug out from under the diehard Stalinists who oppose Gomulka in the name of Marxist purity. "These party members," said Khrushchev, "sometimes depict...
...jaunt with President de Gaulle to Rome and Madagascar. The U.S.'s Christian Herter got in some sailing on the choppy waters of Massachusetts Bay. For Britain's Selwyn Lloyd there were long English weekends at Chequers. Even Russia's Andrei Gromyko presumably took some dour relaxation, though he also returned to Geneva with Khrushchev's humiliating words ringing in his ear: "Gromyko only says what we tell him to say. At the next Geneva meeting, he will repeat what he has already told you. If he doesn't, we will fire...