Word: frenchness
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...French architect Jacques Ferrier is a big fan of concrete. He has used it extensively in his latest work, including the French pavilion he has designed for the 2010 World Fair in Shanghai, and believes it has strong aesthetic appeal. "It has a sensuality," he enthuses. "It evokes images of white minerality." Most of all, Ferrier praises concrete for its environmental properties. One of his concept projects is Hypergreen, a showcase tower with a curved concrete lattice façade, designed to generate enough energy to meet most of its own needs...
...both environmentally friendly and more effective in fighting corrosion. Dulux Trade, the paint subsidiary of Netherlands-based chemical firm AkzoNobel, this year started selling Ecosure, a type of paint with much reduced amounts of embodied carbon and other volatile organic compounds. And at the R&D center of French cement firm Lafarge, director Pascal Casanova waxes lyrical about Ductal, a super-resilient product the center has developed that he calls the "Formula One" of concrete. It's what architect Ferrier intends to use in his 807-ft. (246 m) Hypergreen tower, a project that could not be built with regular...
...sense of how technological progress is translating into environmental gains, take a trip to Lafarge's research campus, just outside the French city of Lyons. The world's largest cement company, Lafarge has set itself a goal: by 2010, it will cut its net CO2 emissions for every ton of cement it produces to 20% below the 1990 level. But it is also steaming ahead with research into smarter, stronger and less polluting products, including ultra-high-performance concrete. Research director Casanova traces the path of innovation back to the 1980s, when the first big gains were made in increasing...
Such shocking moments--and startling candor--are everywhere in The World Is What It Is (Knopf; 554 pages), a biography of Naipaul by the British writer Patrick French that is as haunting and harrowing a psychological document as you could ask for. Telling the life of the famously exacting writer has long seemed a daunting prospect, not least because he has written so often and with such unsparing honesty about his ambitions and insecurities. But French pursues his prey with an acuity worthy of the man himself. That this unsettling record is an authorized biography says something impressive about both...
Excavating Pat's diary and the writer's own journal and talking to more than a hundred people on several continents, French grippingly develops an account of the writer's life as cool and undeluded as Naipaul's former friend Paul Theroux's was rivetingly emotional. Though he remains deeply sympathetic to Pat, who gave herself over without complaint to a man she was convinced was a genius, French is otherwise as plainspoken as his subject: the critic Clive James is "an ill-favoured Australian humorist." Naipaul's second wife Nadira he calls "dyslexic, emotional, fairly scandalous...