Word: gothic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Architecturally, the Piazza della Signoria is a unique example of the harmony of three styles, separated in time by some 250 years. Dominating them all is the rough-stoned Palazzo Vecchio, with its narrow, Tuscan-Gothic windows. At right angles stands the triple-arched Loggia dei Lanzi (named for the German lancers quartered there by the Medici), which many critics consider the most beautiful secular building in Florence. Between the two is the short, narrow street which Mannerist Painter Giorgio di Vasari created as a tour de force in perspective, leading to the Arno...
BRUSSELS' GRAND' PLACE is another handsome object lesson in the good-neighborliness of conflicting styles. The steep-roofed Hôtel de Ville, a noble example of middle Gothic, rests comfortably alongside the fantasia of the guildhalls; the light, vibrant stone tracery of the late Gothic Broodhuis (Bread Market) surpasses, without clashing against, the ornate, 18th century classical façade of the House of the Dukes of Brabant...
...Jonahs as well as Ahabs go looking for their private whales. Abe Rogoff is a middle-aged Jonah just asking to be swallowed. For ten years he has been a snickering outsider ("to take business seriously is a kind of disease") camouflaged as a docile insider in the pseudo-Gothic spires of Manhattan's Tower Mutual Life Insurance Co. Abe's disease might be diagnosed as undulant barricade fever, the nostalgic complaint of an ex-free-lover, ex-radical newspaper editor and ex-Wobbly. The newest totalitarianism, Abe decides, is Total Security. As the whale of social conformity...
Thus to my Hegelian sensibility, the pendulum theory appears an arbitrary construct. Western culture incorporates not only Biblical and Hellenic elements, but also Gothic. It takes up parts of these traditions and discards others. The classical Renaissance did not simply resurrect the Ancients in their old form. Gibbon dressed his Romans and his Christians as neo-classicists, and while Hellenism dominated the synthesis, it did not emerge pure. Consequently, it hardly seems likely that the impending transformation will be accomplished with a religion designed for the Hellenic Babel...
Memorial Hall loomed large before 900 hesitant and expectant freshmen on the morning of September 21, 1928, as they filed before "the huge Gothic pile" to register as members of the Class of 1932. The eyes of Burke and Chatham looked severely down upon them, the jealous gargoyles stared angrily at the Yard behind them, and the clangor of the bell seemed to make time itself revert to the 19th century as they enrolled...