Word: gothically
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...Smith a mighty man is he. But what is he doing in a modern novel? This is in fact a Gothic novel cropping up after a lapse in taste of a century or so, and Donleavy's Smith is the once familiar Byronic hero, the diabolically fascinating doomed aristocrat...
Like its original, the modern Gothic novel is prone to interest in tombs, graveyards, menacing strangers, cryptic portents, castles and ghosts. These are all present in A Singular Man, cleverly transposed into the idiom of contemporary Manhattan and ancillary Fairfield County. Smith has a great marble mausoleum under construction, air-conditioned, flood-and earthquake-proof. Smith moodily lurks there from time to time. The ghosts are of the contemporary autobiographical kind-Smith's own spectral guilty memories acquired in a posh Jesuit prep school. The furies are represented by the Press. Evil is represented by the abandoned power-bitch...
...Cheek-by-jowl existed buildings from the colonial brick of Connecticut Hall where Nathan Hale once lived, to Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's dark glass box containing the university's IBM computer center. At one end of the campus is an electricity-generating powerhouse in, of all things, Gothic; not far away is a student dwelling, Davenport College, so eclectic that its street fac.ade is pseudo-Gothic and its courtyard colonial brick...
Between Saloon & Gym. At a time when many college architects around the U.S. were building contemporary campus structures as neat, clean and impersonal as factories, Saarinen decided to come to modern terms with the gargoyle. Given a site over which loomed the 197-ft.-high Gothic gymnasium, he designed his buildings to be "good neighbors." To capture the masonry spirit of nearby older pseudo-Gothic buildings, Saarinen pumped wet concrete into frames that were filled with stones, simulating inexpensively their handcrafted finish...
...hill town of San Gimignano, Saarinen plotted a multilevel alleyway between the two new colleges. Lying between Mory's famed saloon and the gym, this walkway separates the colleges in a cavernous passage while louvered windows peep through sandy slabs. The atmosphere is similar to Yale's Gothic buildings of the 1920s-though one modern-for-modern's-sake critic likens it to a set for Ivanhoe. Determined to avoid the typical cookie-cut module, Saarinen decided that as far as possible no two rooms should be alike. Result: though at first scorned, his Stiles and Morse...