Word: grid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...second boom occurred at the height of Barcelona's industrial prosperity and misery, between 1860 and 1910. Its main frame, the huge grid of chocolate- square blocks that stretches from the Barri Gotic up the slope toward the Collserola hills, was designed in 1859 by a socialist engineer named Ildefons Cerda. It is known as the Eixample, or Enlargement, and is the ancestor of all the Utopian schemes of 20th century architecture. The cultural contents of this grid, as it developed, proved no less remarkable. The trade-obsessed city of powerful clerics and stuffy businessmen was the closest place...
Gradually it filled Cerda's grid, which is now the world's greatest museum of 1900s architecture. The big Catalan mercantile families who made their piles after 1850 and ran the city tended to preen themselves on being modern versions of Renaissance princes -- all the more so since most of their grandfathers had been artisans or colonial hustlers. There was a lot of pent- up vigor and ambition itching to glorify itself...
...auditorium, from the sculpted Valkyries riding across the proscenium arch to the encrustations of ceramic roses (each the size of a cabbage) on the ceiling, it takes decor beyond congestion; and yet, because it is also one of Europe's earliest curtain-wall buildings, framed in a steel grid, Catalan historians are fond of praising its "rationalism" -- which was also real...
...number of two-dimensional, cliched images: L.A. means the glamour and glitz of Hollywood; it means slums teeming with illegal immigrants; it means the hedonism of an appearance-obsessed culture, it means pristine beaches and smogchoked hillsides; it means a postmodern, impersonal city of intertwined freeways and grid-locked streets; it means inner cities blighted by gang warfare and Rodeo Drive...
...fact, a civilization in these forests, even if it is nonhuman. The area is latticed with trails, some as wide as boulevards, that have been cut and maintained by elephants. Says Ndokanda: "This is the elephant's city, and the leopard's and other animals' too." The grid of paths leads to the elephants' favorite spots: mineral licks and clearings, where they socialize with relatives and friends; baths, where they cover themselves with mud; knobby trees, where they rub the mud off, stripping their skin of ticks in the process; and trees such as the Balanites wilsoniana and Autranella congoensis...