Word: metallism
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WASHINGTON: Sober, scientific Occidental medicine has always been a little condescending toward the mysteries of the East. Acupuncture, the idea that the body-wide insertion of long thin metal needles can ease pain, is no exception...
...list of conditions met to get the permit to break ground eventually ran to 107 items. Some were major design considerations. The neighbors didn't want Meier's signature white surfaces glaring at them in the Pacific sun, and the metal cladding panels were accordingly colored a pale tan. They insisted on, and got, strict limits to the height of the buildings. And they hated the idea of culture-curious hoi polloi, 1.3 million of them expected each year, looking down into their backyards. One woman feared that visitors to the Getty would look across the valley from a spur...
...kind of context that not only Gehry but also some of the artists he is closest to, like the sculptor Richard Serra, love. Disregarded, blue-collar beauty. The rusty pecs of Basque industrial capitalism. Seen from the far side of the river, the museum does indeed evoke a vast metal ship, full of compound curves, run aground--a sort of art-ark. "To be at the bend of a working river intersected by a large bridge," Gehry wrote at an early stage of the design, "and connecting the urban fabric of a fairly dense city to the river's edge...
...plate glass hung on steel members with exaggerated joints and flanges, and titanium skin. (The titanium sounds like an extravagance, but wasn't. Gehry was able to lock up enough of it to cover the museum when the Russians, in 1993, started dumping their stocks of the normally ultraexpensive metal on the market.) Their forms swelling and deflating in a strongly rhythmical way, large trunks of glass, plaster and titanium rise to the top of the five-story structure; they house utilities, a stair and an elevator...
...very big pieces work very well here, notably Claes Oldenburg's soft shuttlecock drooping from a balcony of the atrium, and the curving steel sheets of Serra's 104-ft.-long Snake. It would be a tremendous pity if Bilbao ended up with a great building stuffed with heavy-metal, late-imperial American cultural landfill. What broad public is really interested in such art? For the present, however, people will come for the building...