Word: modernize
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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FRAGMENTING land into small holdings clashes head on with the trend toward efficient, big-scale farming with machinery. Essential for modern grain cultivation, big-scale farming is also useful in sugar; Puerto Rico tried and let die a 500-acre limit on sugar farms. By turning his agrarian reform against bigness rather than inefficiency, Castro may well scare off all U.S. capital and thereby slow Cuba's growth toward a diversified economy. As Mexico and Puerto Rico have proved, diversification provides new jobs and takes most of the fire away from the land-reform issue. Only 55% of Mexico...
...Noguchi has not shown more often is that he is too busy. Long an architects' favorite, he has been swamped with commissions in recent years, including statues and gardens for Connecticut General's new offices near Hartford, Conn. (TIME color, Sept. 16, 1957) and the highly praised modern Japanese garden for Paris' new UNESCO headquarters. Not all commissions work out as planned. In his present exhibition, Noguchi displays a towering column...
...architecture blossoms out in billowing forms of reinforced concrete, many a modern architect is turning back to study the work of the handful of pioneers who blazed the way for modern shell structures. One of the foremost and least known is Engineer Eduardo Torroja y Miret, 59. A short (5 ft. 4½ in.), bald-domed Spaniard, Torroja was throwing wafer-thin slabs of concrete up into space as early as 1933. His race-track stands, soccer stadiums, marketplaces, churches and aqueducts are only now getting the recognition they deserve as ancestors of some of today's most spectacular...
...world's most breathtaking architectural sights. Even in the small churches and shrines that Torroja has built for Pyrenees villages, he has exploited shell structure to produce new forms whose strength comes from shape and whose beauty springs from mathematical curves possible only in modern reinforced concrete. Torroja is fond of walking his institute visitors under the sickle-shaped ribs of the pergola that spring from the outside wall and curve elegantly overhead like jets of water frozen in a high wind, explaining with professional pride that they are actually "Bernoullian lemniscates* with zero end curvature." Says Torroja, "Every...
Both books may have an odd effect on readers, for they are set in the era before the modern welfare state-capitalist or socialist-encroached on the life of the individual. Whatever the merit of the "good old days," these stories seem to refute the notion that they were happier. In tale after tale, the plots turn on the tragedies of men and women shrugged off by society and left to the mercy of God and the charity of strangers...