Word: monumental
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...artist over his creation"-and lost. Undaunted, he has appealed the case, supported by a group of painters, musicians and writers, including Joan Miró, Pierre Boulez, Olivier Messiaen and Eugène Ionesco. Meanwhile, Renault has started to bury the concrete base and central basin of the monument. They plan to turn the 2,150-sq.-yd. area into a lawn...
...million house is not a home-and it no longer symbolizes California. As just about everybody knows by now Reagan's successor, Jerry Brown, refuses to inspect, much less inhabit the abode, conspicuously preferring to bunk downtown in a modest $275-a-month apartment. Today this monument to the California dream stands cold and mute, an incongruous reminder of an era that no longer exists...
Alas, that grande dame of the Paris skyline, the 1,052-ft.-tall Eiffel Tower, is ailing. Parisians fretted last week as the French press disclosed that their cherished 88-year-old monument was in need of $10.5 million worth of repairs. Most alarming is the condition of one of her antique hydraulic elevators that take visitors from the second to the third observation platform. The newsmagazine L 'Express quoted from a confidential 1970 report by the tower's chief engineer, who had warned of the lift's "serious fatigue." A cylinder might burst, he contended, causing...
Philosopher Roland Barthes believes a large part of the tower's fascination is its "fully useless" quality: "It achieved absolute zero as a monument." In a 1975 book, Author Joseph Harriss makes the same point: "Parisians have always recognized the human need for the superfluous." The late playwright Jean Giraudoux, who was born around the time of the tower's conception, came to its defense. It has reached an age, he observed, "when one likes to have children-and American girls-crawling all over...
...idea of a living memorial opens unlimited vistas to monument-minded Americans. What about installing a young novelist in William Faulkner's house in Oxford, Miss.? A young architect in Frank Lloyd Wright's house in Oak Park, Ill.? A young physicist in Albert Einstein's house in Princeton, N.J.? A young semanticist in Casey Stengel's house in Glendale, Calif...