Word: monumentalized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...superintendent of the Bandelier National Monument, six miles southwest of Los Alamos, began a controlled burn of 330 acres as a fire-prevention measure. And for the next week, the fires would not stop, first consuming dry grass, then Ponderosa pines, then, engorged to 32,000-plus acres, gobbling up hundreds of homes and singeing buildings at Los Alamos, birthplace of the atom bomb. The fires never came close to a building that holds drums of transuranic mixed waste and a metric ton of plutonium. No disastrous explosions occurred, but the air will be monitored for radioactivity. Meanwhile, noxious fumes...
Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Harry Gugger and Christine Binswanger, who share credit for the redesign, were smart enough not to mess too much with the building. "Sir Giles Scott created a monument," says Gugger. "We wanted to blur the boundaries of the monument, to turn it into open space." Blur is the right word. It's the gentle transformation of a giant. The most astonishing thing about it may be that a looming, great, scary industrial complex could become something so polite...
...along Truc Bach Lake and disgorged a small group of Americans. Leading the pack was a tour guide with a head of white hair, a stiff gait and enormous Ray-Ban sunglasses. "Here it is, ladies and gentlemen!" John McCain announced as he paced over to the modest concrete monument that commemorates the day in October 1967 when a Vietnamese missile shot down his plane and he was pulled from the lake by an irate mob. And unless you spent the entire primary season on the phone trying to match wits with Regis, you know McCain endured the next...
...would think that returning to Hanoi would be an occasion for solemn reflection. But this was his eighth visit since the war, and as he inspected the monument, its facade cracked and stained by a vandal's splash of red paint, the Arizona Senator wasn't exactly overcome with emotion. "At least it's better than last time," he noted wryly, "when the grass had grown all around it and there was bird crap everywhere." He has passed his love for the well-timed wisecrack on to his son Jack, who at 14 was visiting Vietnam for the first time...
...happens, is Beijing. Without fanfare, crews in the capital last month started construction of Beijing's National Theater, a glitzy, $420 million monument to modernity just minutes from the imperial splendor of the Forbidden City. Designed by French architect Paul Andreu, the voluptuous glass and titanium complex will encompass an opera house, a 2,500-seat conventional theater, an experimental theater complete with rotating stage, and a 2,000-seat concert hall. The cultural overhaul has taken nearly a half-century to get under way: former Premier Zhou Enlai first conceived of a national stage in 1958, but plans languished...