Word: nervy
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Torroja (pronounced toe-roe-ha) has long been recognized within a narrow professional circle as a creative engineer whose breathtaking structures are rivaled in Europe only by those of Italy's Pier Luigi Nervi. Even the late Frank Lloyd Wright doffed his porkpie in salute, said, "He has expressed the principles of organic construction better than any engineer I know...
...Rogers), was picked by UNESCO to name Les Trois who would actually design the building. The site was changed twice to placate the jittery guardians of Paris' celebrated skyline. With that act over, the U.S.'s Marcel Breuer, Italy's famed master of concrete, Pier Luigi Nervi, and France's Bernard Zehrfuss could get down to work...
...Nervi's task was the formidable one of carrying through on the structural problems, making a concrete edifice that would appear not only airy but also monumental and imposing. Placing a building on stilts (pilotis) has been modern architectural fashion ever since France's Le Corbusier introduced it back in the 1920s. But rarely has a column in concrete had such handsome treatment as Nervi evolved for the 72 paired columns that hold the seven-story Secretariat some 16 ft. in the air. Tapered from a rectangular cross section at the top to a near oval...
Equally successful is the butterfly-roofed conference hall. With roof and monumental façade shaped from folded concrete slabs, it attains simple dignity by the drama of its stark engineering. Says Nervi: "At last reinforced concrete has become a 'noble' architectural material...
...Henry Moore, vintage 1938, turned out a reclining, Swiss-cheese female, carved out of rich travertine from Michelangelo's old quarry at Carrara (see color). For all its massive ten tons, it fails of monumentality, is less successful than the reinforced concrete canopy behind it that Breuer and Nervi designed as an afterthought...