Word: nouveau
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Minoru Yamasaki of the World Trade Center, or spokesmen of cultural grandeur like I.M. Pei. Indeed, given the architecture Americans have had for 40 years, such a description virtually deprives Post-Modernism of living father figures. There are, of course, dead grandfathers, from the Catalan master of Art Nouveau, Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926), to the English imperial architect Sir Edward Lutyens, whose richly coded and sometimes wildly illogical structures were left wherever the British army marched, from the Somme battlefields to New Delhi...
...Civil War, for example, Americans were springing literally out of ditches into great wealth. The trajectory that their money purchased into ostentation, if not aristocracy, gave them all kinds of anxiety attacks. And so the etiquette-book business flourished, scores of manuals pouring forth to soothe and lead the nouveau riche nervously forward to some kind of presentability. Some of the rules were quite exquisite then; one writer advised that books by male and female authors should never be placed side by side on a bookshelf...
...system of tradition designed to make "gentlemen." The student lounging in the Junior Common Room of one of the Oxford colleges (often medieval in origin), taking afternoon tea (provided by the college butler) and resplendent in T-shirt and jeans, may be the son of a lord, a nouveau riche city businessman or a coal miner: you won't automatically be able to tell which. Course-work may be specialized and conservative--but it is leavened by the drama, debating, music, sports, and politics groups that English students throw themselves into in pursuit of our reputation as "gifted amateurs...
...more than a million laborers, the Forbidden City is not only a marvel of space, extravagance and style but also a dazzling repository of art, in gold and silver, ivory and jade. Restored and main tamed by a crew of 1,000, it makes Versailles look like a nouveau riche country mansion. In the hills northwest of the city is the Summer Palace, which was largely destroyed hi 1860 by Britain's Lord Elgin, son of the seigneur who took the marbles from the Parthenon. Rebuilt hi 1888 by the dotty Dowager Empress Tz'u Hsi, diverting funds...
...postwar decline. When Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958, one of his first acts was to restore the French franc to strength with a currency reform that devalued the franc, established an austerity program and even symbolically replaced the Monopoly-money ancien franc with a nouveau franc at a rate...