Word: paradoxical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Corbu's career has been equally full of paradox. He has put up about 75 buildings (Frank Lloyd Wright built 500, Christopher Wren nearly 150). The French government has yet to commission him to design so much as a school or a hospital, and the first Le Corbusier building in the U.S.-a $1,500,000 Visual Arts Center at Harvard-is only now getting started. He began as the architectural prophet of the machine age, the poet of the mass-produced. Yet his recent buildings in India are in a sense almost handmade. He was all logic...
This gap between appearance and reality, pretension and performance plagued the Age of Reason (roughly 1657-1757) and made it an age of paradox. The age professed skepticism and credulously embraced charlatans like Count Cagliostro, who had a yellow pill that would keep one permanently young, à la Dorian Gray. The age prattled of liberty, but the man the intellectual French Encyclopedists hailed as a philosopher king, Frederick the Great, was described by one British observer as "the completest tyrant God ever made. I had rather be a post horse than his first Minister, or his brother, or his wife...
Mumford's theme is thus the ceaseless struggle between modern civilization and modern man, massively and often turgidly argued in the pioneering tetralogy-on which he labored, heedless of the paradox that as his reputation has grown, his influence has diminished. Now, in an intricate synthesis of his past output, Sociologist-Art Critic-Litterateur-Town Planner Mumford has written a densely composed history of that struggle on its most bloody battlefield-the city. The interpretation may not be fresh, but simply as a Portable Mumford (if 576 pages of narrative, 56 pages of annotated bibliography, and 114 pages...
...what is wrong with the crew. The men are in good condition, the stroke is up to racing cadence, the starts are adequate for this time of year, and the bladework is improving. But oddly enough, it hasn't added up to any speed. One oarsman commented on the paradox rather well earlier this week: "If a combinations develope out of this, all hell could break loose...
Neither expediency nor principle justifies Murrow's action. If there is an explanation, it should be given, so as to resolve this most un-ingenuous paradox...