Word: parthenon
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...Delhi was a rousing cheer that rolled the full range of the architectural profession, from Mies van der Rohe purists to Frank Lloyd Wright ("The only embassy that does credit to the United States"). Said one U.S. architect, just back from India: "The effect is of the Parthenon, with the pierced marble screen of Delhi's Red Fort and the white of the Taj Mahal. In the sun it's going to tell a terrific story." Cracked Frank Lloyd Wright: "Why not call it Taj Maria...
...brought home a lot of generalizations-largely accurate-about the Greek character, which form his book's most engaging part. Politeness demands that a Greek be asked three times before he accepts anything. However poor, he never begs, except for cigarettes. No one hawks pictures of the Parthenon or dirty postcards to tourists ("The Greek approach to sexual matters is so direct that perhaps they cannot imagine the possibility of vicarious lechery"). The tutelary Greek deity is Narcissus: a Greek cannot resist being photographed and will disgorge photos of himself on the slightest pretext...
...TAKE the Parthenon," said Manhattan Architect Marcel Breuer. "The sculpture is architectural decoration, whereas in our sculptural solutions we use completely independent forms which by some invisible, mysterious means 'jive' with the architecture." Breuer was talking to TIME Researcher Martha Peter Welch, who called on him last week to get his views on the relationship of outdoor sculpture to modern architecture. From the Parthenon Breuer moved quickly on to his UNESCO building, which is being put up in Paris with sculpture and murals by Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Arp, Miro and Picasso. As Breuer talked, he doodled...
Obviously, Gropius could not imitate Athens' most famed building, the Parthenon, a monumental structure built to be viewed from without and to house, within its narrow sanctuary, the great statue of Athena and her attendants. To build flexible office space with working room for 200 U.S. embassy employees, Gropius and his collaborators fell back on the plan the ancient Greeks used for their domestic architecture, built the embassy around the central open court, and added the modern principle of movable interior walls...
...Free Man." To gain Athenian dignity, Gropius ringed the three-story structure with tall, reinforced concrete columns, visible girders and horizontal ribbons, sheathed all of them in strips of the gleaming white Pentelic marble used in the Parthenon. This design forms a 20-ft. cantilever which serves as a sunbreak, reminiscent of the massive Greek porticos. The first floor has a screen of sky-blue ceramic tile; the upper two stories have a curtain wall of grey glass spandrels hung from the roof girders. For added elegance, the interior court will be ringed with columns of Pentelic marble, the base...