Word: parthenon
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There are architects who love the Parthenon. Greg Lynn has a thing for the blob. This would not only be the '50s sci-fi thriller about a belligerent wad of jelly. The blobs that beguile him are any "isomorphic polysurfaces," meaning shapes that are, well, blobs. Architecture is a profession in which the cube and sphere are still the literal building blocks. What Lynn prefers reminds you of amoebas and bundled foam. In the most pliant forms of nature, in very irregular geometry, he sees the future...
...glass Parthenon, like Mies van der Rohe's National Gallery in Berlin, or an elaborately "timeless" spatial event, like Louis Kahn's Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. It is not an operatic signature building, like Frank Gehry's titanium-sheathed meganautilus in Bilbao, Spain. Still less is it a feat of conspicuously externalized luxury, like Richard Meier's Getty Center, poised in marble aloofness above Los Angeles...
...NASHVILLE] Grand Ole Opry, Country Music Hall of Fame, Parthenon...
...this remove, the fate of Los Angeles is a novelty. It's Saturday at the Parthenon and we noble citizens look on as it flashes gory in the sun, our own little Exodus replete with earthquake, fire, flood and riot: tantalizingly apocalyptic. Among the expatriate Angelenos, there might be swaggering or display of battle wounds, an anecdote about the aunt whose Malibu home slid seaward. But the real L.A. is far away, and so is 1992, the year of the riots. Not old enough for an anniversary, the remains lie unexcavated in the rubble of more recent crises...
...massive in their rain-slicked oilskins, and the women mending nets and waiting on shore. The distended shapes of windblown clothes give these already robust female figures a sculptural air: you feel the gale blowing their aprons into spinnakers. Homer had to have been looking at the Parthenon marbles in the British Museum, with their fluent drapery rippling across limbs and torso. Sometimes these shawled women, silhouetted against the scudding gray, have the presence of Greek mourners. At Cullercoats he found a basic image: man (or woman) against the sea, the self in the enormous, indifferent context of nature...