Word: perfection
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...executive-legislative spectacle is particularly ridiculous since a perfect way out of the quandary is available. In an address to the General Assembly, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze called for a United Nations peacekeeping force to insure the freedom of the seas in the Gulf. The State Department knee-jerk opposition to the plan is exactly what it appears to be: reactionary short-sightedness at its most blatant...
BEFORE HARVARD enters the 21st century, one-third of its current faculty is expected to retire. This turnover presents the University with the perfect opportunity to diversify its faculty. But if there is to be a more diverse faculty, there must be a more diverse pool of scholars from which to choose. Now is the time to broaden the pool of graduate students in order to plan for the future...
Tadao Ando, 45, is the most influential figure among Japan's baby-boomer architects. Combative, ascetic, a radical traditionalist, he is the perfect maverick: after wandering across the U.S. in the '60s, he aspired to a professional boxing career before becoming an architect. He is something of a Zen zealot. He hates "automated buildings with all manner of electronic convenience." He hates posh materials. "Concrete, far cheaper than marble, can achieve a far greater spiritual sense of wealth," he says. Indeed, most of his 90 buildings are constructed of concrete. Ando is thus maintaining a tradition: large-scale modern buildings...
...precise and almost ostentatiously austere. He is seeking purity and purification. His town houses in Tokyo and Osaka are jewel- box bunkers, the concrete facades rigorously designed compositions of door, windows, fabrication scars and joints. The Protestant chapel (1985) on the top of Mount Rokko, outside Kobe, was the perfect Ando commission. "The process of preparing ourselves for the spirituality of religion takes time," he says, and so the entrance to the chapel is a colonnaded tunnel. The chapel itself is a deep, 24-ft. by 24-ft. concrete box, with one side an expanse of glass overlooking the garden...
...route, he may have stumbled onto the campaign he has always dreamed of: a high-minded dialogue with the voters, devoid of ritual handshakes, insincere smiles and meddlesome aides. As he moves from disgrace toward dignity, Hart may come to relish the joy of speaking his mind with the perfect freedom of a man who has nothing left to lose...