Word: piazza
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...been severely criticized by the academic community of city planners. They claim that Lake Anne Village, the first of Reston's seven projected sub-towns to be completed, is too picturesque in its setting among the rolling Virginia hills and trees. The town houses, clustered around an Italian-looking piazza on the edge of an artificial lake, look like the pastoral idyll of some dreamer who wished that the automobile and the industrial revolution had never happened. Further, they object to the predominantly upper-middle-class character of the F F R--first families of Reston--who dared...
Reston will have all of these. Thus it differs completely from an ordinary suburb, where the shopping center, school, and father's office are each separate car trips away from home. At Lake Anne, Reston's one completed village, the brick piazza holds offices, a restaurant, a hardware store, drug store, art supply store, and nursery. Above these lie apartments, and town houses border the square. The town center is within walking distance of any resident. Here is the city's way of life, deliberately reproduced in a new setting. In fact, the corner store idea has been so successful...
...McLuhan himself works his readers over with aphorisms and jokes. "If we were to dispose of the city right now," he says, "future societies would reconstruct them, like so many Williamsburgs." Of Renaissance art, which he blames for placing Western man "outside the frame of reference," he says: "A piazza for everything and everything in its piazza." Telstar, movies and jetliners have generated "a worldpool of information"; the clash of cultures in the modern world is a "collide-oscope"; television programming is "the charge of the light brigade." As a result of the information explosion occasioned by modern technology...
...Florence, the tide tore through the walls of jewelers' shops on the Ponte Vecchio (built in 1345) and inundated the Piazza, della Signoria. Propelling logs and other debris, it piled autos into heaps of smashed steel and left a thick oil slick in its wake. Hundreds of rare manuscripts and books were destroyed in the slime. The water knocked out five panels of Ghiberti's "Doors of Paradise," the famed bronze reliefs on the doors of the Baptistery near the Duomo. It wrecked the priceless 13th century crucifix by Cimabue in the Museum of Santa Croce...
...once great republic of Venice was dying. Spies kept watch on the Piazza San Marco, clerics confiscated books by Voltaire and Rousseau, and not infrequently a tourist would stumble upon a dead body ignominiously tagged "For treason against the state." Throughout the 18th century, Venice still ranked as the favorite playground of Europe, but with its possessions dwindling, its power declining, and its wealthy reveling in pomp and cant, all that remained was shimmer and shadow...