Word: platz
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...spite of this sophisticated structure, Clowes keeps the focus on characterization. The various inhabitants include Random Wilder, the eccentric would-be poet laureate; Violet Van der Platz, the insecure, love-lorn teenage girl; Charles, the hyper-articulate and aware sixth-grader; and Mr. Ames, the mono-maniacal private investigator. Each has their own story to tell, along with half a dozen other characters, including "Rocky" the town's inhabitant in 100,000 B.C. "There goes Ogg," he thinks, "'Mr. Sunshine' - what's his secret? I'll kill him." Between them all Clowes builds another of his hilariously slightly off-center...
...Piano's words, architecture involves walking "the knife edge between art and science": One day the architect is a poet, the next day an engineer. That fine edge was highlighted in the first part of his speech, which dealt with his redesign of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz. This enormous, 5 million square foot space resonates with cultural significance, since it is both the former cultural center of Europe as well as the center of tragedy. The Cold War divide between East and West Germany, however, is now a matter for the history books, and Piano's task, as he noted...
...into a uniform design, ignoring the fact that cities draw life from the evolution of buildings over time. All told, the slides presented certainly showed a city center that avoided that danger, and mirrored the unpredictable and complex interactions of humanity. Built around a recently-opened piazza, the Potsdamer Platz as envisioned by Piano will be a meeting point that encompasses vast differences, where elements of the "sacred," like libraries, meet elements of the "profane," like cinemas and casinos. Even the act of construction, which involved 5,000 workers from all over the world, represented the idea of interaction, particularly...
...West Germany. The Pritzker ostensibly honors a lifetime of work, but surely it is Monchengladbach that got the prize for Hollein. The three-year-old hillside museum is like a tiny town within a town, an agglomeration of distinct but compatible structures, a labyrinth set on its own stone Platz. Undula- ting red brick terraces hug the slope, relaxed and vaguely mock-ancient, not abrasive Disneyland replicas. As ever, Hollein succeeds in pleasing with the highly particular small space, the odd cutout corner or voluptuous semicircular marble stair. Monchengladbach has the virtuoso exuberance of a big, ambitious first novel, brimming...
Mann-Knopf (2 vol. $6). "An unassuming young man was traveling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks' visit." Soon after his arrival, he perceives that his cigars have a flat taste. Before his three weeks are over, he has a bad cold. Before his return to Hamburg, to a world at war, he has spent seven years in a mortal fairyland...