Word: pomp
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Failed Pomp. It has long been a national embarrassment that the nation's capital has had no proper showcase for the performing arts. This was the lack that the Kennedy Center's planners set out to remedy. When they began their work in the mid-'50s they were thinking of a national cultural center that would present all the traditional forms of opera, theater, ballet, orchestral performance and film. The grand-scale, centralized package they had in mind was a challenging problem for an architect. How does one design a "monumental" building that visually responds...
...arguably the most frigid tribute a modern architect has paid to the muses. To walk down the river terrace, with its 630 feet of polished white Carrara wall monotonously glittering like a new kitchen, past the finned, bronze-anodized columns and the regimented shrubs, is an experience of failed pomp. There is an absence of human scale. Undifferentiated bays crash repetitively like boots on a parade ground. There is even the look of an inflated Greek temple, 20 times life size. Above all, the Center has an absolute lack of plasticity in space and detail. The halls and theaters...
...South Africans react? "The blacks are intrigued," reports TIME's Peter Hawthorne, "delighted with the pomp afforded Banda and perhaps secretly amused that one of them could have whites clicking their heels. The whites are wryly interested, privately a bit cynical, but when confronted with the whisk-waving Banda, gleefully cavorting like a black leprechaun, they tend to be shy, a little confounded, but ultimately pleased to have shaken his hand. As one government official observed at a state banquet in Banda's honor, 'Suddenly South Africa isn't the same any more.' " For South...
...sound of marching below. "Officers call!" barks the adjutant, and eight black-coated officers, swords tight against their shoulders, wheel in close formation across a floodlit field. "Sound attention!" and they come, the main body of six platoons, surging from beneath a darkened arcade. With all the pomp, panoply and flair that can be mustered, the most brilliantly executed military parade in the U.S. is under way. The spectacle is the weekly Friday-night retreat at the Marine barracks of Washington...
...with successive impastos of paint flaking from their arched windows and delicate, rusting Corinthian capitals. But SoHo is a kind of museum of the style, containing some of the best buildings that were made within that idiom anywhere in the 19th century-strong-boned, forthright in detail, free of pomp and fuss...