Word: ramps
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...aircraft's forward hatch stepped Dwight Eisenhower, wearing a grey topcoat and a grey felt hat. The weather omens were inauspicious as he stepped lightly down the ramp to begin his historic 19-day tour of eleven nations. But with his evident ease and friendship, he carried his own omens. He doffed his hat in the rain as he shook hands with Italy's President Giovanni Gronchi and Premier Antonio Segni, doffed it again as a band played short versions of the U.S.'s Star-Spangled Banner and Italy's Inno di Mameli...
...mayors were still flying when their aircraft stopped at the ramp at Tyndall. Mayor Healy, in fact, swayed so much as he egg-walked down the steps that an officer stood by to catch him. When an Air Force car drove Healy and Fitzpatrick to their billet at a motel 30 miles away, the two mayors, says Motel Owner Fred Faulkner, "had to be helped to their room." And when an officer arrived later to give them some information about Project William Tell, Healy made three requests: he did not want to be bothered with any of "this William Tell...
...last week. Discord and controversy had marked it since the day it was commissioned 16 years ago. Wright had proposed "one great space on a continuous floor," a gigantic, uncoiling drum of reinforced concrete that swelled outward as it rose, carrying within more than one-quarter mile of continuous ramps sloping upward six stories to a great glass dome 92 ft. above the ground. Paintings were to be tilted backward, "as on the artist's easel"; lighting would come from skylights above the ramp and would be reflected downward by louvers. "The net result of such construction is greater...
Away with Coffins. Spiraling ramps are not new in architecture. Assyrian King Sargon II wound a 6-ft. ramp around his 143-ft-tall Ziggurat at Khorsabad back in 706 B.C. What Wright did was avail himself of reinforced-concrete shell techniques to stand the structure on its narrower end, cantilever the floors inward, and top off the structure with glass, a material no ancient architect had to use on such a scale...
...that it looked like "an inverted oatmeal dish." Wright fired back: "It's going to make the Metropolitan Museum look like a Protestant barn." Twenty-one artists signed a round-robin protest charging that Wright's scheme for hanging would throw their canvases askew and the sloping ramp (3%) would provide no level base board for reference. Wright replied that the old rectilinear frame of reference was "a coffin for the spirit" and admonished them to wait...