Word: shapes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...carrying on the faith of the embattled camisards, renewed their sense of what is now a faraway tradition, listening to a sermon out of doors from a collapsible pulpit, and studying such Huguenot relics as a clandestine pastor's flat hat that can fold into the shape...
...space is a tough neighborhood for frail balloons. Microscopic meteorites punctured Echo's skin, allowing the gas inside to seep out. Sunlight exerted a slight but persistent pressure. Gradually Echo lost its regular shape; flat places and wrinkles appeared on its shiny surface. "She's prune-faced already," says Richard Slater of G. T. Schjeldahl, Northfield, Minn., the company that made the balloon. When Echo turns deliberately about once in eight to ten minutes, flat places sometimes act as mirrors, making the sun's reflection momentarily brighter. Wrinkled places dim the reflection. The radio waves that...
Echo's orbit has changed very little, but no one can say for sure how long it will last. All its gas pressure is probably gone by now. The only reason it keeps its shape is that the forces that tend to shrink or distort it are extremely small. Slater estimates that meteorites nibble away about 1¼ sq. in. of its skin per day. Eventually the sphere may collapse, pushed to a pancake by air drag and pressure of sunlight, or drawn together by the Mylar's "memory" of the way it was folded in the launching...
...shape our buildings; thereafter they shape...
Stave & Stupa. Johnson's recent work (see color) shows how far he has gone in breaking new ground while finding imaginative uses for old forms. The haystack-shaped shrine, set in a Grecian court in New Harmony, Ind., was built as a memorial to the Harmonists, a German Separatist sect that assured its own extinction by faithfully practicing celibacy. But to Johnson it suggests the stave churches of Norway and the stupa forms of India. Without its name, the Nuclear Reactor Building in Israel could be a medieval cloister, topped by a huge, 20-sided tower that seems...