Word: slab
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...climbing faster than the market price of silver. The only way that would-be guests can see the inside of a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel is to buy a $4 ticket to the film California Suite, and the Los Angeles Marriott, a 1,020-room slab within easy earshot of the airport runways, is expected to hit 100% occupancy for more than 150 days this year. The squeeze is much the same in Detroit (where guests sometimes have to settle for space in Ann Arbor, an hour's drive away), New York (where...
...Chrysler Building. As the architect Rem Koolhass has argued in his brilliantly suggestive book, Delirious New York (Oxford, 1978), these were the definitive fantasy-structures of American capital, the cathedrals of a "culture of congestion" that finds its apogee in the 1,244 blocks of Manhattan Island. No glass slab could hope to be as rich in imagery as the work of an architect like Raymond Hood (chief architect of Rockefeller Center, designer of the old McGraw-Hill Building and the Chicago Tribune Tower). This point was not lost on Johnson. Fantasy veiled as history: such is the message...
...peculiar rather than radical. Its main element is a 660-ft. glass slab laced into a Beaux-Arts, Manhattanist corset of pinky-gray granite. This shaft sits on an entrance block that is an enormous pastiche of the courtyard front of Brunelleschi's 15th century Pazzi Chapel in Florence. One cannot guess from drawings or models how well this will work. To take a small, private Renaissance chapel and inflate it to nearly the size of the Baths of Caracalla is the kind of perversity Johnson enjoys but has never been allowed to do on such a scale before...
...similar shift in corporate buildings? Not yet. The "new" corporate look, however, is strongly mannered. It was developed by Johnson-Burgee in the IDS Center in Minneapolis (1972) and, more successfully, in their Pennzoil Place in Houston (1976). Johnson calls it "shaped modern"-the glass slab with shears and cuts. Sometimes it is combined with mirror glass. This fashion for veiling the mass in shine, or dissolving it in reflections, can be seen in the polished aluminum skin of Hugh Stubbins' Citicorp Building in Manhattan...
Deep in Guatemala's Petén rain forest, five men dig into a curious mound in the earth. They suspect that an ancient tomb lies somewhere beneath it, and before long, their hunch is confirmed. Just below the surface, they uncover a huge limestone slab, or stela, inscribed with Mayan symbols. A little deeper they find the tomb, filled with jade and alabaster jewelry, brilliantly colored ceramic platters and other priceless antiquities created by Mayan craftsmen long before Columbus reached the shores of the New World...