Word: slab
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...story luxury hotel, a 34-story office building, and parking facilities for 3,000 cars. Only the sub-street-level waiting room and the train concourse will be kept of the old Penn Station. In order not to interrupt train service, the builders will install a reinforced concrete slab at street level before razing the superstructure of the station...
20th Century City. Architect Gruen, famed for spacious shopping centers (Eastland in Detroit) and a well-publicized zeal for turning downtown areas into car-free malls (Kalamazoo, Mich.), designed the slab-shaped buildings slim and high to take advantage of the island's Manhattan view and allow for landscaping. The lower buildings, varying in height and snaking along the island's length, would be topped with gardens and windbreaks for recreational facilities. The air-conditioned pedestrian concourse below would be sunlit (through glassed holes in the roof) and undulating to kill the monotony of long straight corridors...
...University City, Paris, there rose a dormitory called the Swiss Pavillion-a great slab on stilts with a front that was mostly of glass, and blank end walls. One Swiss newspaper predicted that it would corrupt the youth who lived in it, but to architects it was a milestone; it became the model for countless other slabs before and since the U N Building. In all his work, Corbu had lifted his prisms on high to reclaim the land underneath. His columned structures had freed the façade for inventive sculpturing, opened up interiors, surrendered the long dark walls...
...that survived two decaded of Stalinist criticism as anti-esthetic to become, now, much admired. Then Le Corbusier flew to Brazil (in the old Graf Zeppelin), to advise a team that included Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa on the designing of Rio's 1936 Ministry of Education, a slab on pilotis with a new feature: a honeycomb of sun-shading breeze-admitting vanes at the windows, called brises-soleīl. That single example spread to give all the major cities of Latin America, notably Brasilia, their present look of clean, high, colorful, modern business buildings...
...joined the project just a few months before. A large area was being leveled for the construction of a supermarket, and Alfred led his small but expert crew to a place where shale lay near the surface. They dug down to the dark rock and brought big slabs to the surface. They found some coelacanth fossils first but ignored them as commonplace. Then they split another slab, and Alfred knew at once that they had come upon something extraordinary. In the shale was the 7½in. skeleton of a delicate creature that looked like a cross between a lizard...