Word: smithsonian
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Lindbergh is still almost pathological about guarding his privacy, though age and a receding hairline have made him almost indistinguishable from other commuters in Darien, Conn., where he has lived in recent years. He has five grown children (three sons, two daughters). Occasionally he appears in Washington's Smithsonian Institution and gazes up at the Spirit of St. Louis, dangling there, fragile but painstakingly guarded against rust and oblivion. He is seldom recognized. Yet any associate or friend who talks to a reporter about him is deprived of the light of his countenance. Typically, he refused to have...
...weighs a mere 800 tons, consists of only three rooms and a monumental entry gate, measures 82 ft. from front to back. Nonetheless, more than 20 U.S. museums, appropriately including one each from Memphis, Tenn., and Cairo, Ill., applied for it. The two leading contenders were Washington's Smithsonian and New York's Met, and the jockeying in what became known as "the Dendur Derby" began right from the start. When the White House asked the Smithsonian to name a committee to award the temple, the Met protested, charging a conflict of interest. To resolve the conflict...
With the backing of Interior Secretary Udall, the Smithsonian argued before the commission that the temple should be erected outdoors on the banks of the Potomac, for the benefit of the capital's 9,000,000 annual tourists. The Smithsonian maintained that the temple's porous sandstone, which is so soft a man can scratch it with his finger, could be coated with synthetic resins to protect it in the East Coast's soggy climate. The Met cited testimony indicating that any outdoor setting would reduce the temple to a pile of sand and stone stumps...
Into place atop a pedestal in front of the Smithsonian Institution's new Museum of History and Technology last week went an 8-ft.-high, stainless-steel piece of abstract sculpture designed by New York's José de Rivera, 62, and executed with the aid of fellow New York Abstractionist Roy Gussow, 48. In terms of institutional oneupmanship, the work gives the Smithsonian the distinction of placing the first abstract sculpture on the capital's Mall, which will eventually be blooming with them: Hostess Gwen Cafritz is donating an Alexander Calder stabile-mobile that will...
...Smithsonian had originally intended an orrery, the globular celestial map made of intersecting rings and developed for the 17th century Earl of Orrery, for the front of the new building; but its architect, Walker O. Cain, called on De Rivera instead. De Rivera has titled his 20th century piece Infinity, explaining modestly that he named it that solely to prevent the U.S. Government from giving it a still more pretentious name. He made its swooping, stainless-steel lines by extruding a rod of steel and welding its ends together, alternately heating and hammering it like the village smithy...