Word: snails
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When the actual structure began going up, its exterior proved too much for many critics as well, was dubbed "the snail," an "indigestible hot cross bun," a "wash ing machine." Robert Moses, New York City Parks Commissioner and Metropoli tan Museum ex officio trustee, decided 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...
...process, however, Wright created new problems. While his structure, shaped like a snail shell with portholes, may attract, it also repels as no mere skyscraper can. In his grand manner he committed glaring faults (for instance, the office space was designed for gnomes...
...jets cruise at 550 m.p.h., but the queues of passengers at airport ticket counters still creep at the old snail's pace. To bring ticketing up to jet-age standards, Denver's Continental Air Lines last month began selling tickets aloft instead of at airports on its Boeing 707 flights between Chicago and Los Angeles. Continental's competitors at first scoffed that the commuterlike service would produce only confusion, but last week they banked steeply onto Continental's course. The innovation proved so successful in eliminating nagging airport waits (it also helped boost Continental...
...fetched in Paris. An edition of 197 copies of Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyages Fantastiques, illustrated by Bernard Buffet, recently sold out within 48 hours at prices up to $15,500. More ambitious yet was Don Quichotte illustrated by Salvador Dali with "divine splashes" from an ink-filled snail shell. For the regular edition, Publisher Joseph Foret set the price at a mere $300 a copy. But one copy, billed as "the most expensive book in the world," was tagged at $25,000. The Frenchman who succumbed (he insisted on anonymity) got a volume of 200 parchment pages that...
...Ronchamp shows that the man who first put the box on stilts now leads in the move toward sculptural plasticity. Redoubtable Frank Lloyd Wright, who once made his houses hug the earth, built Manhattan's still unfinished Guggenheim Museum of reinforced concrete in the form of a giant snail shell resting on its smallest point. Even the austere Mies van der Rohe, in his proposal for the Bacardi office building in Santiago, Cuba, has designed a templelike reinforced-concrete building, with shadows playing around the frieze and fluted columns in the great classical tradition...