Word: sphere
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...life's higher questions and learn to appreciate its more refined pleasures. Admittedly, the notion that college is a time for self-edification, shielded from the more crass concerns of the rat race, has been under assault for years. From the increasingly heated resume-padding battles of the extracurricular sphere, to the proliferation of pre-professional courses, the purely liberal education has long been on the wane--especially here at Harvard. However, not until the TECH, has the rejection of liberal pedagogic ideals been so explicit...
Back on the ground floor, as the giant sphere hovers overhead, you enter the Hall of the Universe. It features, among other things, a video wall flashing the very latest astronomical images, including downloads from the Hubble Space Telescope, and an updated version of the Hayden's popular "how much you'd weigh on other worlds" scales...
...Rose's centerpiece, literally and dramatically, is the planetarium itself, located in the upper half of the sphere. The stars inside actually twinkle, thanks to the Hayden's one-of-a-kind Zeiss Mark IX projector. It even projects stars you can't see, unless you bring binoculars into the dome, and shows constellations with 3-D reality. A second projection system, driven by a Silicon Graphics supercomputer loaded with real astronomical data, lets visitors "fly" beyond the Milky Way. As they look back on their gradually diminishing home, it becomes just one more speck amid a lacy network...
When he wanted a design for the 21st century, James Stewart Polshek, architect of the Rose Center, went to the 18th. His solid sphere set in a mostly glass cube has its origins in one of the abiding fantasies of the architectural world: the unbuilt ball that French neoclassical visionary Etienne-Louis Boullee conceived in 1784 as a memorial to Sir Isaac Newton. Boullee knew a simple sphere would state with full authority the grandeur of the cosmos. Polshek knew...
...Louvre pyramid, that shakes up the buildings around them. The old Hayden Planetarium, demolished to make way for the Rose, had blended all too well with the museum's flavorless north end. Polshek's forms, by contrast, operate on our deepest fantasies about the order of the universe. His sphere is covered with steel panels that inscribe it with meridians and latitude lines, so it stands in easily for the earth. But see it from the side, within sight of the floating models of Jupiter and Saturn, and it's the sun. Get underneath, next to the giant tripod that...