Word: spire
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Practicality and a Puritan bias toward plainness have made the white clapboard church, not the soaring stone spire, the nation's quintessential symbol of worship. Yet some Americans prefer to honor God in grandeur. One was George Washington, who dreamed of "a great church for national purposes in the capital city." It was only a century later that members of his Episcopal Church began making plans to build a towering Gothic cathedral atop the highest point of land in the District of Columbia...
Hence the big machines, like The Hay Wain. Hence, too, an unfamiliar - be cause privately owned - masterpiece, Salisbury Cathedral, from the Meadows, c. 1831. In the afterstorm light, the spire and facade of the cathedral show silver against slate roof, and the clouds are like marble. The cathedral sits inside the rainbow's curve as though in a proscenium arch. Then one sees how every element (building, rainbow, sky, the tree on the left and the cart) is linked by one startling device: the tree, turning on the hub of the cartwheel like an immense brush, seems to have...
CATHEDRAL: The Story of Its Construction by David Macaulay. 80 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $6.95. This marvelous book recreates the building of a French Gothic cathedral, from the hewing down of half a forest to the placement of the last sheet of lead on the spire. Macaulay, a young architect, uses voluminous knowledge and pen-and-ink sketches, accompanied by a brief, clear narrative. He shows how to design and build a flying buttress, cast a bell in bronze, use the mortise-and-tenon method on the roof beams. By changing his viewpoint, he also powerfully conveys the immense rook-filled...
Daniel Blank is the evil alpinist, whose climbing is an ever repeated solo ascent of a mammoth phallic spire called the Devil's Needle. Goaded by a neurotic, not to say overly demonic young woman, Blank finds true fulfillment in splitting the skulls of strangers with his ice ax. The detective is Captain Edward X. Delaney, a shrewd cop with a need to bring order to the mess of life that almost matches Blank's compulsive twitches. Sanders, who has learned a lot since his 1970 The Anderson Tapes, handles ponderous scenes gracefully enough. He balances the action...
Local politics bore you? Remember that spire Agnew began on a local school board in Maryland and that Watergate begin in small cities and towns across the nation. The "new political morality" that Agnew says defeated him, began in Cambridge in 1971 with the common Slate. It could...