Word: station
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...addition, lasers in space could act with lightning speed, igniting 70-80 fires on the earth every second--and that is the capability of just one station. The Reagan Administration has suggested deploying 160 such stations, leading one of the researchers to conclude that, "all of the major cities of either superpower could be targeted for thermal attack by intense lasers with the potential for creating mass fires in all of these urban areas in a matter of hours...
...view of the Tuileries. Originally, the Cours des Comptes had stood here, and after the ravages of the Paris Commune of 1871, its melancholy, fire-gutted ruins remained untouched for nearly 30 years. Then, in 1898, the Orleans railroad company bought the site and raised on it a railroad station with a built-in hotel, serving as the terminus of lines from southwestern France. Its architect, Victor Laloux (1850-1937), did not approach the genius of men like Charles Garnier, who created the Paris Opera, and Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, France's supreme engineer. But he gave the Gare d'Orsay...
...Gare d'Orsay was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel, but its glories lasted only 40 years. By 1939 changes in railroad technology had downgraded it to a commuter station. In 1969 the last train left, and the place was abandoned: a rusting abode of cats and pigeons, whose damp silence was occasionally broken by film units; Orson Welles and Bernardo Bertolucci are among the directors who have sought evocative locations in its Piranesian gloom. Meanwhile developers covetously eyed it, dreaming of the slow-motion arc of the wrecker's ball. In 1971 the French government, under...
...that the collections would need 47,000 square meters enclosed by walls on which to hang the paintings. This meant putting a new building inside the old, and there was no question of designing it in the manner of Laloux. "It could not be a pastiche," says Lachenaud. "The station itself was pastiche, a 19th century parody of what the 18th century was thought to be -- iron and glass technology layered over with archaic decor. So we knew we could make no compromise with the original design...
...seems, can the full evidence of creativity be reconstituted. If we are to enter the world of our great-grandparents and discover why their values in art, for better and worse, were so much more intense than our own, the train that will take us there leaves from this station...