Word: vans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sarcasm aside, lobbyists do serve a useful purpose by showing busy legislators the virtues and pitfalls of complex legislation. "There's a need here," says Anne Wexler, a former Carter Administration aide turned lobbyist. "Government officials are not comfortable making these complicated decisions by themselves." Says Lobbyist Van Boyette, a former aide to Senator Russell Long of Louisiana: "We're a two-way street. Congress often legislates on issues without realizing that the marketplace has changed. We tell Congress what business is up to, and the other way around...
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's life was well timed. He was born at the right moment (100 years ago next month) and in the right place (prosperous middle Europe) to lead the radical transformation of architecture during the 1920s and '30s. He left his native Germany just ahead of probable persecution by the Nazis, arrived in Chicago just as his austere vision was catching on among U.S. architects and developed his pragmatic skyscraper design just as the war ended and corporate America found itself instantly in need of such a prototype for acres of new high-rise office space...
...that was last year. Apparently the time has now come to rethink the last two decades of revisionism, to rehabilitate Mies posthumously. The definitive biography has just appeared, a wise, readable book by Franz Schulze titled simply Mies van der Rohe (University of Chicago; $39.95). Barcelona has nearly finished reconstructing his perfect building, the cool, absolutely confident German Pavilion built for the 1929 International Exposition. And now at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, always Mies' most important institutional propagandist, Architecture and Design Director Arthur Drexler has assembled the ultimate Mies exhibit: doodles, sketches, renderings, building models, photographs, furniture...
...also invented a new surname by appending Rohe, his mother's maiden name. (Less is more be damned: in German, mies means lousy, more or less.) Mies van der Rohe, invigorated by Weimar Berlin, spent most of the 1920s designing gorgeous industrial exhibits and handsome, blocky villas descended from Frank Lloyd Wright. Well into the decade, however, Mies the modernist was not scrupulously practicing what he preached: a neo-Georgian country house appeared as late...
...most important steps in dealing with a disaster is investigating its causes. When the fifth floor of a high-rise office tower under construction in Los Angeles collapsed last December, killing three people, the general contractor, San Francisco-based Swinerton & Walberg, was besieged. Recalls Bill Van Leuven, Swinerton's manager of business development: "People were banging on our doors. We didn't know where to turn. No one was prepared to address the problem." The company hired Lexicon Communications, which organized a team of safety engineers and Swinerton executives to assess the possible causes of the collapse...