Word: vastness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...emphasized by the top of the building-the now famous "grandfather clock" pediment with its round operculum, through which the heating system will issue clouds of steam on cold days. This is yet another historicist joke, alluding to one of Johnson's favorites from the past-Boullée, whose vast panoramas of pyramids, masonry globes and smoking crematoria are among the singular documents of the early Industrial Revolution. That a building should have a top was, of course, anathema to Johnson's mentor, Mies van der Rohe; the glass prism required a flat roof, finished in one clean...
...control. Buildings mean things; sometimes they convey meaning in highly complicated ways, but they can also be very blunt, and unconsciously so. The silliness of many of the biggest recent official architectural projects in America flows from this. No doubt when Gordon Bunshaft and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the vast concrete drum of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington they had in mind the "ideal," unbuilt funerary monuments to heroes dreamed up by the French Revolutionary Architect Etienne-Louis Boullée. That does not stop the thing looking like a set for The Guns of Navarone, minus the guns: an unwitting...
...West Coast, providing more than 750,000 sq. ft. of space. The surface is not mirror, but semitranslucent blue glass, which glitters and disappears and re-forms against the dusty blue sky. In form, it resembles an extruded architectural molding: one single block. Its scale is its success; a vast illusion built for the luxury interior-decoration industry, plunked firmly down in Dreamsville...
...York. Watching young girls in the audience held on the edge of their chairs by the power of the Anne Frank story makes this revival seem eminently worthwhile. It has, at least, a clarity that enables innocence to speak forcefully to innocence across the years and across vast differences of experience...
...Australian Meteorologist Peter Webster. Predicting them is bafflingly difficult; they are a cauldron of complex, wildly fluctuating conditions. Says the U.S. National Science Foundation's Richard Greenfield: "They can vary fantastically over the space of a few miles, and even a one-or two-degree temperature shift sets vast amounts of airborne water dropping...