Word: westernization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That fact alone makes Tokyo's spanking new National Museum of Western Art architectural news of the first magnitude, since it reaches so hard for perfection. Based on sketches by France's owl-wise, owl-grouchy Le Corbusier, the museum was completed by three Japanese architects who had studied with the master in the 1930s. It uses concrete, tile, French glass and Philippine teakwood to create a more finished and refined atmosphere than Le Corbusier himself enjoys. Otherwise, it faithfully represents his solutions to the two great problems of museum architecture: display" and lighting...
...lights should also brighten Japan's knowledge of Western art. Though the collection is not all first caliber, there are some great works, especially of sculpture (see color pages). Valued at $5,000,000, it was put together in the early part of the century by a Japanese shipbuilder named Kojiro Matsukata, who bought largely by lot, and reportedly paid between $15 million and $20 million all told. Because the Japanese government imposed a 100% duty on art works, Matsukata kept the bulk of his collection in Paris and London. The London half was bombed out in World...
From the ricksha-cluttered commercial district of Shanghai to the waterfront of Tientsin, hardly a Western businessman could be found last week in all of Red China. The traders who came and went with revolving-door regularity only a few months ago, crying the benefits of trade with the Chinese Communists, have returned disillusioned to Germany, Italy, Great Britain, France, Canada. What soured them on doing business behind the Bamboo Curtain was no political change of heart, but the best reason a businessman can have: unbusinesslike methods of doing business, developed by the Chinese into an exasperating art. Snapped...
When it started its highly touted trade offensive short months ago, Peking lured Western businessmen with offers of $7 violins. $23 sewing machines, $14 bicycles, promised to deliver nails, newsprint and electric motors at prices far below Japanese goods. But haste to gather foreign exchange to cover a huge trade deficit with Russia-and to do what it could to damage non-Communist competitors-led Red China to overstep itself. Its rickety economy suffered from primitive production methods, an overburdened transportation system, and an anarchic planning system that put untrained workers on industrial machines and knowledgeable technicians in mines...
Lectures & Whims. Many of the samples that lured Western businessmen also turned out to be junk, and others were not delivered in promised quantities. Orders of iron bars arrived with pockmarks of rust, textile bolts with lengths misstated, rice colored by bluing on the sacks. In Shanghai, 20 out of 31 steam turbines and 64% of electrical relays manufactured during one period were below standard, and one-third of the castings for electric motors were worthless. A whole shipment of electric generators had to be rebuilt at the factory because of "faulty cores." Canned goods, sometimes turned out by several...