“
But I don’t understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture? He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon.
That, said the Dean, is the Parthenon.
- So it is.
- I haven’t the time to waste on silly questions.
- All right, then. - Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. - Shall I tell you what’s rotten about it?
- It’s the Parthenon! - said the Dean.
- Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon!
The ruler struck the glass over the picture.
- Look,- said Roark. - The famous flutings on the famous columns – what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood – when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?
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Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
“
That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.
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Andrew Vachss (Mask Market (Burke #16))
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On arrival at Orly Airport, Fritz and Magda hired a taxi which drove them to the city. They saw before them a metropolis crowned with triumphal architecture and magnificent monuments. The first Parisian landmark that caught their eye was the majestic Eiffel Tower and, in the background, on a distant hill, the white church of Montmartre. They immediately opted that their hotel could wait and asked the driver to take them around the city, though they knew that this would cost them a whole day's budget.
What they began to see was simply spectacular: wide areas edified with splendid monuments, fantastic fountains, enchanting gardens and bronze statues representing the best exponents who flourished in the city, amongst whom artists, philosophers, musicians and great writers. The River Seine fascinated them, with boatloads of tourists all eager to see as much as they could of the city. They also admired a number of bridges, amongst which the flamboyant Pont Alexandre III. The driver, a friendly, balding man of about fifty, with moustaches à la Clemenceau, informed them that quite nearby there was the famous Pont Neuf which, ironically, was the first to be built way back in 1607. They continued their tour...
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Anton Sammut (Memories of Recurrent Echoes)
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As John Adams famously wrote during the American Revolution, “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” So maybe today they’re writing apps rather than studying poetry, but that’s an adjustment for the age.
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Fareed Zakaria (In Defense of a Liberal Education)
“
In the words of the famous tea master Sen no Rikyu, a delicious cup of tea should be served so that it is cooling in summer and warming in winter.
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Geeta K. Mehta (Japan Style: Architecture + Interiors + Design)
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The moon garden of the mansion was famous, having been designed with night-blooming flowers lining the pathways and hillocks of the landscape. They stepped through open doors, went down the wide stone steps, and were greeted by the heady perfume of late-blooming autumn flowers. The pale blossoms were lit from below, setting a mood of mystery. A fountain of natural stone rose up out of a pond surrounded by terra-cotta sculptures.
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Susan Wiggs (The Lost and Found Bookshop (Bella Vista Chronicles, #3))
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Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.
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E.A. Bucchianeri (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly (Gadfly Saga, #1))
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Athens, while remaining nominally independent, no longer commanded its lifelines or its fate. Just as it had invented many Western institutions and intellectual and artistic endeavors, so did it pioneer a less glorious tradition. In the centuries following the Peloponnesian war, Athens became the first in a long line of senescent Western empires to suffer the ignominious transformation from world power to open-air theme park, famous only for its arts, its architecture, its schools, and its past.
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William J. Bernstein (A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World)
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I see the last two millennia as laid out in columns, like a reverse ledger sheet. It's as if I'm standing at the top of the twenty-first century looking downwards to 2000. Future centuries float as a gauzy sheet stretching over to the left. I also see people, architecture and events laid out chronologically in the columns. When I think of the year 1805, I see Trafalgar, women in the clothes of that era, famous people who lived then, the building, etc. The sixth to tenth centuries are very green, the Middle Ages are dark with vibrant splashes of red and blue and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are brown with rich, lush colours in the furniture and clothing.
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Claudia Hammond (Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception)
“
He was disorganized, forgetful, perpetually dissolute, and famous for his tremendous benders. One year he missed fifty straight weekly meetings at the Office of Works. His supervision of the office was so poor that one man was discovered to have been on holiday for three years. When sober, however, he was much liked and widely praised for his charm, good nature, and architectural vision. A bust of him in the National Portrait Gallery in London shows him clean shaven (and indeed clean, a slightly unusual condition for him), with a very full head of hair and a face that seems curiously mournful or perhaps just slightly hungover. Despite
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Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
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From the pleasure podium of Ali Qapu, beyond the enhanced enclosure, the city spread itself towards the horizon. Ugly buildings are prohibited in Esfahan. They go to Tehran or stay in Mashhad. Planters vie with planners to outnumber buildings with trees. Attracting nightingales, blackbirds and orioles is considered as important as attracting people. Maples line the canals, reaching towards each other with branches linked. Beneath them, people meander, stroll and promenade. The Safavids' high standards generated a kind of architectural pole-vaulting competition in which beauty is the bar, and ever since the Persians have been imbuing the most mundane objects with design. Turquoise tiles ennoble even power stations.
In the meadow in the middle of Naghshe Jahan, as lovers strolled or rode in horse-drawn traps, I lay on my back picking four-leafed clovers and looking at the sky. There was an intimacy about its grandeur, like having someone famous in your family. The life of centuries past was more alive here than anywhere else, its physical dimensions unchanged. Even the brutal mountains, folded in light and shadows beyond the square, stood back in awe of it. At three o'clock, the tiled domes soaked up the sunshine, transforming its invisible colours to their own hue, and the gushing fountains ventilated the breeze and passed it on to grateful Esfahanis. But above all was the soaring sky, captured by this snare of arches.(p378)
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Christopher Kremmer (The Carpet Wars: From Kabul to Baghdad: A Ten-Year Journey Along Ancient Trade Routes)
“
Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.)
Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon.
But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better.
For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing).
And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo.
Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too.
For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other.
Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.
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Thomas Frank (Rendezvous with Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society)
“
In 1910 Leroux had his greatest literary success with Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera). This is both a detective story and a dark romantic melodrama and was inspired by Leroux’s passion for and obsession with the Paris Opera House. And there is no mystery as to why he found the building so fascinating because it is one of the architectural wonders of the nineteenth century. The opulent design and the fantastically luxurious furnishings added to its glory, making it the most famous and prestigious opera house in all Europe. The structure comprises seventeen floors, including five deep and vast cellars and sub cellars beneath the building. The size of the Paris Opera House is difficult to conceive. According to an article in Scribner’s Magazine in 1879, just after it first opened to the public, the Opera House contained 2,531 doors with 7,593 keys. There were nine vast reservoirs, with two tanks holding a total of 22,222 gallons of water. At the time there were fourteen furnaces used to provide the heating, and dressing-rooms for five hundred performers. There was a stable for a dozen or so horses which were used in the more ambitious productions. In essence then the Paris Opera House was like a very small magnificent city.
During a visit there, Leroux heard the legend of a bizarre figure, thought by many to be a ghost, who had lived secretly in the cavernous labyrinth of the Opera cellars and who, apparently, engineered some terrible accidents within the theatre as though he bore it a tremendous grudge. These stories whetted Leroux’s journalistic appetite. Convinced that there was some truth behind these weird tales, he investigated further and acquired a series of accounts relating to the mysterious ‘ghost’. It was then that he decided to turn these titillating titbits of theatre gossip into a novel.
The building is ideal for a dark, fantastic Grand Guignol scenario. It is believed that during the construction of the Opera House it became necessary to pump underground water away from the foundation pit of the building, thus creating a huge subterranean lake which inspired Leroux to use it as one of his settings, the lair, in fact, of the Phantom. With its extraordinary maze-like structure, the various stage devices primed for magical stage effects and that remarkable subterranean lake, the Opera House is not only the ideal backdrop for this romantic fantasy but it also emerges as one of the main characters of this compelling tale. In using the real Opera House as its setting, Leroux was able to enhance the overall sense of realism in his novel.
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David Stuart Davies (The Phantom of the Opera)
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What is WordPress?
WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. But in non-geek speak, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today.
Many famous blogs, news outlets, music sites, Fortune 500 companies and celebrities are using WordPress.
WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. There are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine.
WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.
You can download and install a software script called WordPress from wordpress.org. To do this you need a web host who meets the minimum requirements and a little time. WordPress is completely customizable and can be used for almost anything. There is also a servicecalled WordPress.com.
WordPress users may install and switch between different themes. Themes allow users to change the look and functionality of a WordPress website and they can be installed without altering the content or health of the site. Every WordPress website requires at least one theme to be present and every theme should be designed using WordPress standards with structured PHP, valid HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Themes:
WordPress is definitely the world’s most popular CMS. The script is in its roots more of a blog than a typical CMS. For a while now it’s been modernized and it got thousands of plugins, what made it more CMS-like.
WordPress does not require PHP nor HTML knowledge unlinke Drupal, Joomla or Typo3. A preinstalled plugin and template function allows them to be installed very easily. All you need to do is to choose a plugin or a template and click on it to install.
It’s good choice for beginners.
Plugins:
WordPress’s plugin architecture allows users to extend the features and functionality of a website or blog. WordPress has over 40,501 plugins available.
Each of which offers custom functions and features enabling users to tailor their sites to their specific needs.
WordPress menu management has extended functionalities that can be modified to include categories, pages, etc.
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ellen crichton
“
He said that architecture was truly the greatest of the arts, because it was anonymous, as all greatness. He said that the world had many famous buildings, but few renowned builders, which was as it should be, since no one man had ever created anything of importance in architecture, or elsewhere, for that matter.
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Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
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Brian Chesky sends to all Airbnb employees is a powerful one. “You have to continue to repeat things” Brian told our class at Stanford. “Culture is about repeating, over and over again, the things that really matter for your company.” Airbnb reinforces these verbal messages with visual impact as well. Brian hired an artist from Pixar to create a storyboard of the entire experience of an Airbnb guest, from start to finish, emphasizing the customer-centered design thinking that is a hallmark of its culture. Even Airbnb conference rooms tell a story; each one is a replica of a room that’s available for rent on the service. Every time Airbnb team members hold a meeting in one of those rooms, they are reminded of how guests feel when they stay there. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously bans PowerPoint decks and insists on written memos, which are read in silence at the beginning of each meeting. This memo policy is one of the ways that Amazon encourages a culture of truth telling. Memos have to be specific and comprehensive, and those who read the memos have to respond in kind rather than simply sit through some broad bullet points on a PowerPoint deck and nod vague agreement. Bezos believes that memos encourage smarter questions and deeper thinking. Plus, because they’re self-contained (rather than requiring a person to present a deck), they are more easily distributed and consumed by a wider population within Amazon. The late Steve Jobs used architecture as a core part of his deliberate communications strategy at Pixar. He designed Pixar headquarters so that the front doors, main stairs, main theater, and screening rooms all led to the atrium, which contained the café and mailboxes, ensuring that employees from all departments and specialties would see people from other groups on a regular basis, thus reinforcing Pixar’s collaborative, inclusive culture.
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Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
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This was how Dinocrates, recommended only by his good looks and dignified carriage, came to be so famous. But as for me, Emperor, nature has not given me stature, age has marred my face, and my strength is impaired by ill health.
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Vitruvius (The Ten Books on Architecture)
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OCP: The Open-Closed Principle Bertrand Meyer made this principle famous in the 1980s. The gist is that for software systems to be easy to change, they must be designed to allow the behavior of those systems to be changed by adding new code, rather than changing existing code.
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Robert C. Martin (Clean Architecture: A Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design)
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LSP: The Liskov Substitution Principle Barbara Liskov’s famous definition of subtypes, from 1988. In short, this principle says that to build software systems from interchangeable parts, those parts must adhere to a contract that allows those parts to be substituted one for another.
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Robert C. Martin (Clean Architecture: A Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design)
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• OCP: The Open-Closed Principle Bertrand Meyer made this principle famous in the 1980s. The gist is that for software systems to be easy to change, they must be designed to allow the behavior of those systems to be changed by adding new code, rather than changing existing code.
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Robert C. Martin (Clean Architecture: A Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design)
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No matter how far you have wandered hitherto, or how many famous gorges and valleys you have seen, this one, the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, will seem as novel to you, as unearthly in the color and grandeur and quantity of its architecture, as if you had found it after death, on some other star; so incomparably lovely and grand and supreme is it above all the other cañons in our fire-moulded, earthquake-shaken, rain-washed, wave-washed, river and glacier sculptured world.
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John Muir (The Wilderness Essays)
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Vietnamtravelandcruise.com, the perfect way to visit the highlights of Vietnam such as the famous World Heritages in Ha Long, the colorful Old Quarter of Hanoi, spectacular architecture of Hue Citadel and more.
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Highlight of Vietnam
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Where people were once dazzled to be online, now their expectations had soared, and they did not bother to hide their contempt for those who sought to curtail their freedom on the Web. Nobody was more despised than a computer science professor in his fifties named Fang Binxing. Fang had played a central role in designing the architecture of censorship, and the state media wrote admiringly of him as the “father of the Great Firewall.” But when Fang opened his own social media account, a user exhorted others, “Quick, throw bricks at Fang Binxing!” Another chimed in, “Enemies of the people will eventually face trial.” Censors removed the insults as fast as possible, but they couldn’t keep up, and the lacerating comments poured in. People called Fang a “eunuch” and a “running dog.” Someone Photoshopped his head onto a voodoo doll with a pin in its forehead. In digital terms, Fang had stepped into the hands of a frenzied mob. Less than three hours after Web users spotted him, the Father of the Great Firewall shut down his account and recoiled from the digital world that he had helped create. A few months later, in May 2011, Fang was lecturing at Wuhan University when a student threw an egg at him, followed by a shoe, hitting the professor in the chest. Teachers tried to detain the shoe thrower, a science student from a nearby college, but other students shielded him and led him to safety. He was instantly famous online. People offered him cash and vacations in Hong Kong and Singapore. A female blogger offered to sleep with him.
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Evan Osnos (Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China)
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On Monday mornings in nice weather, Diana would ask, “Where did you go this weekend, Mrs. Robertson?” She knew we made frequent trips outside London. Other English friends would tell us about their favorite spots, but Diana was not forthcoming with travel suggestions. At the time, I assumed that she might not have seen as much of England and Scotland as we did during that year. Diana enjoyed our enthusiasm for her country--its natural beauty, its stately homes and castles, its history. She must have smiled inside when I would tell her of my pleasure in the architecture, paintings, and furniture I saw in England’s famous mansions. She’d grown up in one! And she would always ask, “How did Patrick enjoy…Warwick Castle or Canterbury Cathedral or Dartmoor?” Patrick was a very good-natured sightseer.
In return, I would ask, “And how was your weekend?”, leaving it up to her to say as little or as much as she chose. I would not have asked specifically, “What did you do last weekend?” She would answer politely and briefly, “Fine,” or “Lovely,” maybe mentioning that she’d been out in the country. Of course, I didn’t know “the country” meant a huge estate that had been in the family for centuries. Diana was unfailingly polite but sparing of any details. She considered her personal life just that, personal. She was careful never to give us a clue about her background. If she did not volunteer information, something in her manner told me I should not intrude. She may not have even been aware of this perception I had. I viewed her understated manner as appealing and discreet, not as off-putting or unfriendly.
Clearly, Diana did not want us to know who she was. We may possibly have been the only people Diana ever knew who had no idea who she was. We welcomed her into our home and trusted her with our child for what she was. This may have been one reason she stayed in touch with us over the years.
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Mary Robertson (The Diana I Knew: Loving Memories of the Friendship Between an American Mother and Her Son's Nanny Who Became the Princess of Wales)
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knew. And his ex had seemed so kind on those first few dates, so infatuated with his Navy uniform, so enthusiastic in tearing up his bed. His ex-wife, a former stripper named Trish Bardoe, had married on the rebound a fellow by the name of Eddie Stipowicz, an unemployed engineer with a drinking problem. Lee thought she was heading for disaster and had tried to get custody of Renee on the grounds that her mom and stepfather could not provide for her. Well, about that time, Eddie, a sneaky runt Lee despised, invented, mostly by accident, some microchip piece of crap that had made him a gazillionaire. Lee’s custody battle had lost its juice after that. To add insult to injury, there had been stories on Eddie in the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek and a number of other publications. He was famous. Their house had even been featured in Architectural Digest. Lee had gotten that issue of the Digest. Trish’s new home was grossly huge, mostly crimson red or eggplant so dark it made Lee think of the inside of a coffin. The windows were cathedral-size, the furniture large enough to become lost in and there were enough wood moldings, paneling and staircases to heat a typical midwestern town for an entire year. There were also stone fountains sculpted
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David Baldacci (Saving Faith)
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Education was still considered a privilege in England. At Oxford you took responsibility for your efforts and for your performance. No one coddled, and no one uproariously encouraged. British respect for the individual, both learner and teacher, reigned. If you wanted to learn, you applied yourself and did it. Grades were posted publicly by your name after exams. People failed regularly. These realities never ceased to bewilder those used to “democracy” without any of the responsibility. For me, however, my expectations were rattled in another way. I arrived anticipating to be snubbed by a culture of privilege, but when looked at from a British angle, I actually found North American students owned a far greater sense of entitlement when it came to a college education. I did not realize just how much expectations fetter—these “mind-forged manacles,”2 as Blake wrote. Oxford upholds something larger than self as a reference point, embedded in the deep respect for all that a community of learning entails. At my very first tutorial, for instance, an American student entered wearing a baseball cap on backward. The professor quietly asked him to remove it. The student froze, stunned. In the United States such a request would be fodder for a laundry list of wrongs done against the student, followed by threatening the teacher’s job and suing the university. But Oxford sits unruffled: if you don’t like it, you can simply leave. A handy formula since, of course, no one wants to leave. “No caps in my classroom,” the professor repeated, adding, “Men and women have died for your education.” Instead of being disgruntled, the student nodded thoughtfully as he removed his hat and joined us. With its expanses of beautiful architecture, quads (or walled lawns) spilling into lush gardens, mist rising from rivers, cows lowing in meadows, spires reaching high into skies, Oxford remained unapologetically absolute. And did I mention? Practically every college within the university has its own pub. Pubs, as I came to learn, represented far more for the Brits than merely a place where alcohol was served. They were important gathering places, overflowing with good conversation over comforting food: vital humming hubs of community in communication. So faced with a thousand-year-old institution, I learned to pick my battles. Rather than resist, for instance, the archaic book-ordering system in the Bodleian Library with technological mortification, I discovered the treasure in embracing its seeming quirkiness. Often, when the wrong book came up from the annals after my order, I found it to be right in some way after all. Oxford often works such. After one particularly serendipitous day of research, I asked Robert, the usual morning porter on duty at the Bodleian Library, about the lack of any kind of sophisticated security system, especially in one of the world’s most famous libraries. The Bodleian was not a loaning library, though you were allowed to work freely amid priceless artifacts. Individual college libraries entrusted you to simply sign a book out and then return it when you were done. “It’s funny; Americans ask me about that all the time,” Robert said as he stirred his tea. “But then again, they’re not used to having u in honour,” he said with a shrug.
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Carolyn Weber (Surprised by Oxford)
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Another celebrated building that we saw inside the Fort was the Diwan-i-Khas. Here can be seen in Persian characters the famous inscription, “If a paradise be on the face of the earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.” At the time of the Delhi Durbar in 1903 to celebrate the proclamation of Edward VII as Emperor of India, this exquisite building was used as a supper room. “This is the Chandni Chauk [Silver Street],” said our driver as we passed along Delhi’s main street. “It is the richest street in the world.” “Used to be,” corrected Sam. “It was sacked at least four times and most of its riches carried away.” Nowadays it is the abode of the jewelers and ivory workers of Delhi. Ten miles south of Delhi, amid the ruins of another ancient Delhi, stands the Kutb Minar, which is said to be the most perfect tower in the world and one of the seven architectural wonders of India. Built of marble and sandstone which is dark red at the base, pink in the middle, and orange on the top story, this remarkable structure, 238 feet high, looks almost brand new, yet it was built in A.D. 1200. Close by is another Indian wonder, the Iron Pillar, dating from A.D. 400. A remarkable tribute to Hindu knowledge of metallurgy and engineering, this pillar, some sixteen inches in diameter and twenty-three feet eight inches in height, is made of pure rustless malleable iron and is estimated to weigh more than six tons. Overlooking both the Fort and the city, and approached by a magnificent flight of stone steps, is the Great Mosque, also erected by Emperor Shah Jehan. It has three domes of white marble, two tall minarets, and a front court measuring 450 feet square, paved with granite and inlaid with marble. “Sight-seeing in Delhi is as tiring as doing the Mediterranean,” I
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Carveth Wells (The Road to Shalimar: An Entertaining Account of a Roundabout Trip to Kashmir)
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Wright is an interesting study of a superstar architect having both right and wrong influence. “All Architecture, worthy the name,” he decreed in 1910, “will, henceforward, more and more be organic.”12 So inspired by Viollet-le-Duc and Louis Sullivan, he inspired countless others (including young me) toward an organic approach to architecture. At the same time, the very pomposity of his decrees helped inflame a fatal egotism in generations of architects, and his most famous buildings belie his organic ideal. They were so totally designed—down to the screwheads all being aligned horizontally to match his prairie line—that they cannot be changed. To live in one of his houses is to be the curator of a Frank Lloyd Wright museum;
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Stewart Brand (How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built)
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The view of the strange city with its peculiar architecture, such as he had never seen before, filled Napoleon with the rather envious and uneasy curiosity men feel when they see an alien form of life that has no knowledge of them. This city was evidently living with the full force of its own life. By the indefinite signs which, even at a distance, distinguish a living body from a dead one, Napoleon from the Poklonny Hill perceived the throb of life in the town and felt, as it were, the breathing of that great and beautiful body. Every Russian looking at Moscow feels her to be a mother; every foreigner who sees her, even if ignorant of her significance as the mother city, must feel her feminine character, and Napoleon felt it. "Cette ville asiatique aux innombrables eglises, Moscou la sainte. La voila done enfin, cette fameuse ville! Il etait temps," * said he, and dismounting he ordered a plan of Moscow to be spread out before him, and summoned Lelorgne d'Ideville, the interpreter. * "That Asiatic city of the innumerable churches, holy
Moscow! Here it is then at last, that famous city. It was
high time."
"A town captured by the enemy is like a maid who has lost her honor," thought he (he had said so to Tuchkov at Smolensk). From that point of view he gazed at the Oriental beauty he had not seen before. It seemed strange to him that his long-felt wish, which had seemed unattainable, had at last been realized. In the clear morning light he gazed now at the city and now at the plan, considering its details, and the assurance of possessing it agitated and awed him.
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Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)
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Their settlement was famous for its dissolving architecture; at any moment a balcony might disappear and drop people to their deaths. This did not happen so often that it was monotonous, but often enough to make living there exciting.
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Jeff VanderMeer (The Big Book of Science Fiction)
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The famous art deco architecture, fine dining, spas, and legendary nightlife make for an unforgettable vacation day in Miami Beach.
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Scott Cooper Miami Beach
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Passyunk Avenue (pronounced pashunk by the locals) cuts a rude swath across an otherwise orderly grid of streets in South Philadelphia. Except for Passyunk (and Moyamensing) Avenue, the neighborhood is composed of a uniform matrix of numbered and named streets—one big street followed by two little streets. Viewed on a map, they form ninety-degree angles and predictable intersections. Passyunk Avenue, or simply Passyunk, is the great disruptor of this comforting geometry. Irregular and meandering, its slashing path intersects with the more obedient byways. Together they form a unique gridwork of inconvenient crossings and odd angles. The cumulative result is one of strangely shaped buildings. Their pointy corners puncture curious cells of dead space—the spaces between. While born of necessity, the resulting architecture created by these acute angles also manages to be strangely beautiful, an exotic visage in a sea of pretty faces. If you’ve ever seen the famous photo of Sophia Loren giving the side-eye to Jayne Mansfield, that’s Passyunk—South Philly’s middle finger to white bread Center City.
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Michael Caudo (Return of the Prodigal: A Prodigal of Passyunk Avenue Mystery (Nick Di Nobile Art Heist Crime Thriller #1))
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This is (I suppose) a story. It draws a great deal on history; but as history is the lies the present tells in order to make sense of the past I have improved it where necessary. I have altered the places where facts, data, info, seem dull or inaccurate. I have quietly corrected errors in the calendar, adjusted flaws in world geography, now and then budged the border of a country, or changed the constitution of a nation. A wee postmodern Haussman, I have elegantly replanned some of the world's greatest cities, moving buildings to better sites, redesigning architecture, opening fresh views and fine urban prospects, redirecting the traffic. I've put statues in more splendid locations, usefully reorganised art galleries, cleaned, transferred or rehung famous paintings, staged entire new plays and operas. I have revised or edited some of our great books, and republished them. I have altered monuments, defaced icons, changed the street signs, occupied the railway station. In all this I have behaved just as history does itself, when it plots the world's advancing story in the great Book of Destiny above.
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Malcolm Bradbury (To The Hermitage)
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The computer scientist Gerald Weinberg is famous for saying, “No matter what the problem is, it’s a people problem.
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Mark Richards (Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach)
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in one of the most famous papers of the twentieth century, ‘The Architecture of Complexity’, Simon wrote that the central theme that runs through my remarks is that complexity frequently takes the form of hierarchy, and that hierarchic systems have some common properties that are independent of their specific content. Hierarchy, I shall argue, is one of the central structural schemes that the architect of complexity uses. And also: I have already given an example of one kind of hierarchy that is frequently encountered in the social sciences: a formal organisation.
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Daniel L. Everett (How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention)
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Cornell’s reputation as a pressure cooker comes from its preprofessional attitude and “we try harder” mentality. Spans 6 colleges—4 private and 3 public. (Tuition varies accordingly.) Strong in engineering and architecture, world-famous in hotel
administration. Easiest Ivy to get into.
(The Elite Private Universities - Cornell University)
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Fiske Guide To Colleges (Fiske Guide to Colleges 2005)
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As technologists, developers and architects like to solve technical problems, not people problems. However, as Gerald Weinberg was famous for saying, “no matter what they tell you, it’s always a people problem.
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Richards, Mark
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she says something nasty.’ ‘Well, not nasty, exactly,’ Gertie said. ‘More sly, isn’t it?’ Celeste nodded. ‘Like the time she said that you were looking well.’ Evie gave a mad sort of laugh. ‘Yes!’ she cried. ‘She said I suited the extra weight I’d put on.’ ‘And the time she admired my dress,’ Gertie said, ‘and then went on to say that she wished they’d come in petite so that she could have one too.’ Celeste gave a knowing smile. ‘I don’t think it’s natural to be as skinny as Simone,’ she said. ‘No,’ Evie said. ‘Didn’t she once say that she hated chocolate? How can you trust anyone who doesn’t like chocolate? It’s not natural, is it?’ ‘It certainly isn’t,’ Celeste said, enjoying the jovial mood between them and wishing it could be like this more often. ‘And if she says my fingernails look like a man’s one more time, I swear I’m going to scream,’ Gertie said. The sisters laughed together before getting out of the car. Oak House was on the edge of a pretty village in what was known as ‘High Suffolk’ – the area to the north-west of the county famous for its rolling countryside. The house itself wasn’t attractive. Or at least it wasn’t attractive to Celeste, who was suspicious of any architecture that came after the Arts and Crafts movement – which this one certainly had. She still found it hard to understand how her father could have bought a mock-Tudor house when he had lived in a bona fide medieval home for so many years. She looked up at its black and white gable and couldn’t help wincing at such modernity. It was the same inside, too, with neatly plastered walls and floors that neither sloped nor squeaked. But, then again, Oak House had never known damp or deathwatch beetle and there was never the slightest chance of being cold in the fully insulated rooms with their central heating. ‘God, I’d rather spend an afternoon with Esther Martin,’ Gertie said as they approached the front door, which sheltered in a neat little porch where Simone had placed a pot of begonias. Celeste didn’t like begonias. Mainly because they weren’t roses. ‘I popped my head in to see if Esther was all right this morning and she nearly bit it off,’ Celeste said. ‘I’ve given up on her,’ Gertie said. ‘I’ve tried – I’ve really tried to be nice, but she is the rudest person I’ve ever met.’ Evie sighed. ‘You can’t blame her
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Victoria Connelly (The Rose Girls)
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In a purely technical sense, Sens Cathedral is probably the first Gothic church. When Abelard and Bernard met there in the spring of 1140, they probably did not notice that an architectural revolution was taking place over their heads. Its builders pioneered many of the characteristic elements of the Gothic style, from ribbed interior vaults and a three-part elevation, to the famous pointed Gothic arch for its windows.
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Arthur Herman (The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization)
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In addition, Sultan Iltumish, for all his rhetoric of being India's sole legitimate Muslim ruler, continued to issue coins with the old bull-and-horseman motif and a Sanskritized form of his name and title: 'Suratana Sri Samsadina', the latter referring to his given name, Shams al-Din. He also enlarged Delhi's Qutb mosque by three times in order to accomodate the many immigrants from beyond the Khyber who had flocked to Delhi during his reign. And he added three storeys to the city's famous minaret, the Qutb Minar. Notably, he placed a seven-metre iron pillar in the centre of the mosque's oldest courtyard, on a direct axis with its main prayer chamber. Originally installed in a Vishnu temple to announce the military victories of a fourth-or-fifth century Indian king, the pillar was now associated with Iltumish and his own victories. In transplanting the pillar in this way, the Sultan broke with Islamic architectural conventions while conforming to Indian political traditions. For in 1164, within living memory of Iltumish's installations of the Vishnu pillar in Delhi's great mosque, Vigraharaja IV Chauhan (r. 1150-64) recorded his own conquests on the same stone pillar on which the emperor Ashoka had published an edict back in the third century BC.
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Richard M. Eaton (India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765)
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Stainless steel might have seemed an extravagantly expensive material for architectural decoration at first glance, but it was touted as being durable and worth the expense, which it proved to be. It has a tensile quality, which was ideal for covering large expanses, and it could be easily worked at the factory and welded at the site. Since it is alloyed with chromium, it resists abrasion and corrosion, and, when combined with nickel, it achieves an even shinier finish. Its use in the Empire State Building for the mullions that race up the sides is one of the great secrets of the building’s subtlety and aesthetic satisfaction. Perhaps its most famous use in New York is the crown of the Chrysler Building.
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John Tauranac (The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark)
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Nandprayag is a place that ought to be famous for its beauty and order. For a mile or two before reaching it we had noticed the superior character of the agriculture and even some careful gardening of fruits and vegetables. The peasantry also, suddenly grew handsome, not unlike the Kashmiris. The town itself is new, rebuilt since the Gohna flood, and its temple stands far out across the fields on the shore of the Prayag. But in this short time a wonderful energy has been at work on architectural carvings, and the little place is full of gemlike beauties. Its temple is dedicated to Naga Takshaka. As the road crosses the river, I noticed two or three old Pathan tombs, the only traces of Mohammedanism that we had seen north of Srinagar in Garhwal. Little
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Ruskin Bond (Roads to Mussoorie)