Word: galveston
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Practical-minded modern Americans have been contemptuous of follies, those curious buildings meant only to charm and delight. But recent architectural fashion has been tending toward the fey, even the frivolous. This winter in the American heartland, form follows fantasy completely: in St. Paul and Galveston, Texas, local volunteers have just finished putting up elaborate municipal whimsies...
...centerpiece of its centennial winter carnival, St. Paul has a neogothic ice palace twelve stories tall. And with its Mardi Gras celebrations as a happy pretext, downtown Galveston has seven exotic ceremonial arches designed by a remarkable group of architects. The ice palace and the arches were both finished last week...
Both cities are caught up in revivalist sprees. Galveston's arches have been erected in the rehabilitated old quarter of downtown. Even the local celebration of Fat Tuesday is a recent revival of tradition, and commemorative arches went up once before...
Moore has developed a subspecialty in this sort of high-camp Gulf ephemeron: for New Orleans he designed the Piazza d'Italia and the snazziest part of the 1984 World's Fair. His Galveston arch, a pair of towers connected by wire mesh, is more of the same, a flibbertigibbet accretion of painted waves, plywood sea creatures, banners, arches, gables, windows, lights, action. Aubry's rigid canopy of pleated gold fiber glass, topped by a big wooden fish, is baffling but unequivocally vulgar--like kitsch from another planet, or a collaboration between Claes Oldenburg and Cher. Powell's arch, with...
Along the Texas coast in East Galveston Bay, Hugh Brothers, 52, a Houston pharmacist, was casting for flounder in shallow water. "This swell came up from behind in the water. It didn't knock me down, but it was extraordinary. I looked around and saw there weren't any boats nearby, and I said, 'Where'd that come from?' Then everything was perfectly still." On the 48th floor of the 64-story Transco Tower in Houston, Martha Carlin saw "water sloshing around in the coffee urns. Office doors were closing, and the building was in motion. I looked...