Word: scaffolding
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...revolutionary year of 1989, the world grew accustomed to the spectacle of ruling Communists stepping onto the slippery slope of power sharing, with no more enthusiasm than a condemned man mounting a scaffold, but with no more resistance either. However, that was in Eastern Europe, not the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was different: it couldn't happen there...
...most famous paintings from nearly 500 years of accumulated grime and murky glue? But the computer -- an Apollo workstation programmed to map every curve and crack down to the last millimeter -- proved so indispensable that it was installed 20 meters (65 ft.) above the ground, on the main scaffold, where it put a wealth of data about the frescoes at the master restorer's fingertips. Today man and machine labor side by side, only an arm's length from Michelangelo's original brushstrokes...
...that does not mean the building is easy to understand or like. Running its whole, three-city-blocks length is a permanent, jungle gym-like white steel scaffolding. The faux scaffold is inspired: it defines a long outdoor walkway, it plays tricks with perspective (Does the thing tilt up? Down? Are its beams parallel?), and its evocation of construction in progress makes the Wexner Center seem perpetually unfinished, excitingly open-ended...
...angry public fulminated at American impotence. Just six months in office, Bush had become the third U.S. President in a row caught in the same wretched predicament. The latest hostage crisis, however, yielded a gruesome new image of horror: a man, bound and gagged, dangling from a makeshift scaffold...
...revolution is fixed in the collective psyche of the nation. Ask any Frenchman to free-associate: he automatically recites, "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite." Then comes a torrent of violent images. Heads on pikes. Hungry mobs storming Versailles. Women knitting and jeering in front of the scaffold. Marat murdered in his bath. The zealous Saint-Just railing, "There is no liberty for the enemies of liberty!" And the battalions of Marseilles singing the nation's new anthem: "May the blood of the impure soak our fields...