Word: fa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...role as a Silk Road caravansary, its 16th century revival under the great Mughal Emperor Babur and its recent troubles. Encircled by the snowcapped Hindu Kush, Kabul is a small city, with its history compressed. As a result, Buddhist stupas are hidden in Muslim graveyards, and elaborate Afghan façades can be glimpsed between Soviet-style apartment blocks...
...stacks of food, borne on asymmetrical plates. The spa (known simply, perhaps, as The Spa) is expensive, padded and white, as if catering to the insane. None of these things are necessarily bad in themselves. But design-led hotels were supposed to free us from homogeneity. Instead, behind individual façades, they have been palming us off with the same formulaic, outmoded minimalism. That's my beef...
...grand sérail, seat of the Lebanese government, is a magnificent 19th century Oriental palace. The stone façade, geometrical courtyard and ornate chambers were originally built as an Ottoman military barracks. Though beautifully restored, the structure was gutted at the start of the 15-year civil war - a wound on Lebanese history that is never far from the mind of the Grand Sérail's occupant since 2005's Cedar Revolution: Prime Minister Fouad Siniora...
...enjoy his fame. He studied at the Stuttgart Academy in the early 1990s and, after barely a decade as a working artist, began to establish a reputation along with Franz Ackermann, Jorge Pardo, Tobias Rehberger and a rising generation of young iconoclasts. Majerus made waves by painting the entire façade of the Italian pavilion at the 1999 Venice Biennale with a pastiche of famous artworks. In 2002 he covered Berlin's famed Brandenburg Gate with a digital rendering of a graffiti-blighted East Berlin housing block...
...specter of a rearming and aggressive Japan gives the rest of Asia flashbacks to WWII, but the truth is that Iwakuni, like all Japanese military facilities, is far more defensive than offensive. While missile-armed FA-18 Hornets launch daily from the American side of the base, Japan's hangars are filled with craft like the MH-53, which sweep for mines, and the US-1A, a giant propeller-powered flying boat that has participated in hundreds of sea rescues...