Word: parabolas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...turntable; making one revolution every six seconds, the mercury rises gently toward the edges and dips in the middle, the way coffee does when it is stirred in a cup. In perfect deference to the laws of physics, the metal's highly reflective surface takes the form of a parabola, the shape of solid mirrors used in conventional telescopes to focus starlight into a sharp image. Says Ermanno Borra, the Laval astrophysicist who built it: "It's a wonderfully simple arrangement...
...21st is fast becoming the age of the wiggle. Over the past few years, and especially after the debut of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the sturdy glass-and-steel rectangle, for decades the default mode for serious buildings, has begun to give way to the parabola, the whiplash curve and geometries so irregular, there's no point in looking them up in geometry books. Thanks to a combination of insistent forward thinking by architects and ever more ingenious computer-design software, buildings that once would have been no more than architecture-student fantasies are being green...