Word: steels
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...America, that a cultural fascination with machinery that had been growing since the early 19th century reached its apogee. One is used to reading, in prattle like Tom Wolfe's 1981 book Bauhaus to Our House, that the American affair with machine culture during those years -- functionalism, steel-and-glass buildings and so forth -- had been imported, as intellectual fashion, from Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth. The concise and mighty industrial-based forms of American building, conceived by architects from James Bogardus in the 1850s to Louis Sullivan in the 1890s and by the engineers...
...Henry Adams' Virgin, to the Renaissance and Gothic nostalgia that had assuaged the cultural elites of New York and Boston at the end of the 19th century; welcome to the dynamo, to the total plan, the slick shell housing, the fins and flanges, the didactic sheen of stainless steel, the Aztec-style bracelet of imperishable Bakelite. Goodbye, Hell's Kitchen; hello, skyscraper...
...Business. Instead of quoting Gothic or Renaissance detail as an indirect sign of quality, the whole tower changed into a business logo, architecture as advertisement -- the archexample being William Van Alen's Chrysler Building, 1928-31, with friezes of hubcaps and wheels, gargantuan winged chrome radiator ornaments and stainless-steel finial...
...painting by Stuart Davis or a DC-3? John Marin's watercolors of the New York skyline or the Empire State Building itself, surging upward before the astonished eyes of Gotham at the rate of one floor a day? A relief sculpture by Charles Biederman or the prodigious steel catenaries of Othmar H. Ammann's design for the George Washington Bridge...
...reduce its work force from 24,000 to 17,000 by year's end. One 90-year-old shipbuilder, Hakodate Dock, was once the largest employer in the city of Hakodate. Now the company has no orders at all for next year and beyond. In shipbuilding, as in steel, the most forceful challenge comes from South Korea, whose currency, unlike the yen, is pegged to the dollar. South Korea's share of world shipping is expected to climb by year's end from 10.7% to 28.4%, while Japan's portion will drop from 49% to 41%. Says Kazuichi Murai, director...