Word: stucco
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...blaze of morning sunlight the buildings are white, elegant and French in downtown Algiers. Although the streets are named after Algerian martyrs, their design is French colonial. White stucco, palm trees and street cafes appear in regular sequence and converge at a large square or park. Their sharp angularity seems out of place in this hilly city decorated with Islamic arabesques...
...after 1 o'clock in the afternoon in the ornate, white stucco Spanish mansion that sits upon Manila's Pasig River. Malacañang's huge second-floor reception hall used to be filled with the guests and functionaries of Spain's colonial governors. Now the great men of Philippine national independence stare down from the walls-Aguinaldo, Quezon, Roxas, Magsaysay. The hall most conveniently serves as a waiting area for the diverse individuals and groups who daily seek audience with the President. Saudi Arabian princes, American bankers, Jaycee delegations-all get their turn...
...unprepossessing gray stucco building in the working-class Parisian suburb of Boulogne hardly looks like an official seat of government. No bronze plaque or carved insignia identifies the occupants of the four-room ground-floor apartment at 56 Avenue Jean-Jaures as ministers of a republic that is almost a half-century old. Inside, however, there are clues. A large reproduction of Picasso's Guernica adorns one wall, and a small, faded red, yellow and purple flag flutters above a desk cluttered with state documents. Here last week, as they have for the past 30 years, the ministers...
...decorative pattern breaks up the surface. It volatilizes what once was solid, rendering substance−bronze, stucco, tile or parchment−almost immaterial. This was no less true of relatively small objects like a 13th century Syrian canteen in silver inlaid brass (see color page), with its elaborate conflation of Islamic and Christian imagery arranged in dense concentric bands, than of vast architectural projects like the tile-work of the Alhambra in Granada. It is hard−perhaps impossible−to hold the entire pattern in one's mind, even when looking...
Scarcely less exotic are the human rituals that take place along the border. At one point, for example, the South Koreans have built an elaborate stucco "freedom village" that is supposed to typify the comforts of capitalism; near by, the North Koreans have solemnly built a slightly larger Potemkin village of their own (its 3,000 smiling inhabitants are trucked in each day and out every night, according to U.S. officials...