After a design by Robert Adam ... Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art ... But one should be on one's guard. Abbé Marc Antoine Laugier (1711–1769), author of the influential Essai sur l’architecture (1755), argued for purity of form in building. The book’s frontispiece shows a rustic hut composed of still-living trees. Laugier explained, “The pieces of wood raised perpendicularly have given us the idea of columns. The horizontal pieces which surmount them have given us ideas of lintels. Finally the sloping pieces which form the roof have given us the idea of pediments. That has been recognized by all the masters of art. But one should be on one’s guard. Never has an idea been more fertile in its consequences.” Laugier’s writings gave support to the view that harmony and grace were principles laid down by nature herself. The rustic hut had been praised by the Roman writer Vitruvius (active late first century B.C.), and for Laugier it was a model for simplicity and the elimination of superfluous embellishment. As eighteenth-century architects were exposed to such ideas, the Greek temple with its mathematically proportioned columns and pediments was reborn as mansion, church, bank, museum, or other commercial institution.
Jacques Germain Soufflot’s (1713–1780) Church of Saint-Geneviève (now the Panthéon) was one of the first Neoclassical structures in France, heralding the simplification of churches that became increasingly classical in inspiration. In England, the leading architects were Richard Boyle (1694–1753), Colen Campbell (1676–1729), and Sir William Chambers (1723–1796), disciples of the architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) and called Neo-Palladians. Author of I quattro libri dell’architettura (Four Books on Architecture, 1570), Palladio took Vitruvius’ De Architettura as the foundation for his own study of classical forms, and the resulting designs were directly incorporated into the plans of the Neo-Palladians. Mereworth Castle, Kent (1722–25), is a British country house whose structure is derived from Palladio’s Villa Rotonda in Vicenza. Palladian-style architecture spread rapidly and was favored by wealthy patrons as an expression of their rank and judgment. The style appeared in the United States in the work of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello and the Rotunda, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (1823–26). The Neo-Palladian style gave way to the innovations of Scottish architect and designer Robert Adam (1728–1792), whose interiors such as the Etruscan dressing room at Osterley Park, Middlesex (ca. 1775–76) were drawn from a repertory of classical motifs culled from design literature and his own travels.
Furnishing such elegant interiors were a rich variety of decorative arts for which ancient models were transformed into gilt-bronze ornament, silver, pottery, and porcelain. Paris, in particular, was a great center of production for objects of le goût grec (Greek taste). Eighteenth-century Parisian cabinetmakers Georges Jacob, Martin Carlin, and Jean-Baptiste-Claude Sené freely employed classical motifs in their pieces (1971.206.17; 1977.102.9). Lavish dinner services were issued in porcelain and silver to grace aristocratic dining tables as symbols of status (1997.518; 33.165.2a–c). Miniature biscuit reproductions of noteworthy antique sculptures also decorated the dining table, mantelpiece, and bureau (2001.456), along with classicizing busts of leading intellectuals, political and society figures, and theatrical performers by Jean Antoine Houdon (1741–1828) and Augustin Pajou (1730–1809). Neoclassical taste was perhaps most industrially promoted in England by the pottery firm of Josiah Wedgwood and Thomas Bentley, which produced trade catalogues (in English, French, German, and Dutch) of its wares made after engravings and plaster casts of classical pieces. Another leading design publication was Robert and James Adam’s Works in Architecture (2 volumes, 1773, 1779), which, in addition to building plans, included engraved designs for tables, chairs, mirrors, wall lights, clocks, and doorknobs. In America, furniture makers and silversmiths were directly inspired by English models and ornament prints and books.
Outside the home, classically inspired architecture and other structures like tombs, small temples, and bridges were often strategically set into “picturesque” landscapes. Such landscape gardens were not re-creations from the ancient Greek and Roman world, but instead were made to showcase monuments and encourage contemplation. Inspired by seventeenth-century idyllic Italian landscape paintings, particularly those by Claude Lorrain, these gardens were designed to be seen like pictures as the viewer walked from one carefully constructed vantage point to another.
On the dusty tarmac of an airport in Northern Afghanistan, six planes have been waiting for days.
Thousands of Afghans seeking to escape Taliban rule have converged in the vicinity of the airstrip, located outside Mazar-i-Sharif, on the promise of a charter flight out of the country.
But since Sept. 3, the planes have been stranded. The final flight out of the sleepy airport left Sept. 2.
Into this taut and fluid situation stepped an unlikely personage: Glenn Beck, the far-right radio host who made a name for himself on the Obama conspiracy circuit.
As Afghanistan collapsed over the past months, Beck claimed to have raised more than $35 million to finance what he describes as a massive evacuation effort for Christians, American citizens, and vulnerable Afghans. Beck says he has done that via a Utah group he founded called Nazarene Fund, which has been working with another Beck-founded charity called Mercury One to organize charter flights.
Like many of Beck’s broadcasts on TheBlaze, the Afghan ones have been filled with a mix of exaggeration and invective, with most of the right-wing firebrand’s ire directed not at the Taliban but at “laughing” bureaucrats in the State Department and the Biden White House. With the six charter planes blocked from leaving Mazar by the Taliban, Beck has claimed that lollygagging diplomats and an uncaring Biden has left thousands of American citizens and vulnerable Afghans to the mercy of the new regime.
Beck’s bomb-throwing came as the State Department began to face mounting criticism from those involved in the charter flights, who saw Mazar as a means to quietly evacuate thousands of vulnerable Afghans and some American citizens in the days after the U.S. withdrawal. With global attention still focused on Kabul, people familiar with the evacuation effort said, Mazar offered a discreet escape route.
But as the Mazar window remained open in the first days of September, people involved said, the State Department struggled to develop consistent guidance on how private charters could secure approvals for the flights – a complicated process occurring in a near-warzone that involves vetting passenger manifests and getting destination countries to issue landing authorizations.
Meanwhile, Beck trained his megaphone on the delicate evacuation effort. At times, even Beck has admitted to being asked to tone down his “fat mouth,” as he called it, not always with success.
Answer:Stephen Joshua Sondheim is an American composer and lyricist known for his work in musical theater. One of the most important figures in 20th-century musical........so yeah true
