Crash plan for Pisa

Exercise 10. Reading for pleasure. See appendix. BLACK CATS AND BROKEN MIRRORS (II).

Exercise 8. Translate the following sentences paying attention to P-II.

1) When reconstructed this house will look more beautiful than before.

2) Here is the entrance, inflected gently away from the point to welcome the pilgrim with a wooden door always open in summer, and never locked in winter.

3) When burnt coal produces heat.

4) When rebelled against his father’s plan to make his eldest son the next head of the firm, he clearly learnt much.

5) He was apprenticed as a cabinet maker, and then studied design at the Basel school of arts and crafts, followed by the study at the Pratt Institute in New York.

6) The silver surfaces, combined with the curve, tend to dissolve space, to make it wide and almost amorphous.

7) The second aspect of Zumthor’s architecture clearly shown at Sogn Benederg is his belief in the importance of rooting buildings.

8) When mixed with water and gravel, cement forms a solid substance called concrete.

9) A big rectangular block grows out of the hillside, faced in slabs of local bluish grey gneiss, laid strata-like, thin edges outwards.

10) “They (panels) rest on metal consoles (brackets) held in place by large clamps”.

11) Diffused light pours in through the frosted skin of the building and down via the translucent glass ceiling, where it is supplemented in the middle of each floor, and … at the perimeter by automatically controlled artificial lighting.

12) If polished, this material can be used for making foundations.

13) Light falls into galleries basically square in plan, though modulated (like the square within a square of the main pool at vals) by planes brought forward from the perimeter.

14) It will be sort of maze created on rectangular plan out of parallel walls of building timber’ made like a lumberyard.

15) It is the carved block…

16) The theatre built in the last century needed reconstruction.

Exercise 9. Word control:

recipient (n); essence (n); diverse; response (n); site; sensitivity (n); concern (n, v); easterly; gabled; incredible; bring up; rigor (n); spell; sophisticated; achieve (v); achievement (n); acclaim (v, n); shaggy (a); shingle (n); expose (v); exposure (n); clerestory (n); chapel (n); strew (v); taper; slacken (v); hamlet.

Appendix: Reading for pleasure

The Italian Government have made a grant of 2 million pounds for urgent work to stop the Learning Tower of Pisa falling down.

But the money is only for temporary repairs while the Government wait for a master plan to save the 180 ft. high white marble bell-tower. They have launched an international competition with a prize of 200,000 pounds.

The decree earmarking¹ 2,110,000 pounds for immediate shoring up work² was published in the week-end edition of the Government’s official gazette. The same decree passed on to a special commission the task of choosing the winner of the “Save the Learning Tower” competition – for which thousands of ideas have already been submitted.

The Tower was built in 1350 on marshy ground and with poor foundations.

It now leans by 17 feet and every year it tilts a further twenty-fifth of an inch. If nothing is done the tower will crash in about 100 years.

Notes on the text:

1. earmark – предназначать

2. shoring up work – работа по спасению

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