ziggurat

He traces some of Washington's "religious" aspects back to Babylon an other ancient capitals: radiating avenues, orientation of the city's main axes to the four points of the compass, "central monumental architecture like temples, palaces, pyramids, ziggurats, and raised altars," and "processional boulevards connecting these places of power." Such architecture, Meyer says, symbolizes the larger cosmic order and proclaims a connection between the city and its heavenly sponsors.

Under those ziggurats she stood, around her the crosswalk's rumpled hide of even bars striving, white and black, and I saw her nod and raise her throat to the light's acute descent fiercely, vainly, I thought at first: let November match this cheekbone's Lithuanian shadow (as if to say), let the triumph of concrete ramparts somehow narrow and cure the light in these eyes from green to dull gray.

"Twin Cities of Sin" said the catch line on a somewhat lurid depiction of the action complete with collapsing ziggurats.

Redeeming an ordinary building material for art and evoking enormous towers and ziggurats, the block pieces make explicit the artist's fascination with architecture, catalyzed during an early stmt as a draftsman for I.

Moreover, neither divine kingship nor ziggurats emerged suddenly in Mesopotamia, and the anteriority of the alleged Egyptian models for the Mesopotamian banquet and related imagery is at least questionable.

Parked in a stockade we stand beside their pickup while admittance is sought to a building.Yet all I can think of is the carpet I had seen in the suq, a carpet in scarlet and brown with a pattern of ziggurats on which a figure was visible, climbing towards the sky.

It was only rediscovered in the early twentieth century by German archaeologists and now consists of a vast number of mounds covering acres of land -- the remains of ancient buildings -- dominated by the huge bulk of a ziggurat. Ziggurats -- stepped pyramids, formed with a series of terraces and ramps -- seem to have been evolved by the Sumerians around 6000 ye ars ago and were taken over and developed by succeeding Mesopotamian civilization like the Assyrians.

Photos taken in Venezuela or South Africa, for example, are literally "prolonged" in hand-drawn pendants executed several years later; a six-monitor video piece takes its images from a 1997 performance in Angola and its title from a seventeenth-century haiku; and an installation from the series "Nuevas architectures" (New architectures 2001), uses rice-paper lamps to construct millennial table-top cities where igloos, ziggurats, and pyramids coexist with modernist monoliths and futuristic towers undulating toward the ceiling/sky.

Half-finished apartment towers and bare concrete skeletons of huge hotels whose doors never opened loom above the jungle canopy like the deserted ziggurats of some forgotten civilization.

But when I arrived at his loft on Greene Street in SoHo, which felt like the inside of a cedar trunk, I found the floor covered with ziggurats of piles of playing cards, scraps and colored paper, ripped cardboard, gnarly flatened metal coffee cans.

Laib also sculpts rudimentary house forms in stone and wax that serve as containers for rice ("Rice Houses") and large-scale beeswax constructions in the shape of steps, ziggurats, boats, and walk-in rooms.

Prominent themes of his works include the inscription of naive motifs within a grid structure as well as references to architecture through evocations of ziggurats, doors, steps, and tunnels.