Into the streets for almost 2 months now demanding change overnight protesters clashed with security forces security forces used rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse the demonstrators and they say the protesters were throwing rocks at police around 46 people were taken to the hospital according to the Lebanese civil defense and Red Cross Lebanon is facing one of its worst economic crises in decades and the protesters accuse the ruling class who've been in power for 3 decades of mismanagement and corruption emanating on n.p.r. News Beirut officials in Bangladesh say at least 10 people were killed in a fire at a factory outside Bangladesh is capital today the 2nd deadly factory fire in the area and less than a week the fire broke out in the luxury fan factory in the Gaza poor area outside of Dhaka 10 bodies were recovered after firefighters brought the blaze under control this is n.p.r. News. Protests in India's capital turned violent today with demonstrators clashing with police and P.R.'s Lauren Frayer reports a controversial new citizenship law is it issue the protests began last week in India's diverse northeast where immigration is a sensitive issue people there worry the citizenship Amendment Act will allow migrants to Guy loot local culture and compete for jobs clashes with police there have left several people dead over the past week curfews have now been eased in the northeast and demonstrations have broke out in the capital New Delhi rioters burned a bus there this controversial new law is designed to offer refuge to persecuted religious minorities from neighboring countries but only if they're not Muslim and that exclusion has drawn allegations of discrimination opposition parties have asked India's Supreme Court to strike down the law Lauren Frayer n.p.r. News Mumbai at the box office this weekend frozen to slid to 2nd place after 3 straight weeks at the top replacing it Sony's Jumanji the next level with a box office take of more than $60000000.00 in the u.s. And Canada. Will be more challenging. Problem on G.'s a normal I don't want to point question. Is that. How when how and how big are the film's stars Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart and is a follow up to the 2017 Jumanji Welcome to the jungle Clint Eastwood's latest film Richard Jewel opened 4th with box office sales of $5000000.00 I'm Louise Schiavone n.p.r. News Washington support for n.p.r. Comes from new offering a personalized weight loss program based on our cognitive behavioral approach with the goal of losing weight and keeping it off for good learn more Numa and o.o.m. Dot com and listeners like you who donates had this n.p.r. Station. Studio 360 is supported by new whose yellow green and red approach to categorizing food helped you make better meal choices with the goal of losing weight and keeping it off for good learn more at noon and o.o.m. Dot com. And couldn't miss it I'm sitting on the steps of the Lincoln with. Thomas Jefferson a vegetable I like to have the best he will do anything is all about timing I try to get a little bit away from the actual subject he could secure place right Studio 3 a week it could Anderson. This month is the 75th anniversary of Tennessee Williams great groundbreaking play The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams was 33 when it opened in Chicago in 1904 and became this really vivid overnight success it turned him into a household name that's w. N.y.c. Culture editor Jennifer Bowen ask Oh The Glass Menagerie is a domestic drama Tennessee Williams It takes place all in an apartment in St Louis Tennessee Williams called it a memory play and what he meant by that is that not only is Tom telling it from the future but he's telling it out of his memory which means that maybe he doesn't get all the details right being a memory play it is. It is sentimental It is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen. That explains. So Tom is the narrator of the story Tom is really a stand in for Tennessee Williams I am the narrative of the play a character in. The play of my mother. And a gentleman called. Tom works at a shoe factory he's a really unhappy because really in his secret heart he's a poet very much like Tennessee Williams There's Amanda she is the main shark of the family the single mother who's a very demanding very nag will have Laura Tom Sr and Amanda's daughter she's kind of emotionally fragile Laura is most likely based on Thomas e. Williams actual sister Rose who herself was later diagnosed with schizophrenia Laura just really wants to be left alone she has this collection of glass animals The Glass Menagerie the unicorn horses other kinds of animals she just wants to spend the day polishing them taking care of them. Or. Most little have a lot of time just. In the work. By the concert. And it's a story about nobody getting what they want the brother wants to escape his dysfunctional family the sister once a gentleman caller to rescue her from her shyness and the mother keeps telling Laura you need a job or you need a husband what are we going to do the rest of our lives just stay home watch the parade go by amuse ourselves this Glass Menagerie darling the glass animals are really the central a metaphor for the Glass Menagerie one of the glass animals in particular unicorn becomes a man. For for Laura and for her possibilities in life when Jim the gentleman caller comes and visits the unicorn breaks. All the good. It does. I just imagine he had not. And the hone his route to make him feel. Free. Now I'll be back. When. We get the feeling oh great she's no longer going to be a unicorn off by herself solitary almost extinct she is going to be able to have a family and have a life just like everyone else but by the end of the play we understand that this glass you know when this broke communal corn is actually a metaphor for all of Laura's broken hopes and that she's never going to be whole again it's really heartbreaking. To play ends with Tom running off to the Merchant Marines he has not had a life Bill so his mother and his sister are left and darkness and the despair. It's interesting that the play doesn't really put Tennessee Williams in a very good light Tom really leaves his family in really dire straits like maybe even more straights and there would have been if he hadn't even been in the family . I just read the class naturally and I realized that I've kind of identified with all the different characters at different times that's one of the things that makes a resident even though our world is so different than the 1944 world when it was 1st written you can keep mining it for experiences over and over these characters are still kind of the archetypes that we live with and so many of us also have of course dysfunctional families and we know what it's like to want to escape our situation and we know what it's like to really learn for something more. Jennifer Vasco is culture editor w n y c. So Glass Menagerie glass buildings when it comes to buildings it wasn't that long ago that glass had this very particular wall form window this. Rectangle set into the wall to let some light in but a big part of what makes the modern world modern are perfectly rectangular buildings that are all about glass they're glass skins and that's due in large measure to a small art and design school that existed very briefly in a small German city in the early 20th century the house the bone house was founded in by Mar in 190100 years ago which is why I'm talking about it today my idea was always we have to do something together to destroy these separations between painting and. So on is oh that's Walter Gropius who was a founder of its stars included the artist convinced the holy knowledge. And the architects Walter Gropius and mood would meet vendor Rowe both of whom ran the school as well even though the buy house only lasted for 14 years the architecture and design faculty became so influential that the school's name became the name of a movement and is still practically synonymous with moderns so to get a centennial fix on the Bauhaus legacy especially in America I called my friend Francis bro net to go on a field trip to look at some of New York's Bauhaus the in buildings. Or however you say that in German I guess Francis is an architect and president of Pratt Institute the architecture and design an art college in New York where I happen to serve on the board even the question of what is Bauhaus see right what does that mean for the original Bauhaus architects it meant more than just a static after the hell of World War One they wanted to make the world a better place when we look at the origins of Bauhaus it had a social project this was an industrial revolution it was a moment in time where you were building a new professional class that was going to be using new materials new techniques new. These new tools and develop a whole new world with that where more people could have access to more people could have better lives that was the intent the lasting big Bauhaus idea in architecture was that modern buildings should look like decorated cakes but like the sleek engineered machines they are showing off their modern construction techniques and modern materials like steel plate glass and grids of columns and beams and kennel leavers with flat roofs so what was the Bauhaus about it was deep experiments with new materials new technologies new ways of thinking about labor because they were trying to figure out the place between crafts and manufacturing there walking into the industrial revolution they're coming out of the 1st industrial revolution what can we do now to to generate things for everybody but also what does technology reveal about the making of something what can we do after the Nazi shut down the house in 1033 the architect Gropius and knees as he was called immigrated to America and me set up the important u.s. Bauhaus outpost at the Illinois Institute of Technology he even designed the campus where until just a couple of years ago Francis was provost I not only taught at I I t. Lived on a museum campus I actually lived in a nice tower and like start right really along the lake in Chicago yeah so nice founder he father was a stonemason so he grew up learning about crafts very very deep awareness of how you make things attention to detail of course about those buildings not everybody in America instantly loved Mrs to pieces me in Tokyo up purely technical approach to architecture of denial of a static beauty No I don't. Think. Oh. It means. You know if. It's 50. You know options. Somebody's got to. But before long he and his influential followers helped bring the Bauhaus d.n.a. There every new post-war American big city including here in New York 375 Park Avenue not just another New York office building but in the words of architectural leaders a singular landmark and new and aristocratic qualities are not likely to be often repeated in any city anywhere new standard architectural quality here we are at the Seagram Building one of the great buildings certainly the park avenue of New York of America is still to me a beautiful building but it's probably not as extraordinary as it was when it was put up 60 years ago well of course one of its extraordinary features is that it's still extraordinary rights that it's timeless it's this dark black steel and glass it's actually coated in bronze rant this one has a kind of pattern that wasn't the norm in the search for a special dignity and design age old bronze was chosen other New York skyscrapers where pieces of aluminum steel glass but this building machines and bronze is unique. The seat room building is $38.00 stories just tall enough to be imposing Amber tinted glass dark bronze and out from this perfectly scaled stone plaza with 2 decorative pools the building is as refined and serious as a bespoke business this is also building in some way that you know expresses a structure Ok so you see this basically what other people would call columns but they're not called the vertical elements that are huddling all the way to the top as singular strips all the way up unrelenting right there not broken. You see them going so those are actually added on to the structure they're not doing anything other than the static construction man speak of them as. These problems have to architectural tasks to perform a separate floor to ceiling windows and also they multiply the vertical lines rising majestically from the glass wall the ground floor to the top of the building here is actually an unrestricted cure. So when people say well decoration it's ridiculous you have to look at all of these details you know look at where any kind of great is placed everything is absolutely deliberate There is nothing arbitrary about where things land and where the joints look like it has a certain kind of proportion right and symmetry. In some ways a kind of control discipline and what's interesting here is that it has this incredible fluidity from inside to outside it's pretty remarkable You can see that fluidity between inside and outside that Francis is talking about when you look at the pink granite that paves the building's lot which is the same granite on the surface of the plaza just outside the blast walls and the surface is continuous It goes right inside there isn't a threshold and it's the same material just goes right same material goes right through so he's basically saying as though anybody could come into the building everybody is welcome there isn't this monumental staircase and you have to sort of ask Do I belong here it's you feel like you can come on here but there are some discussions about this because he says everybody can come here but there's no place to sit then we headed inside the building. But here we are in the lobby of the Super Building which is grand but not bombastic or gigantic and kind of small you know it's modest It's 2 stories. Maybe a 100 feet by 50 feet glass and bronze and beautiful travertine marble Yes And it's fascinating to me to see what's here because I'm sure these desks this is not an easy an aesthetic there they have too much detail they're not as elegant as the building itself. The level of precision that and control all right that he wanted now in fact there's a lot a lot of work and writing about modern architects wanting to control what you were wearing the furniture in the lobby of many of their residential towers for example would have designed the chairs Frank Lloyd Wright was doing that before out of the way these guys slippers everything was taken care of that is actually the critique often of the work does that allow for people to truly inhabit the space you mean as opposed to being too austere and you have to be controlled and so I think that the real question is What are the parameters by which we can occupy these spaces and feel Ok about being in them right so let's walk across this gorgeous continuous floor slash Plaza over the lever conveniently 50 yards away was a nother masterpiece of the houses Thetic building just leave your house 390 Park Avenue it was built in 1952 as headquarters for the Lever Brothers so Company Brownlee warehouse in New York City come back greatest skincare discovery of our time cream yours while you watch it was designed by Gordon buncha and Natalie deplores who were American disciples of me and worked in the Bauhaus mode so there were architects are already bringing this what ultimately became the international style but they were explicitly influenced by all these European modernist including the bad guys right absolutely because this work with already. Everywhere in the in the twenty's and thirty's now being built that early so existed on paper buildings like this well it was doing drawings of glass towers that were very very sophisticated in the twenty's and thirty's so it is this very. This mirror to Blue-Green window glass which is a very distinct part of the building right well remember the context in which they're operating the streets was a set of buildings that were brick and stone right and all of a sudden there is this very very lights almost. Project that challenges the sort of heaviness of these other impenetrable building right and this building is thinking about opening up space so you could actually see it right and I think what's really important about this particular building is its play with openings and solids and light and voids were very very central to the way the Bauhaus experimented and looked at projects so you have an open space on the ground that anybody can go into so you're on the street and then you're in this beautiful covered space and then you in this courtyard that's completely open to the sky so. I think that's what's extraordinary again the play inside outside inside outside this building is actually I think if you go back to its social agenda if you want it's giving back to the streets right it's saying to the people yeah you come in here because we don't have anything marking the edge of it right the sidewalk goes right into the plaza people are cutting right diagonally across that they feel that they're welcome to just enter fundamentally private property the Leiber house architects word for Skidmore Owings and Merrill which was the modern American firm went on Earth heard of architects as a kid among other things more designed the former Sears Tower in Chicago the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and skyscrapers and banks and corporate buildings almost everywhere. Frank Lloyd Wright referred to Skidmore Owings and Merrill as the. Many people will say Skidmore Owings and Merrill were the firm that understood me and that work and were able to develop it into a very very corporate model very sophisticated and became the firm to do the most eminent corporations right which is another way the Bauhaus had this was a mortal relief to have this life in the United States and the rest of the world beyond the actual toots from the right but was also about can the building itself be part of the brand so the lever house was part of the brand you know think about it it was transparent they're selling soap the building is the headquarters of a manufacturer who has a natural interest in keeping things clean it becomes an advertisement for Unilever rights so you're saying Stephen is there's a big bottle of Scotch basically that's I guess oh there's the bronze. But one of the other things to be aware of is that. There seems to be a small irony right. In the fact that the Bauhaus started off as a social proposition and then the 1st buildings to emerge are corporate entities. So these modern buildings in the mid fifty's in America seemed like the very expression of sophisticated and modern and new which America was so trying to own and be at that time the difficulty of course is that in some ways to do this as well required an incredible discipline and not everybody had it and it was also easy to copy so by being easy to copy some of the very sophisticated nuances get lost and then of course how do you do this without doing a 1000 iterations losing money on the job so I think that people started to short not understanding the values of the proportions of how people move through the building the relationship of the scale itself how big can you go before in fact there is failure aesthetic failure so if you look across the street at whatever building that is. $99.00 to you wherever there's a kind of value engineering there right we're not afraid he's right about value engineering is the architecture phrase for making it cheap for taking out things that might cost too much right and so much smaller panes of glass right so much less expensive much less difficult to install and again we're trying to figure out ways to make things faster better cheaper right and sometimes the design was one of things that are forfeited right remember some of the most extraordinary designs have a p