Saturday, December 17, 2005

Galinda soaked up the architecture of Shiz. Here and there, mostly in protected college yards and side streets, the oldest surviving domestic architecture still leaned, ancient wattle-and-daub and exposed stud framing held up like paralytic grannies by stronger, newer relatives on either side. Then in dizzying succession, unparalled glories: Bloodstone Medieval, Merthic (both Least and the more fantastical Late), Gallantine with its symmetries and restraint, Gallantine Reformed with all those ogees and broken pediments, Bluestone Revival, Imperial Bombast, and Industrial Modern, or as the critics in the liberal press put it, High Hostile Crudstyle, the form propogated by the modernity-minded Wizard of Oz.

Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (75-76)