facade-ectomy
n.— «To be sure, shaving away everything but the facade of a building has been done before. In 1989, architects Moriyama & Teshima jammed a modern office building at 10 S. LaSalle St. with blue and lime green walls between the templelike base of the 1912 Otis Building by the legendary Chicago firm of Holabird & Roche. The resulting visual mismatch epitomizes the sins inflicted by this type of architectural surgery, which preservationists pejoratively refer to as a “facade-ectomy.”» —“The danger of becoming skin deep” by Blair Kamin Chicago Tribune Apr. 8, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Janet in Montgomery, Alabama, reports that a day after she had surgery on her hand, the wound burst open, and a doctor noted that her wound dehisced. She’s used to hearing dehisce used in botany to mean the splitting of a plant structure to...
In 1971, when a new public library opened in Troy, Michigan, famous authors and artists were invited to write letters to the city’s youngest readers, extolling the many benefits of libraries. One of the loveliest was from E.B. White, author of...