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
An Army veteran in Madison, Alabama, wonders about the use of the charrette (sometimes spelled with one R, charette) in the military to mean a gathering to workshop ideas and work through all potential solutions to a problem. The term seems to have...
What sort of language is worthy of being inscribed in stone? A frieze on the James A. Farley Building in New York City is inscribed with Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their...