Sometimes the symbolism is unmistakable, as in Saarinen’s design for the main terminal for TWA at New York’s Idlewild airport. This structure looks so much like a “big bird” that it is hard to believe it was not so tagged in the architect’s drafting room. The fact that this effort rounds the circle, and that, intentionally or not, the symbolic reference to an alighting bird is just as simple and direct as it would be in popular building, does not mean that the TWA terminal will not reach a high esthetic standard. The models promise an interior not only alliterative but beautiful.

Of course, ghosts do not always lie quietly. In the diptych bloody thursday, Wendy focused on overhead wires at a MUNI turnaround across the street from the Audiffred Building, where two striking workers were fatally shot on July 5, 1934. The wires, she said, reminded her of “bullets flying through the air.” Tom’s Glen Park Grasses, taken at the site of Alfred Nobel’s first U.S. dynamite factory, Giant Powder, is haunted by the workers who died in the industrial accidents that pushed manufacturing further away from populated areas in the city center.