And that is how we arrive at this latest group of extraordinary projects.
But I think the best talk of TED 2012 was Regina Dugan's speech about doing the impossible in which she gave example after example of extraordinary projects of past and present where just before success the experts said it was impossible: airplanes, the sound barrier, space travel, landing on the Moon, the Internet, thought-controlled robots, etc.
Gordon's recounting of such extraordinary projects as the building of the Erie Canal, which made New York the commercial epicenter of the U.S., are riveting.
Few of their extraordinary projects got further than the drawing board, but those that did and still stand are precious historical reminders of a hopeful age before communism was eaten from within by purges, war and - finally - stagnation.
In the early 1980s, though, as the dictatorship's rigidity began to assuage, Bo Bardi completed one of the most extraordinary projects of recent Brazilian architecture: the SESC Pompéia, a social and cultural centre adapted from an obsolete oil drum factory in downtown São Paulo.
The latter, facilitated by historian Cal Winslow, director of the Mendocino Institute, "was one of the most extraordinary projects I've undertaken as a scholar," recalls Watts - whose past fieldwork has taken him to west Africa, south Asia, and Vietnam to study peasant agriculture, Islamic social movements, and the political ecology of oil.
The supervisor of this extraordinary project was Louis Dollo, a zoologist who was to spend most of his life studying Iguanodon, working out its structure, and speculating on its living habits.f England and Europe produced most of the early discoveries and students of dinosaurs, but North America soon began to contribute a large share of both.
This case is the subject of an extraordinary project at Columbia Law School, which this week released a book-length account — called "Los Tocayos Carlos," or the namesake Carlos — detailing the errors in the investigation and prosecution of Mr. DeLuna from the moment of his arrest.
Here's an anecdote from my own archive of The Extraordinary Project: "I needed an answer to a cultural question once," said midwife and filmmaker Mary Sommers, who made the Detroit documentary, Tough Luck.
And this reminds me of your extraordinary project "365 Paintings for Hope". Can you explain what this project is? PS: The project is based on Joseph Beuys's idea of a "social sculpture". CD: You mean the idea that art has the power to transform society?
With little fanfare, it has been unpacking boxes of extraordinary Writers' Project material over the last few years from warehouses and storage facilities.
