I suspect that foreign visitors, especially if they think of the White House as the American equivalent of the ?ys?Palace, come away with the impression that the nerve center of the world's mightiest nation is an oddly ramshackle, disorganized project with respect to architecture and interior decoration, and an unaccountably humble interpretation of national glory and grandeur.
In Old San Juan, the colorful facades and cobblestone streets end at the cliffs, where a mound of ramshackle homes – a project named the Pearl – juts over the ocean, and confronts tourists with some of the 45% of Puerto Ricans who live below the poverty line.
Other bogus projects include ramshackle buildings that were financed as modern community centers.
I always wanted to write a book, but was intimidated by the sheer size of the project; starting Ramshackle Glam with virtually no knowledge of what blogging for a living might entail was what gave me the courage to just write the thing.
In reality, it is just a few shiny, glass and steel buildings erected in the place of ramshackle former factory warehouses and housing projects.
On the garden project, she is living in a ramshackle caravan, taking to the bottle now and again to deal with her memories.
In India, the entire project of life can be conducted out of ramshackle structures erected on dirty sidewalks from scraps of discarded tarp, pilfered corrugated metal, bamboo poles and a few logs for fuel scavenged daily from trash heaps.
This summer, the Smithsonian Institution is offering a tour of Manhattan Project landmarks in New Mexico, including the High Bay building, a ramshackle structure where key components for the Trinity device and the Nagasaki bomb were assembled.
After a £4m restoration project, the oldest pub music hall in the world is looking as ramshackle as ever.
And although Australia's aid to PNG has declined since its independence, it is still equivalent to about one-quarter of that country's tax revenues.The sheer number of foreign-funded development projects, and the bureaucracy involved in dealing with their sponsors, overwhelm these poor countries' ramshackle governments.
