IN: Chester Burton "Chet" Atkins (June 20, 1924 - June 30, 2001), known as "Mr. Guitar" and "The Country Gentleman", was an American musician, occasional vocalist, songwriter, and record producer, who along with Owen Bradley and Bob Ferguson, among others, created the country music style that came to be known as the Nashville sound, which expanded country music's appeal to adult pop music fans. He was primarily known as a guitarist. He also played the mandolin, fiddle, banjo, and ukulele. Atkins's signature picking style was inspired by Merle Travis.

While working with a Western band in Denver, Colorado, Atkins came to the attention of RCA Victor. Siman had been encouraging Steve Sholes to sign Atkins, as his style (with the success of Merle Travis as a hit recording artist) was suddenly in vogue. Sholes, A&R director of country music at RCA, tracked Atkins down in Denver. He made his first RCA Victor recordings in Chicago in 1947. They did not sell, but he did some studio work for RCA that year but had relocated to Knoxville again, where he worked with Homer and Jethro on WNOX's new Saturday night radio show The Tennessee Barn Dance and the popular Midday Merry Go Round. In 1949, he left WNOX to join June Carter with Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters on KWTO. This incarnation of the old Carter Family featured Maybelle Carter and daughters June, Helen, and Anita. Their work soon attracted attention from the Grand Ole Opry. The group relocated to Nashville in the mid-1950s. Atkins began working on recording sessions and performing on WSM-AM and the Opry. Atkins became a member of the Opry in the 1950s. While he had not yet had a hit record for RCA Victor, his stature was growing. He began assisting Sholes as a session leader when the New York-based producer needed help organizing Nashville sessions for RCA Victor artists. Atkins's first hit single was "Mr. Sandman", followed by "Silver Bell", which he recorded as a duet with Hank Snow. His albums also became more popular. He was featured on ABC-TV's The Eddy Arnold Show in the summer of 1956 and on Country Music Jubilee in 1957 and 1958 (by then renamed Jubilee USA). In addition to recording, Atkins was a design consultant for Gretsch, which manufactured a popular Chet Atkins line of electric guitars from 1955-1980. He became manager of RCA Victor's Nashville studio, eventually inspiring and seeing the completion of the legendary RCA Studio B, the first studio built specifically for the purpose of recording on the now-famous Music Row.

Did Sholes later show appreciation or help him back?

OUT: His albums also became more popular.

IN: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( MEESS; German: [mi:s]; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886 - August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He is commonly referred to and was addressed as Mies, his surname.

Mies designed a series of four middle-income high-rise apartment buildings for developer Herbert Greenwald: the 860-880 (which was built between 1949 and 1951) and 900-910 Lake Shore Drive towers on Chicago's Lakefront. These towers, with facades of steel and glass, were radical departures from the typical residential brick apartment buildings of the time. Mies found their unit sizes too small for him, choosing instead to continue living in a spacious traditional luxury apartment a few blocks away. The towers were simple rectangular boxes with a non-hierarchical wall enclosure, raised on stilts above a glass-enclosed lobby. The lobby is set back from the perimeter columns, which were exposed around the perimeter of the building above, creating a modern arcade not unlike those of the Greek temples. This configuration created a feeling of light, openness, and freedom of movement at the ground level that became the prototype for countless new towers designed both by Mies's office and his followers. Some historians argue that this new approach is an expression of the American spirit and the boundless open space of the frontier, which German culture so admired. Once Mies had established his basic design concept for the general form and details of his tower buildings, he applied those solutions (with evolving refinements) to his later high-rise building projects. The architecture of his towers appears to be similar, but each project represents new ideas about the formation of highly sophisticated urban space at ground level. He delighted in the composition of multiple towers arranged in a seemingly casual non-hierarchical relation to each other. Just as with his interiors, he created free flowing spaces and flat surfaces that represented the idea of an oasis of uncluttered clarity and calm within the chaos of the city. He included nature by leaving openings in the pavement, through which plants seem to grow unfettered by urbanization, just as in the pre-settlement environment.

What material were they built from?

OUT: These towers, with facades of steel and glass, were radical departures from the typical residential brick apartment buildings of the time.

IN: John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 - August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

In 2012, amongst a wide range of American and international centennial celebrations, an eight-day festival was held in Washington DC, with venues found notably more amongst the city's art museums and universities than performance spaces. Earlier in the centennial year, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas presented Cage's Song Books with the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York. Another celebration came, for instance, in Darmstadt, Germany, which in July 2012 renamed its central station the John Cage Railway Station during the term of its annual new-music courses. At the Ruhrtriennale in Germany, Heiner Goebbels staged a production of Europeras 1 & 2 in a 36,000 sq ft converted factory and commissioned a production of Lecture on Nothing created and performed by Robert Wilson. Jacaranda Music had four concerts planned in Santa Monica, California, for the centennial week. John Cage Day was the name given to several events held during 2012 to mark the centenary of his birth. A 2012 project was curated by Juraj Kojs to celebrate the centenary of Cage's birth, titled On Silence: Homage to Cage. It consisted of 13 commissioned works created by composers from around the global such as Kasia Glowicka, Adrian Knight and Henry Vega, each being 4 minutes and 33 seconds long in honor of Cage's famous 1952 opus, 4'33''. The program was supported by the Foundation for Emerging Technologies and Arts, Laura Kuhn and the John Cage Trust. In a homage to Cage's dance work, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in July 2012 "performed an engrossing piece called 'Story/Time'. It was modeled on Cage's 1958 work 'Indeterminacy', in which [Cage and then Jones, respectively,] sat alone onstage, reading aloud ... series of one-minute stories [they]'d written. Dancers from Jones's company performed as [Jones] read."

Who were some of these commissioned composers?

OUT:
Kasia Glowicka, Adrian Knight and Henry Vega,