"Everybody was sweating bullets to think of what would happen this year," said Arthur J. Boyle, general manager of the passenger ship terminal, a concrete complex of bridges, buildings and piers off the Hudson River, from 46th to 54th Streets.

An Associated Press reporter who visited the base in October 2007 described it as a concrete complex near the village.

Paula Ross, a television journalist from Pensacola, Fla., who spent four months in Prague last summer, lived with a working mother "in one of those giant Communist concrete complexes that goes on forever."

"We don't know if there's friendlies in that building," said Sgt. Richard Coleman, referring to the concrete complex a few feet away from where Sergeant Leija had been shot.

GDC paid $68.5 million this fall for the three-story partly enclosed concrete complex, which includes Target, Best Buy, Petco, Bed Bath & Beyond and T. J. Maxx stores.

He parked in a space to the left of double glass doors that led into the lobby and lockup of the large concrete complex he commanded.

Designed in the 1950s, this concrete complex finally opened in 1982 and was quickly tagged London's ugliest building.

The original 'quad' building was incorporated into a new glass and concrete complex, that included a five floor tower containing the English and Science departments.

"We have built a universe of concrete complexes and machinery, but we have not yet created a modern nation," said a Saudi official in Riyadh who speaks with King Fahd.

This new concrete complex is called a "smart" material because it has an attribute of living organisms: the ability to sense that it is injured and then heal its wounds.