The Boston Globe phrased it nicely: "The titan of international architecture, harmonizer of the social, industrial, physical and esthetic needs of modern man, is building a pigsty." Admitted Architect Walter Gropius, 84, explaining why a man who designed the Bauhaus and Boston Center would stoop to a pigsty: "I lost a bet." The bet, he added, was with Friend Philip Rosenthal, owner of the Rosenthal China Co., who brought out a line of china that Gropius was willing to bet would not sell well. The architect offered to pay off in a new home for Rosenthal's porker Roro. Rosenthal's plates have sold splendidly, and Gropius' architecture firm is now busily at work, said an associate, "studying how pigs live."

As the town that boasts the home offices of Eastman Kodak and Xerox, Rochester, N.Y., has a lot of candidates for a winner of its Salesman of the Year award. This year, though, the Chamber of Commerce passed up the boys with the order books and reached into the Rochester Roman Catholic Archdiocese to hail Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, 72, for his "outstanding job of selling Rochester to the country, to the world and to itself."

Elizabeth Taylor? "She looks like two small boys fighting under a mink blanket," says Hollywood Designer Mr. Blackwell, 42, creator and promoter of the annual Worst-Dressed Woman Awards. Even so, Liz ranks only fourth on Blackwell's current list of sartorial sad sacks, behind Barbra Streisand ("Today's flower child gone to seed in a cabbage patch"), Julie Christie ("Daisy Mae lost in Piccadilly Circus") and Jayne Meadows ("Barnum and Bailey in a telephone booth"). Julie Andrews, Carol Channing, Ann Margret, Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave and Raquel Welch are the other distinguished dowdies, but it's not really their fault. "I should have named the ten worst designers," said Blackwell, "instead of blaming the women."

Rutgers English Professor Frederick T. McGill has given the pedagogical lie to hippiedom's worshipful identification with 19th century Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was no "true hippie," said the prof, because his rejection of society was really a matter of "giving up what he desired least in order to leave time and a little money for the essentials." And these essentials, McGill added, did not include blowing his cerebrum. "Thoreau said morning air was his chief intoxicant," lectured McGill. "He undoubtedly would have rejected artificial stimulants and the use of mind-expanding drugs."

In five quick years as discoverer-manager of the Beatles, fledgling Impresario Brian Epstein made $14 million, lived with a valet in a town house around the corner from Buckingham Palace, and adopted opulence as a way of life. He made so much money that not even high spending and Britain's high taxes could drain it all. When he died last summer at 32 of an overdose of barbiturates, Epstein left an estate of about $1,200,000, which after taxes and debts comes to $638,400. Epstein had no will, and the money will go to his mother.

Though he is not quite in the class of that other royal karate expert, Greece's black-belted King Constantine, Spain's Prince Juan Carlos de Borbon y Borbon is good enough to have earned a brown belt, first class, and proud enough of it to invite Madrid photographers to take a look. The occasion was Juan Carlos' 30th birthday, and he celebrated by cleaving a board with the edge of his hand. There was something else to celebrate too. The Prince is now, as far as age is concerned, eligible to become King, assuming that the monarchy is restored, after Generalissimo Francisco Franco steps down. The prince's father, Don Juan, 54, is, of course, first in line, and the prince loyally flew off to Portugal to spend his birthday with his father in exile.

Folks go first class in Texas, and first of all is that bubble-topped monument to indoor baseball and plastic grass, the Houston Astrodome. "We're geared for anything," boasts the arena's major astrodomo, Judge Roy Hofheinz, 55. Not quite, though. The Astrodome lacks a basketball floor, and this might have been an embarrassment when unbeaten, second-ranked Houston University wanted to use the Dome for its game against unbeaten, top-ranked U.C.L.A. No sweat for the judge. He reached clear over to Los Angeles to borrow a portable floor, spent $10,000 trucking it to Texas and setting it up. Then he went out and sold all 48,500 seats plus standing room for $200,000--largest gate in basketball history.

Brooks Brothers, the New York clothiers, makes a nifty set of threads, but $50,000 does seem a bit stiff. Nevertheless, a North Carolina woman named Marion J. Smith is asking that much for an 1865 Brooks Brothers frock coat and suit--namely the one worn by Abraham Lincoln when he was assassinated. The coat came to Mrs. Smith via her grandfather, a White House doorkeeper who was given the clothes by Mary Todd Lincoln. Though the bidding is open to everyone, the National Park Service lusts for the frock coat for its Lincoln Museum in Washington's restored Ford Theater. Would the original maker of the suit like to buy it back for the nation? "We felt," replied a store executive, "that $50,000 was too high a price even for a Lincoln-owned Brooks Brothers suit."

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