architecture
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Balaban and Katz Chicago Theatre
You are viewing stuff tagged with architecture.
Matthew Christopher, on visiting and photographing The SS United States: Philadelphia’s Abandoned Ocean Liner:
As I looked out of the [SS United States] over the strip malls and parking lots that sprawled out before the ship’s bow, it struck me that maybe as a culture we are losing the capability to incorporate things of such remarkable grandeur into the fabric of our lives. We see something magnificent and instead of feeling that transcendent awe and humility, maybe we view it as a threat to the worth of the generally shabby architectural constructs we pepper our cities with today. Rather than a cause for celebration, things of beauty are merely to be gleefully demolished or to be hacked apart for the base elements they are made of. The real failure is in our own inability to save something like the SS United States, not in its inability to integrate itself into our world. We may now have massive cruise ships serving as seaborne vacation metropolises, but it would be hard to argue that they approach the class or elegance of the passenger liners that preceded them. Maybe as a symbol of who we are, we just don’t deserve the SS United States any more. Maybe we never did. I leave that judgment to you.
After seeing a particularly arresting picture of it, I’ve been thinking about the Pantheon in Rome. Here are a few bits about it from Wikipedia:
Almost two thousand years after it was built, the Pantheon’s dome is still the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome.
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It is one of the best-preserved of all Ancient Roman buildings, in large part because it has been in continuous use throughout its history.
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Throughout the day, light from the oculus moves around the interior in a reverse sundial effect: marking time with light rather than shadow.
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The large bronze doors to the cella, measuring 14.6 ft wide by 24.7 ft high, are original.
The Proper People summarize yet another expedition into a crumbling, roughly century-old building:
One reason I love this power plant so much is because there’s no reason it had to be built with all these intricate details and grandiose architecture. It’s just a power plant, after all; all it had to do was create electricity. I think that demonstrates a fundamental change of philosophy in the way we construct the world around us.
To me, the world is feeling more and more disposable. Everything is created as cheaply as possible, and it is simply a means to an end. But, when Port Richmond station was built, the builders thought they were constructing something that would serve future generations for centuries, and when we’re creating something permanent, it’s only natural for us to want to inject art and creativity and craftmanship into it. It’s part of what makes us human — and that’s what lacking from so much of what we build today.
I’m not always a huge fan of Frank Gehry, but he sure knocked it out of the… park, when he designed the Jay Pritzker Pavillion. Mykala’s sitting on the “great lawn” that stretches out from the very high-tech bandshell. We listened to a wonderfully-performed free classical concert, put on during the Memorial Day weekend. The music was atrocious (too much modern dissonance). The night was beautiful. So was Mykala.
The view at the beginning of the magnificent Chicago Lines Architectural Tour. The nice bluish glass spire at the middle is the Adrian Smith-designed Trump Tower at center. I think it’s a great building, and the tour guide during our cruise seemed to agree.
Mykala is in this picture for scale — this building was once the department store Gimbels. According to Wikipedia, this Milwaukee store was where “Adam Gimbel had first found success (and alleged to be the most profitable Gimbel store)…”. It became a Marshall Field’s for a little while, and is now a Marriott Residence Inn. You can see at the top of this picture the large, ornate coffers that make up the architrave of the Roman façade. The curtains are covering the capitals of some huge ionic columns. They don’t build buildings like they used to.
This was the tallest habitable building in the United States for 4 years, from 1895 to 1899.
I first saw this in a completely computerized rendering in the singular, incomparable online video called The Third & the Seventh. This is part of the Milwaukee Art Museum. Take it away, Wikipedia:
Someday, I hope to have a place with a bookcase like this:
However, I’d be fine if I had these cool suspended bookcases like this:
The Galata Tower in Istanbul was built in Medieval times as a part of fortifications. Its stone walls are 9 feet thick. I guess it has a more historically accurate cone top to it now, but I think the wooden cupola pictured here looked cooler.
I recently found out that the famous Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen designed the sanctuary for Christ Church Lutheran, right here in my backyard of Minneapolis. Turns out Saarinen’s son, the world-famous Eero Saarinen (of St. Louis Gateway Arch fame, designed a lovely addition to the original building. Here’s a picture, by the local Pete Sieger:
This obituary for Huguette Clark, who recently died at the age of 104, may be one of the oddest I’ve ever read.
For the quarter-century that followed, Mrs. Clark lived in the apartment in near solitude, amid a profusion of dollhouses and their occupants. She ate austere lunches of crackers and sardines and watched television, most avidly “The Flintstones.” A housekeeper kept the dolls’ dresses impeccably ironed.
This great talk, in which James H Kunstler dissects suburbia, articulates an important problem. We’ve built “places that aren’t worth caring about” that are only accessible via giant highways powered by cars running on temporarily cheap oil. So, when you take the long view (which isn’t very long at this point), you’ll find that suburbs can’t continue as they are. People do not thrive in the isolation of suburbs:
Tried to go on an architectural tour — but at $too much per person, we’ll wait until we return with more funds.
Skyscrapers from the ground look tall!
From an email from Mykala this past May. Apartment Therapy presents: Hobbit House in Wales.
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