Down every Dublin alley is another fascinating vignette. These tiny structures, differentiated from their neighbors by their paint, are yet another example.
Category: Ireland
Old Amidst New
At once (post)modern and ancient, Dublin is a city with many sides; I feel this image captures both. Amidst a see of mid-rise modern construction, this older building looks particularly decrepit with the enormous foliage astride it.
Dublin Barber
The barbershop open at the mouth of a long street of shuttered, graffitied shops almost looks like a dressed set for a film; the visual interplay between the figure in the foreground and the distant figure at the end of the alley raises a question about their past or future interaction that I can’t answer.
Around St. Stephen’s Green
Out and about St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin…
This gull knows the meaning of patience.
Traffic Along the River Liffey
November rush-hour traffic in Dublin provides a glowing array down the street, but I have to imagine it’s more frustrating to be sitting in said traffic.
Irish Balcony
Bright end-of-the-day sunlight adds some brightness to a damp November evening in Dublin.
Dublin Street Corner
Dublin in late autumn has a damp energy that I found unquestionably intriguing; the optical artifacts from shooting into the setting sun do a fair job of approximating the feeling that every bit of asphalt and brick have some eerie effect taking place beneath them.
And a bonus Piper shot from just about the same moment as we explored the city.
Waiting for William Gibson
William Gibson’s novels—particularly the latter ones—are deeply interested in questions of design and constructed environments. That, combined with his characters’ globe-trotting tendencies, means that richly described hotel lobbies figure frequently into his works.
I’m a bit of a great hotel lobby fan myself, so the plant-filled glass space at the front of Dublin’s The Green Hotel immediately grabbed my attention. What a cozy space, sure—but the modern touches make me feel I’m more likely to rendezvous with a spy than slowly slurp a warm beverage.
Three Views of the River Liffey
We travel to Dublin’s River Liffey today. This art installation was a less surprising find that might be expected, as the river has quite a history with Viking longboats.
Just down the way, the Millennium Bridge was decorated with rainbow hoops. Whether looking into the sunset…
…Or away from it, there was a color to match the sky. The (comparatively) modern structure against the older buildings of Dublin makes for a delightful juxtaposition.
And let’s throw in one more for good measure: this further juxtaposition from not far away in Trinity College, Dublin. I like the mix of a delivery driver in a modern van, checking his phone in front of a hall whose builders could never have imagined such a thing.
Campanile Symmetry
Trinity College Dublin’s Campanile forms a center of reflection symmetry on campus—one broken, in this case, by pedestrians, clouds, and construction equipment.
Trinity’s Campanile
I’ll soon be starting work at Trinity, but it doesn’t have a campanile. I went to grad school at Berkeley, which has a campanile. Only at the Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, however, did I find a Trinity that has a campanile of its own.
Shopping Spaces in Dublin
Reviewing my street photography from last November’s trip to Dublin, I was interested to find this set of three otherwise-unrelated images in which the sense of perspective above a busy crowd induced an element of symmetry and order.
Considering Wilde
While most of Oscar Wilde’s family home in Dublin is of a fairly traditional architecture of the era, the bright solarium on the second floor seems like quite the outlier. I like the perspective lines converging to Piper, watching from the doorway.
Oscar in the Setting Sun
Oscar Wilde’s family home in Dublin features both this lovely solarium and a dramatically centered bust of the author.
A Visit to the National Museum of Ireland – Archaeology
Our visit to Dublin included a morning in the National Museum of Ireland’s Archaeology building. Fittingly, the structure of the space combined elegant nineteenth-century cast iron with modern additions.
This flint knife, ringed by other pieces of sharpened stone, struck me as a bit like a king being bowed to by lords and ladies.
These woven metal buttons are incredible pieces of detailed structure built from many hours of human effort. Funny to think that we marvel over the structures produced by techniques like 3D printing, when humans have been inventive with forms and materials for millenia.
This array of Viking-era swords, in various states of oxidation, has a delightful rhythm.
Among them, this sword and its hilt of non-ferrous metal is excitingly less degraded.
Too much Tolkien makes every dark stone bracelet look a bit sinister.
On a lighter note, the runes carved into this deer antler read, “DEER ANTLER.”
Decaseconds 