A Romantic sunset sky with lots of highly textured clouds makes a perfect companion for the rough but linear concrete forms of I.M. Pei’s Bushnell Tower.
BNSF Paint Job?
A childhood spent with a bedroom window facing the train tracks built a skill for identifying train engine paint jobs, but the intervening years of mergers and the geographical distance between Illinois and California have diminished the intense recognition that would have had me swear that black, orange, and yellow meant a BNSF engine.
Union Carbide: Repurposed Headquarters
Like the characters in a horror movie, slowly realizing that they have wandered into a place they Should Not Have, I visited a large Connecticut facility with an excitingly retrofuturistic aesthetic and realized the true backstory of the place.
I was initially surprised that a new residential community would have such obviously older architecture, and pieced together that this must have previously been a corporate headquarters. The ample parking and dramatic hilltop location suggested something ambitious.
Reading about the history of the site on arrival, however, I came to realize that this was the former headquarters of Union Carbide—responsible for the most harmful chemical spill in human history, the Bhopal Disaster, responsible for exposing more than 500,000 people to methyl isocyanate, ultimately leading to the deaths of thousands. As a chemistry Ph.D., the effect of standing in the headquarters of the company when this event took place (the building opened in 1982 and the disaster occurred in 1984) was deeply unsettling—a reminder of the responsibility that chemists hold for the impacts of our work.
Many Rails
So many almost-parallel lines in this image (both rail and power) gives it a disorienting quality.
Light Academia
If “Dark Academia” has become a fairly well-worn genre with familiar tropes, I can’t say I’d mind finding a more optimistic and friendly version—less secret knowledge driving cults towards madness, more dragging indoor furniture into the sunshine to produce a comfy afternoon study spot.
But the Curtain Did Not Rise Again
Spreckels Theater closed in 2020, was sold in 2021, and leaves behind its marquee as a grim and overly optimistic reminder of a different time.
Mohonk Swimming and Boating
Boaters can’t swim across the lake (without checking with a guard first) and boaters can’t enter the swimming area, but they interact across a thin membrane of ropes and floats. Look at that log, moored perpendicular to the floating platform on the right; it splits the difference between the boat/swim categories.
Hotel Floating in the Sky
Glaciers carved deep between stones to create the lake on which Mohonk Mountain House appears to float, but I feel like those glaciers left behind a little bit of their cold blue thermodynamic impact in the colors (and temperature) of the water.
Vineyard in a Horseshoe
A whole vineyard is nestled into a horseshoe bend in the South Elkhorn Creek outside Midway, Kentucky.
Hartford is Where the Rainbow Ends
Though the laws of optics may prevent me from ever reaching the literal end of a rainbow, this double (nearly triple) rainbow over Hartford certainly captures the emotional content of my central-Connecticut experiences.
Return Flight, Almost Night
Reflections of sunset light from the engineered surfaces of an aircraft are quite different from the rougher surfaces of buildings and plants at ground level.
A Trinity Hawk Watching Hartford
Flying a drone is often a strangely lonely affair—high above the world, separate from it—but on this occasion, my Mini 3 Pro had a companion in this red-tailed hawk, perched on Trinity College’s chapel.
Connecticut Capitol, Miyazaki Mode
Warm sunshine, perfectly cloud-decorated skies, and green late-summer colors from bright sunlight make the Connecticut State Capitol look like a still from a Miyazaki movie. The architecture doesn’t hurt the comparison, either.
Sphère d’isolement S2
This view of the future was on display at the Design Museum Brussels and I immediately understood why the transparent shield was in place to prevent visitors from climbing inside and teleporting to another dimension.
MAURICE-CLAUDE VIDILI (1937)
Sphère d’isolement S2
Unité d’habitation – Wooneenheid – Habitation unit 1971
Les Plastiques de Bourgogne (FRA) GRP, PUR, electric circuit, metal.
The Empty (But Clean) Pond in Bushnell Park
The benefit of living in a beautiful place is finding those days when (i) a beautiful location and (ii) charming lighting and (iii) special circumstances align. On a perfect late-summer afternoon, the pond in Bushnell Park is just finished its cleaning and repairs and has had its bottom protected with a layer of large stones. This is sort of a once-in-a-few-decade chance to capture the odd site of the dry pond.
Decaseconds 