Though St. Lawrence has its share of modern buildings (including my own), it’s the old part of campus (buildings like Piskor and Sykes Halls) that best captures the Harry Potter vibe of small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast.
Tag: Architecture
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Sunday Morning in Another Corner of Berkeley
Every corner of Berkeley brings some new quirk. I passed this little stair/alleyway dozens of times during Sunday morning coffee runs. The tall pines and receding buildings struck me as quintessentially West Coast.
Uprooted
In the woods of Hermon, New York, Uprooted played a show to celebrate the release of their new CD. The band’s name stems from its origins: all of its members are transplants to the North Country from across the US. Fitting, then, that the show took place in a home with many handcrafted wood details and structures. The audience stretched far back under the balcony where I hid to take this shot.
Brittany Village
Just across the block from the Normandy Village is the Brittany Village, its Northern-France doppelgänger. As today marks a total solar eclipse over America, I thought another picture (this one on a rainy morning) with a weird sky might be appropriate.
Kentucky Summer Cottage
Our time at Kentucky Horse Park events, and by extension at this charming cottage, has come to an end. We’re New York bound!
Campanile in Late Spring
Commencement ceremonies have ended and the campus is quieting down to a mostly graduate-student-based buzz. The Campanile stands tall and mostly quiet—except, of course, for when the bells are ringing.
Shipping Container House
Photographing landscapes and structures (and being the son of civil engineers), I’ve become a bit of an architecture fanboy. The trend towards building with shipping containers, whether a do-it-yourself effort or a pre-fab corporate approach, seems particularly exciting. This weekend, I encountered this in-construction house built from three forty-foot intermodal containers. The owners added sloped roof, a permanent foundation, and windows and doors outside, but they liked the shipping container aesthetic and plan to keep all of the original paint and labeling outside. I find that look charmingly authentic.
Inside, however, there’s little hint of the structure’s more exotic origins. Though, like the exterior, the interior is still under construction, there’s a straightforward home inside the three long shipping containers worth of space.
Old Under New II
The Transamerica Pyramid is one of my favorite subjects, and I’ve lately enjoyed photographing it juxtaposed with older brick buildings.
Molecular Foundry
The Molecular Foundry’s enormous overhang looks alien up close, but the scale of the structure is really apparent with the lighting beneath the gravity-challenging bulk.
Unleash the Beast
My neighbor parks his growling, thundering Audi S3 in a perfectly-sized space. He carefully backs it in and tucks down the corners of the Audi-emblem car cover. At night, this machine comes to life. LED headlamps flare and the walls of the garage form a resonant chamber for the warm-up revs of the turbo engine. Hydrocarbons are injected, explosively oxidized, and exhausted; the beast is unleashed!
Sunshower Tower
Monster-smash rain storms the night before left me surprised when this Sunday morning broad blue skies and linear sunlight to reflect from every surface in Berkeley. The Campanile (a.k.a. Sather Tower) was looking particularly proud of itself.
Structure Husk
Since I left Berkeley, a major building in the downtown burned to the ground and the wreckage was removed. I don’t remember what once stood here. That correspondence—a building missing from reality and from my memory—seems fitting.
Mohonk: Ready for the Show
Mohonk Mountain House’s parlor is far grander than the name might imply. After dinner, it’s the site of live entertainment. That could be a comedian, or a string quartet, or a band, or an animal trainer. The consistent variety could almost be called old-fashioned—matching the tone of the room.
Landing the Molecular Foundry
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory sits in the Berkeley Hills, so close to multiple centers of scientific and technological innovation; the intellectual climate on its campus is astonishing. One of the newer facilities on campus is the science-fiction-come-to-life Molecular Foundry. The most dramatic part of the building hangs in space above the bay. I can’t resist the image of a spacecraft coming in for a landing.
Decaseconds 