Holiday gatherings with palms in place of pines are out of the ordinary to this northeasterner, but the strangest modification remains the outdoor dining.
Tag: Architecture
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.
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.
Two Spontaneous Alignments in San Diego
With so many tall, vertically oriented structures in a city, it’s probably no surprise that some of them should fall into pleasing alignment with one another. The modest glow of sunrise light through the gap between the clocktower and the adjacent building provides a friendly spark to guide the eye to the center of this image.
In this second case, it’s harsher Sun, rather than palm trees and clock towers, that has found its way into a special alignment through the streets of San Diego. Bright light falls into this canyon that should otherwise be dawn dim.
Curved Room Windows
Design matters, and thus details matter, in making a place feel warm and inviting. Comfy chairs arrayed facing this curved bank of windows offer more than a place to sit while waiting for dinner at Mohonk Mountain House—they produce a sense of place and belonging.
Breakfast on the Porch II
A perfect late-summer morning at Mohonk Mountain House holds the promise of a day spent outside. While this image may be a sequel to last week’s post, I think this other angle reveals a far different view of the possibilities a day can hold when experiencing vacation.
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.
Rocking Chairs Overlooking the Lake
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.”
Within the Red Room
The National Gallery of Ireland has plenty of galleries with the white walls that I expected of an art museum; stepping from monochromatic spaces into this deep red room was a figuratively visceral experience.
Timberline Coffee Time
While Timberline may be cozy and a little creepy at night, coffee time the next morning makes it a far cheerier place.
Little Desk in the Window of Timberline
In a semi-secluded edge of the largest hall of Timberline Lodge, this little desk gets lots of natural light and fresh air. I wonder what Great American Novels and/or postcards were written there?
Lodge Night Interior
Photoshop’s Super-Resolution algorithm strikes again! This 2012 shot from Timberline Lodge was taken using my beginner-level D3100, but now has all kinds of delicious pixel-peeping detail.
ODY in B&W
I recently returned to this shot from 2015 to reprocess the original raw for a calendar of B&W images for St. Lawrence. While it may not have Iwan Baan‘s level of people in the image, the bicycle adds a nice sense of quiet, human scale to the setting.
New Train Station in Clarendon Hills
A visit to my home town of Clarendon Hills brought a surprise: the unremarkable train station from the mid-twentieth century has been replaced by a modern station and platform with a lot more greenery and some really interesting materials.
The station itself uses both lacquered rails (on the left) and wooden slats at odd intervals (Fibonacci-esque, but I didn’t measure to be sure.)
Decaseconds 