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.
Tag: interior
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.”
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.
Hallway with Two Colors
Though the difference in color temperature between sunlight and indoor lighting may be intuitively understood common knowledge, I’ve rarely seen a picture that so dramatically illustrates the color contrast.
Within the Red Stairs
Though the Musée d’Orsay seems from outside like a fine, upstanding member of Paris’s “traditional architecture” club, its interior reveals some more unconventional aesthetic choices.
Dans la Musée
The bold train station geometry of the Musée d’Orsay couples with the high density of artistic masterpieces to produce some kind of dimensional portal.
Raether Library Well
The multistory lobby of Trinity College’s Raether Library was impressive and modern to me when I was a student, shortly after it was built… And I’m happy to report that it remains so to this day.
Normandy Village, Inside and Out
My messy sabbatical desk in the Normandy, sitting next to some enormous (if leaky) windows, was home base for a glorious eight months. I’m glad I paused to take a picture of it as it was (rather than in perhaps a more photogenic state.)
Heading out from the Normandy Village, the crazy brick patterns, tiny windows hidden under the eaves, and trees sprouting from the concrete give way to the mid-twentieth-century architecture of Berkeley instantly. Exiting means stepping through some kind of spacetime membrane back to reality.
This Is the Laser
The laboratories of physical scientists across the planet have pulsed laser systems like this one, and many look quite similar: a collection of squat boxes covering optics, electronics, and beampaths. Above or below the surface of the table are additional boxes of electronics driving the lasers and detectors. This particular system is special to me for two reasons: (1) most modern laser tables don’t have rad wood grain paneling, and (2) this was the instrument I used during my sabbatical at Berkeley Lab last spring. Lots of good data emerged from its photomultiplier tube.
Spectroscopy Lab
After spending my entire adult life as a laboratory scientist, the web of gas lines and vacuum pumps and electrical cable seems normal. I do understand, rationally, that all of this looks overwhelming. There’s so much purpose and productivity behind the network, however, that it’s worth the sophistication.
Inside the LCS
For the stealthy, angular trimaran exterior of the littoral combat ship USS Jackson, peaking inside the ship reveals a more mundane interior (look, a forklift!) that seems oddly pedestrian.
Decaseconds 