Something about the texture of autumn trees in a city park during the blue hour makes the perfect compliment for the rough-hewn stones of a big monument.
Tag: Memorial
A Trip Back to Berkeley on the First Day with a New Camera
Scenery of Berkeley’s campus from Oppenheimer had me looking back again to my RAW files (as I’ve done recently) and finding exceptional images that benefited from my evolution in processing skills over the past decade. This particular December 2012 day marked my first walk to work with my then-new Nikon D7000, and so it was a moment in which I was viewing my quotidian surroundings through a literal new lens.
The light shining down on the little bridge over Strawberry Creek to the Faculty Club, for example, is a far more interesting image to me as a memory than it was at the moment I first processed these in 2012.
Quiet monuments, dappled by sunshine, feel different from a decade away.
Big, dramatic, and green are the themes of this bridge.
I was struck by how many portrait-orientation shots I had initially bypassed. The curving stairs in front of Latimer Hall always looked charming beneath late-autumn foliage.
These stairs down to Hildebrand Hall’s D Level were my typical path to my office. They were about as intimidating in real life as they look in this picture—squeeze between the edges of different intersecting buildings and utilities pass-throughs.
Leaving again at the end of the day, the afternoon sun on Latimer’s facade is starting to shift to an oranger hue.
The trip past the architecture school wasn’t one I typically made by 2012 (I moved from an apartment south of campus to one on the west side), but the light on its concrete architecture wasn’t to be missed.
Memorial on the Cliff
A different kind of Rückensfiguren from my last post: Teenagers visiting a memorial along the curving roads of the Pines to Palms Highway, far above the desert of Coachella Valley.
Crenellation Generation
The collegiate gothic architecture of Trinity College developed over decades, but the crenellations atop the Chapel and Downes Hall tie the structures together.
Spirit in Empty Sky
Liberty State Park’s Empty Sky Memorial is a sobering corridor facing downtown Manhattan. Taking a moment of stillness between the walls of names, I saw some other visitors doing the same thing.
Kill Devil Hill
Of all the hills you can throw yourself down I guess this one isn’t so bad.
Hearst (MMB) Holidays
Following Thanksgiving, all structures seems to sprout these luminescent, multicolored silica-and-copper growths. I’m sure the world’s building biologists are hard at work on a cure for “Christmas lights”, but in the mean time, they sure are pretty.
Tree Rivals the Steeple
Snow levels and re-makes the world, if only for a short time. My sense of scale decouples slightly from reality; though I know that the chapel is far taller than any form, man-made or otherwise, on St. Lawrence’s campus, I can’t help but imagine these trees stretching to impossible heights.
Night Before the Steeple
In the fall of 2013 at St. Lawrence University (on Parents’ Weekend, no less!), the gorgeous old copper steeple of Gunnison Memorial Chapel burned down from an electrical fire. Renovations and repairs are finally done, and the new copper steeple was delivered yesterday. Today, it will be hoisted up and returned to the top of the repaired bell tower, but last night I paid it a visit during the blue hour to get a feeling for the scale of the structure.
Beaux-Arts Trio
The ceiling of the gorgeous Hearst Memorial Mining Building demonstrates the drama of designing your building to mimic the dashboard of a steampunk tank. (Oh, was that not their intention?) Though I’ve posted photographs from inside Hearst Memorial Mining Building before (the past site of my co-author’s office), I don’t know that I’ve done justice to its ceiling before. That such rigid, “linear” materials as steel and brick and glass can be formed into such elegant, smooth surfaces continues to astonish me.
Tea House Roof
In the quiet of Nitobe Memorial Garden, I was struck by the craftsmanship of this teahouse. Even the roof had such gorgeous structure, with the wood lit by ambient light reflected from the water and the foliage.
Nitobe Tree
While I’m on the trend of remembering summers past (and mourning the end of our own summer), I’m also going to reminisce about our trip to the University of British Columbia’s Nitobe Memorial Garden last summer. Look at that lushness. Foliage everywhere. And, as I like to joking call it, the “enormous bonsai tree” framing the soft scene.
Golden Bricks
The glorious Beaux-Arts Classical Revival style of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building stands out among the sometimes-utilitarian University of California, Berkeley. That the building was renovated in the past ten years (but in a way that leaves this lovely lobby unmolested) thrills me. From a crassly photographic perspective, however, I’m most in love with the golden bricks in lovely geometric patterns, and the complementary color of the ironwork.
Stadium Perspective
I had the chance to wander UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium when it was nearly empty one Saturday afternoon. The texture of the weathered concrete is so rough and irregular compared with the smooth, almost-glossy metal of the stands themselves. When free of student mass, it makes for a lovely study in perspective.
Reflecting Annulus
The quiet corners of Berkeley’s campus are united by the coniferous smell that takes me back to summers in New England. Even when science won’t cooperate, no walk home disappoints me if I travel through this strange, surreal little place.
(And as a note to the geometry buffs out there–yes, I realize that the annular part of the picture is not reflective. The name was too good to pass up.)
Decaseconds 