Snowy Clement and Hartford

White covers Trinity’s campus and accents the Neo-Gothic architecture, but the modernist skyline of Hartford in the distance perpetually suggests what else might architecturally be. Though I love twentieth century architecture, there’s little argument that it would have been the wrong choice for a small liberal arts college. It wasn’t until recently that I came to realize that many of these old-looking buildings are less than 100 years old; in essence, they were built to be old-fashioned from the start. Most east-coast schools are a sort of academic Disneyland—one constructed long enough ago that we forgot about the artifice and now see only authenticity.

Snowy Clement and Hartford

Clement, Raether, and the Hartford Skyline

The warm sodium glow of Trinity College’s campus by night—Clement Chemistry Building and Raether Library in the foreground, the chapel and the Hartford skyline in the background—highlights (in a literal, X-marks-the-spot manner) the contrast between being a student and a faculty member here. Though the same institution, the same general campus, I spend my time now in completely different places than I once did. A prime example is the X-marked courtyard between the two buildings—a place I walked through perhaps 10 times total as a student, but where I now pause for coffee with my colleagues nearly every morning.

Clement, Raether, and the Hartford Skyline

LSC and Hartford

With Hartford’s skyline looking on in the background, the brutalist facade of Trinity College’s LSC matches the carefully graded dirt of its adjacent quad before a thick layer of new sod was applied.

LSC and Hartford

Cold Dawn Nucleation

There’s some sang about the photographer, not the camera, mattering to a great shot; while I appreciate the value of having the right tools, this sunrise image captured in a quick moment with my phone on a 1ºF morning provides some evidence to support the theory. The low temperatures quickly nucleated ice crystals from towers across the city and produced this dramatic array of miniature clouds.

Cold Dawn Nucleation

The Southern End of Downtown Hartford

I’ve long been interested in visualizing gradients between different levels of density in housing and construction; here in Hartford, Bushnell Tower is the sort of final edge point between the tall structures of downtown and the medium-rise buildings in the rest of the city. Bushnell Park in the foreground acts as a counterpoint to both.

The Southern End of Downtown Hartford