photographic notebooks
As a creative outlet, Architecture requires tremendous patience. For many architects, myself included, the creative juices seep out the cracks into other media during the in-between times. I am often carrying a camera, so as I do on airplanes, I take pictures.
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In his book “Notes for Friends” photographer Robert Adams quotes William Stafford: “There have been evenings when the light has turned everything silver, and like you I have stopped at a corner and suddenly staggered with the grace of it all: to have inherited all this, or even the bereavement of it…” This sentiment resonates for me as well.
New York, New York.
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Hillsboro, Oregon.
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Dallas, Texas.
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Opal Creek, Oregon.
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Twice I have had the pleasure of traveling to Italy. The first time was for work, and the pleasure (?) of visiting the below: Apostoli Norditalia quarry, north of Brescia, in Northern Italy. Donald Trump's favorite marble. Marble is such a wonderfully beautiful and natural material with an undeniable environmental impact.
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An environmental impact closer to home - one that anyone who has grown up in the Pacific Northwest is familiar with. Coos Bay, Oregon, after a timber harvest…
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…Boise, Idaho, where some of the timber ends up.
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…Portland, Oregon.
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...and Lexington, Kentucky.
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For a number of years I worked on projects in Newark NJ, traveling back and forth from Manhattan across the Meadowlands. Over time I grew to find a rich poetry in that landscape - the blend of old industry and new, natural and manmade, beautiful and banal, decay and new life...
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I also briefly worked on a proposal to renovate Newark's Rodino Federal Building, where I came across the absolutely banal and perfectly American room where immigrants take the oath of citizenship.
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By contrast: the underside the dome over Florence Cathedral.
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Florence.
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Masaccio's Holy Trinity. When you arrive in front of this revolutionary masterpiece it seems inconsequential on a large wall...
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Salmon, Idaho. The life’s work of a different Masachio.
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Maine. What a perfect mess - god only knows what is holding all that up.
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In Manhattan. Who cares about the building, just look at that scaffolding…
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The miserable summer weather in NYC. From Williamsburg, Brooklyn, looking towards Manhattan.
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Manhattan sidewalk. I have walked past this so many times...
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Another sight I often walk past - one with less glaring but more significant environmental concerns....
This wall faces West. It will be blasted by the summer sun. It will receive none in the winter, but it will loose heat like a sieve.
Dear fellow architects, it is time to stop designing all-glass facades. They are an environmental tragedy, a willful regression in the name of style, born of subsidized energy and a belief in no consequences: they perform worse in every regard than walls made 150 years ago, which perform abysmally. They are unethical. They are a stone around the neck of our children’s future. There are plenty of ways to make a “cool” design out of opaque (insulated) walls. Figure it out.
Besides, people don’t like them, and they don’t look the way you want. I bet your rendering did not include the stuffed animals, did it?
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The Oregon White Oak, Quercus Garryanna, icon of the Willamette Valley.
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South Florida.
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Cemetery and dump, New Jersey.
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Rockville, Maryland.
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Andrea Palladio's Basilica in Vicenza.
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Inside this canonical work you find a flea market...
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...around back the pursuit of geometrical purity comes very very close to crashing into the context of medieval reality...
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...and you find a bar.
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The Roman amphitheater in Verona. The form of the building is identical to a modern arena. I am fascinated that the human patterns it is shaped around have not changed in 20 centuries.
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Siena Cathedral
