Architecture – Page 58 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

A busy day that never happened

Today I had a taste of what my life would be if I had the Sky TV cricket channel. (It would be over.) I watched Surrey play Somerset on the live feed from the Oval which comes complete with the BBC’s sound commentary. I had all sorts of plans for today, but managed to get very little else of consequence done.

Surrey spent their day trying to ensure that they avoided all possibility of being relegated from Division One of the County Championship. When they finally managed to defeat Somerset, they found themselves lying second in Division One. Division One contains eight teams, two of which will be relegated, and it’s all rather close, apart from Essex, who have already won, and Warks, who have already been relegated. So, a very strange day, but ultimately a very good one.

So, quota photo time:

Yes, it’s a still life, with condiments instead of old school food in old school containers. Little Big Things, you might say. Photoed five years ago, in a cafe only a very short walk away from the Oval.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Thumbnails

Click on the thumbnail on the right to see why I’m presenting this photo to you, as a thumbnail.

Photo taken outside (as you can probably work out) Westminster Abbey in December 2015.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Un autre quota photo

This evening I started contriving what I hope will be the first of quite a few excerpts from The Judgement of Paris, the book referred to in the previous posting. But it all took far longer than I had thought it would. Those Frenchies and their accents! Also, lots of numbers referring to endnotes had/have to be removed. It has a lot of endnotes.

So, meanwhile, another photo taken by me in Paris, in the frigid February of 2012:

That’s one of the modernistical buildings of La Défense, reflected in another of the modernistical buildings of La Défense. (Even organising those accents was a bit of a bother.)

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

An interruption ends

Today I finally got to the end of The Judgement of Paris. I have now started making a list of some short bits of it that I hope to reproducing here.

Meanwhile, by way of a small celebration, here is a Parisian photo I took, in Paris, way back in February 2012:

It’s the Tour Eiffel, of course, photoed from under it. Tour Eiffel is pronounced “Tour F L”, rather that “Tour I Fell”. Which reassures me that I know how to pronounce the leading historical character, Ernest Meissonier, in the above book. “May sonni eh” rather than “My sonni eh”.

Anyway, a big and very interesting interruption has stopped interrupting me and my life, and I’m very glad about that.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Horse spotted in Putney this afternoon

Friday here at BMdotcom is Cats and Other Creatures Day. So if I am out and about on a Friday, I always keep an eye out for relevant sights. Sights like this, which I spotted in Putney this afternoon.

Potted Horse? As in: horse meat?

Well, no:

Spotted Horse, as in: horse with spots. A pub.

Picture of the entire front of the Spotted Horse:

I like how the buildings on each side are bigger. This being, presumably, because the pub is some kind of preserved building from olden times, and as such impervious to the rising price of land and hence the rising pressure continuously to destroy and replace with something ever taller.

One day, the price of the land upon which the Spotted Horse rests will be such that a skyscraper will be demanded. At this point, I would like to think that the Spotted Horse will mutate into the lowest two floors of this new skyscraper. Why not? The skyscraper will pay for all the confusion involved in contriving this. Just because amusingly antiquated buildings need to become very tall buildings doesn’t mean they have to be destroyed and replaced entirely by modernity, especially when you consider how tedious modernity can be at ground level, a place where architectural antiquity excels. No, put the modernity on top of the antiquity, on stilts.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Dramatic sky over Brixton

For all I know the sky was quite dramatic over other places too, but it was in Brixton that I saw it:

Often, when I show photos here, they were taken days, weeks, months or even years ago. Yesterday, there were photos that were taken ten years ago. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but: the above photos were taken earlier this evening, when I journeyed out to Brixton Curry’s PC World Carphone Warehouse or whatever the &&&&& it’s called, to try and to fail to buy a new TV. Which means that this is topical meteorological reportage.

Click on any of the above photos if you wish, and if you do you’ll get the bigger versions. But I actually think that the smaller versions are more dramatic, because more abstract and less of something. Like little oil paintings. Especially the first one.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Photoer photos at the top of the Walkie Talkie

In January of 2016, a year and a half ago now, a friend and I checked out the top of the Walkie Talkie, and we liked it a lot.

I, of course, photoed photoers, of whom there were, equally of course, an abundance. And although at the time I collected the best photoer photos together into their own little subdirectory, I never got around to putting the selected photos up here. But I chanced upon them last night, and I think they deserve the oxygen of publicity. So, here they are:

As the years have gone by, I have come to like photoing photoers as much for the places they photo in and the things they photo as for the photoers themselves. From the above photos you get quite a good idea of what the top of the Walkie Talkie is like and what you can see from it. The weather that day was rather dull, so the actual views I took were rather humdrum. These photoer photos were better, I think.

The Walkie Talkie Sky Garden advertises itself as a sky garden, but it is more like an airport lounge with plants, that has itself taken to the air. Getting access to it is like boarding an airplane, with luggage inspection and a magnetic doorway you have to walk through. In this respect, as well as the splendour of the views, the Walkie Talkie resembles the Shard, which imposes very similar arrangements on all who wish to sample its views. But sky garden or not, I liked it.

One of the many things I like about the Walkie Talkie is that its very shape reflects the importance attached by its designer(s?) to making a nice big space at the top for mere people to visit and gaze out of. As well as, of course, creating lots of office space, just below the top but still way up in the sky, for office drones to enjoy the views from. Their work may often be drudgery, but at least they get an abundance of visual diversion.

In its own way, the Walkie Talkie is as much an expression of the economic significance of views as those thin New York apartment skyscrapers are. The difference being that in a big office you don’t have to be based right next to a window to be able, from time to time, to stroll over to a window. So, as the building gets taller and the views get more dramatic, it makes sense to fit more people in. Hence the shape of the Walkie Talkie.

If one of the jobs of a Walkie Talkie drone happens to be to try to entice clients to come to the Walkie Talkie, to have stuff sold to them, well, those views might make all the difference.

Note that Rafael Vinoly designed the Walkie Talkie, and designed the first of those tall and thin New York apartments. These two apparently very different buildings have in common that both of them look as they do partly because of the views they both offer.

I also like the Walkie Talkie because so many prim-and-proper architect type people dislike it.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Bromley-by-Bow tube to the Twelvetrees Crescent bridge

Some of the best walks in London that I have done in recent months have been alongside the River Lea. Typically, I would start at Bromley-by-Bow tube station, go south along the A12 and then turn left along Twelvetrees Crescent until I get to the Twelvetrees Crescent bridge. Then I’d go either north or south.

On one of these meanders, the weather was particularly bright and sunny, and before I even got to the river, while I was just walking south along the A12, photo-ops abounded. Or maybe they didn’t but it felt as if they did. Everything, even the most mundane of objects or lighting effects, seemed dusted by a spraycan of joy, and I can’t look at the photos I took that day without that joy colouring my feeling about the photos I took at that moment.

Photos like these:

I can’t be objective about whether anyone else might like the above photos. I was and remain too happy about them to be objective. Just looking at them when I was preparing them for this posting, I became too happy to even care about being objective.

Share my joy, or not, as you please. 1.1 just tells us where we start. 1.2 is another view from the station, but not of it. 1.3 is one of those gloriously complicated drain-unblocking lorries. 2.3 I like because the colours on the car are so like the colours sported by the building, and because the sunniness of it all is emphasised by my silhouette. In 3.2 you can just see the top of the Big Olympic Thing, an effect I always enjoy. And 3.3 features a photo of, I do believe, the Taj Mahal. Lovely.

Not long after photoing all that, I photoed these shopping trolleys.

When I returned a day or two later to retrace my joyful steps, I photoed the excellent footbridge from the Twelvetrees Crescent bridge (one of my favourite footbridges in all of London (although maybe it’s just how good it looked that day from that spot)). I photoed the Shard. And I photoed a map that shows the locality where all these delights are to be found.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Eight

Today being the BMdotcom day for cats, and now also for other creatures, here is another creature, in this case a chicken, in an advert:

And here, photoed by me recently, outside the Old Vic theatre, is one of these excellent machines referred to in the advert, in action:

You can surely see what I did there, and I assure you that it was no fluke. I waited for it to say 8. I also have 9 and 7, because I wanted to make quite sure. I have been photoing these excellent machines for quite a while now.

The 8build website. They’re doing some work on the Old Vic.

On the left in the distance, nearing completion, One Blackfriars. I find liking this Thing a bit of an effort, but I’ll get there. I always do with such Things. According to that (Wikipedia), One Blackfriars is nicknamed “The Vase”. I smell, although I have no evidence for this, an attempt at preemptive nicknaming, by the people who built this Thing. “We’ll call it The Vase, to stop London calling it something worse.” That’s what happened with The Shard, after all. And that name stuck.

I tried to make the title of this “8”, but apparently a number with no letters is not allowed.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The Wheel reflections and The Wheel juxtapositions (and a The Wheel postcard)

About a week ago or less, I found myself in the vicinity of The Wheel. The light was very good, with lots of sunshine and lots of lurid looking clouds. So, I took photos.

Below are a clutch of The Wheel related photos. My opinion of how to photo The Wheel is that you should combine The Wheel with other things. Like graphic designs featuring The Wheel which are in the vicinity of The Wheel. It’s the old modified cliché routine.

In this photo clutch, however, I do include one very old school photo of The Wheel. It’s the photo I took of a postcard (1.2), which features The Wheel. And look what the postcard calls The Wheel. It calls it The Wheel: “The Wheel”. None of this “London Eye” nonsense. Do large numbers of people in other parts of the world call The Wheel The Wheel? I do hope so. And I hope that this habit conquers London.

The next four photos, after the postcard (1.3, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3) are all of The Wheel reflected in a tourist crap shop. And then 3.1 is of The Wheel reflected in a place, next door, that sells sandwiches.

I like how I totally lined up the circular blue logo with The Wheel reflection, in 2.3. Could I also have done something similar with the circular things in 2.1 and 2.2, in the latter case an actual picture of The Wheel. I rather think that I tried, but couldn’t do that. But, memo to self, return to this enticing spot, on a nice day, and see what I can do.

This is what I like about taking photos in London, rather than in some foreign spot that I am only going to be in once. If, upon reflection back home, I suspect that I might have been able to do some of the photos better, I can, in London, go back to try to do this.