Month: December 2017

Australia express: musings on urbanism, I

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MOST people probably know many things about the Land Down Under, but if it happens that it’s only one or two things, likely these include the tale of how, when the British began colonizing Australia’s eastern shores in the late 1800s, boatloads of jailbirds were involuntarily hauled in tow. Prison wards in England were crammed full, dark and tight (just read Dickens’ Little Dorrit); offloading convicts to the colonies was one way to relieve overcrowding. Many of those forcibly resettled unfortunates had been found guilty only of minor crimes — forging checks, unpaid debts, that sort of thing. Others had committed worse. Either way, once they’d served out their sentences, many stayed.

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Old Melbourne Gaol, 1838-1845

From this single, oft-tapped historical spigot of a fact, a fountain of cultural stereotypes continues to gush. Such as: Australian bodies, especially male bodies, come blonde, big-boned, and  saturated with unusually high alcohol content. Australian social practices tend toward the big-hearted and ever-so-slightly crass. Australians incline toward the provincial; inward-looking, they can be a bit quizzical if not suspicious about the pertinence to them and theirs of knowledge harking from beyond their continent’s shores.

Time to shut that spigot off for good. It’s all nonsense. (Indeed so much so that I predict that Danny will object to my writing the paragraphs above, maintaining that one shouldn’t risk perpetuating untruths by recyling them, even if only to discount their veracity.) Since 1996, year after year, the largest percentage of immigrants settling here hail from South and East Asia (you can see the statistics here: http://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about/reports-publications/research-statistics/statistics/live-in-australia/historical-migration-statistics). And though it’s true that around 20% of Australians claim a convict in their ancestry, that means 80% don’t — and one distant convict in one’s otherwise full ancestral tree is hardly a mark of Cain. Besides, what does it matter? The last flotilla of villainy landed here in 1868, 160 years and many generations ago.

Nonetheless, architectural artifacts of the country’s penal heritage constitute its earliest landmarks. Some, as in Sydney, are buried beneath later infrastructure near the shoreline (near the Barangaroo Reserve in Sydney, below); others, like the splendid, if forbidding Old Melbourne Gaol (above), are historic monuments.

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Barangaroo Reserve, Sydney

Today, these are but tiny, obdurate reminders of Australia’s early history, buried in the urban fabric of its cities. So what can we say, even provisionally, about Australian urbanism given our scant exposure to Sydney and Melbourne?

Sydney and Melbourne’s sites differ, for sure. Hilly Sydney boasts of its fun-in-the-sun, 150 decadent miles of shoreline, and that’s not even counting ever-hungrily-land-sucking suburbs. Melbourne’s largely undifferentiated flatlands are slung lazily along the muddy, unprepossessing Yarra River. Even so, their patterns of urban development and growth vary less, or so it seemed to me. And if Sydney and Melbourne’s urbanism represents any sort of larger reality (I wager they do), then Australians have by and large embraced, and more or less consistently practiced admirable social democratic ideals: what we saw evinced a well-considered, well-constructed, well-ordered civil society, even with predictable infelicities of all sorts notwithstanding. We saw this in the residential areas and in the city’s newer public spaces, the topic of the next post.

WE situated ourselves in the so-called “inner ring” suburbs, which seems to denote a distance from the urban core of approximately 4-5 kilometers. Our first stop in Melbourne was tiny Middle Park (population ca. 4000), conveniently proximate both to the City Center and the Pacific Ocean. The neighborhood retains an impressive stock of diminuitive Victorian residences (many with ornate cast iron porch details, as below), most in reasonably good repair. DSC05143_DxO_DxO

Scattered around, tucked between the older homes, are a number of modern single-family dwellings. It’s one of the better ones of these newer places that we managed to score. Tiny: two bedrooms upstairs; kitchen, living and dining room down. A nice patio in back, though.

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DSC05138_DxOThe recessed light well, at right, broke up the linearity of the main living area and admitted all manner of light and weather, including the torrential rains with which we were greeted –four seasons in a day, Uber drivers told us again and again, pontificating about the city’s fickle weather. Anyway, our little Middle Park abode proved a hospitable place to enjoy even the downpours, presenting them artfully, at a slight remove.

Itinerants we are, ever subject to the booking impulses of Airbnb’ers the world over as well as our own changing needs, we had to move after a fistful of days. We landed in a that-much-smaller place, an apartment in a residential high-rise in South Yarra, a decidedly more upscale, far denser district (population ca. 25,000), although its distance from the city center equivalent to that of Middle Park. From there, we got to survey Melbourne’s horizontal and vertical spread.

DSC05343_DxOScattered hillocks of towers, residential and commercial, pop up from the lilyponds of two-to-four story mixed-use buildings which spread in nearly every direction, all the way to the horizon.DSC05342_DxOIn commerical and higher-density residential neighborhoods, the taller structures indicate that Melbourne, like Sydney, takes its towers seriously.

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New ones, and old ones, too.

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In any case, in both cities, it seems that they’re erecting a lot more of them. DSC05232_DxO.jpgI tried to discover statistics on new residential and office space real estate, but curiosity vanished in the deluge of Google hits beckoning me to bankers’ and developers’ websites, so I’ll just go with the information offered by Meaghan Dwyer of John Wardle Architects: in both cities, there’s a lot of building going on.

Much of it good, and good in ways that indicate a heartening — or shall I say big-hearted?– vision of a social realm that supports sociability for all city-dwellers, not just the wildly privileged. DSC05153_DxO

For notable public spaces and landscapes in both cities and what they might mean, stay tuned.

— Sarah

 

 

Australia express: art

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One cannot but judge the architecture of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV- International), on St. Kilda Road in Melbourne, as falling somewhere between the unfortunate and the disgraceful — this photo of kids playing in the plaza outside it makes it look more serenely seductive than it is. And the interiors! Mostly they’re grim, just grim, especially after a renovation completed in 2004 by the Italian architect Mario Bellini, who created new gallery spaces by dropping opaque stone boxes into the existing building’s glass-covered courtyards, thus destroying what was in all likelihood the principal redeeming feature of the original design.

Even so, it’s the premier museum in one of Australia’s two most cosmopolitan states (Victorians will assert, usually only half-jokingly, Melbourne’s superior cultivation and cosmopolitanism in comparison with Sydney, which we heard characterized — more than once — as some kind of over-the-hill Lady of Questionable Virtue). So, as this building houses National Gallery of the State of Victoria, whatever that means, one is obliged to look.

We found: some nice moments, a couple of welcome surprises, a few terrific pieces, and one stunner, a work of contemporary art.

Inside the dark gray perimeter facades sits a single a light-drenched atrium. If you stay on the ground floor and venture toward the rear, you stumble into this.

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In the 1960s, Leonard French, a celebrated Australian artist, worked for five years on a stained glass ceiling for what’s called the Great Room, as if this were some kind of edgy update of the great rooms in historic British manor houses. Impressive, and to my eye more pleasurable to behold than the verging-on-kitsch Tiffany glass compositions that the ceiling recalls. The museum’s curators seem a bit flummoxed as to how to use this space; basically, they’ve thrown a few cushiony pieces in there and invited the children in to play. And they do.

Upstairs (where the windows are, on the upper right), we found galleries devoted to the decorative arts, including one offering up an abundance of very fine Wedgewood — all those aspirant 19th-century Australians adopting British tastes, I suppose. I’ve come to appreciate Wedgewood’s refinement quite a lot, thanks to the enthusiasm and beneficence of my beloved mother-in-law, Norma. This amusing Egyptian piece struck my fancy, though Danny predicted that Norma would not take to it. DSC05369_DxO_DxO

Though we agreed that this one, below. was just her sort of thing.DSC05370_DxO_DxO

The NGV and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney exhibit a good deal of Aboriginal Art; this, from Sydney, captivated me with its absolutely perplexing pictorial space.

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Back in Melbourne’s NGV-International, this beautiful installation, below, of medieval sculptures made these works-from-another-world arresting in a way that the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s installations in its medieval galleries are not. One oddity: in this openly Christian-dominant country (nativity crèches and decorated Christmas trees appear everywhere in the public sphere), the NGV’s wall texts assume not an iota of background knowledge about the religion or its traditions. One went something along the lines of this: Christians consider saints intermediaries between humanity and the divine. Another offered a careful definition of just what an attribute is, and explained how they function iconographically in Christian art. DSC05361_DxO

Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a scholar-princess who converted many wayward souls to Christianity merely by dint of her incisive intellect and oratorical powers of persuasion, has always been a secret favorite of mine, and this ca. 16th century Catalan representation of her holding the wheel, a torture device that shattered when her persecutors tried to use it on her, stuck with me. I love the combination of her serene, aquiline features and her slightly dynamic but not-quite-contrapposto-esque pose.   DSC05359_DxO Then we practically ran straight into one of the best Hans (aka Jean) Arp sculptures, from his “Growth” series, that I’ve ever encountered. I was really tempted to hug it.

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Finally, looking at the art at the museums in Sydney and Melbourne heightened my appreciation for that artist whose work Danny is so taken by, Del Kathryn Barton. We included one image from her exhibition at the NGV-Australia (which is in a different building from the NGV-International, down the street), a couple of posts ago. Danny loves DKB’s complex compositions, jewel-like colors, the over-the-top patterning and refined detail; I appreciate these but just can’t get over the questionable mythologies she’s drawing on in her depiction of women and their bodies. In any case, this painting is quite typical of what’s on display at her solo retrospective exhibition, and I appreciated it more after reading the catalogue essay, which discussed how influenced she is by medieval painting, with its lapidary colors and lack of recessive spaces.   DSC05179_DxO.jpg

It did occur to me, too, that the busyness of DKB’s surfaces bears affinities to Aboriginal painting — here’s one particularly good example, from Sydney. DSC04980_DxO_DxO

And those big, haunting eyes that appear everywhere in her paintings evoke the haunting eyes in some Aboriginal sculptures, like these two, below.

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The NGV Triennial was still in the process of being installed when we visited, but luckily, this piece had already been hung; it became the crème de la crème of our art-scouting day.   DSC05352_DxO

Entitled the PET lamp, this is by Alvaro Catalán de Ocón, a Spanish designer, who worked with the Bula’Bula Arts Aboriginal Corporation to find a group of weavers with whom he could collaborate. They gathered reeds, along with the plants necessary to make the dyes, produced the tints, organized the composition, and wove it. Technically, it’s a chandelier, I guess. Whatever: it’s a stunning, inspiring piece, which the NGV-International’s installation team displayed brilliantly, placing the lamps themselves just above eye level; the large weaving several feet above your head, suspended from the ceiling; and placing circular mirrors on a dais just above floor level. DSC05348_DxOSince mirrors can be used to visually diminish the scale of the object they reflect, you get to experience the piece both as it envelops you, spreading majestically over your head and bleeding into your peripheral vision, and at the same time, regard its entirety by glancing toward the silvery pools of light near your feet.

Seeing this piece set off the kind of all-encompassing, full-body experience of a work of art that is often craved, and rarely realized. Really superb.  

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Danny’s been complaining that, since I’m always behind the camera, we run the risk of having few pictures of me from the trip. He gets the photo credit for this one.

— Sarah

Australia express: architecture

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Of the bits of Australian this-and-that that Danny and I did manage to take in, the takeaways reside in the realms of architecture, art, and urban landscapes. (This may not surprise our faithful readers.) These impressions are as fugitive as was our time in the Land Down Under en tout, but there’s no stopping the camera from shooting what it shoots (deliberate cognition plays at best a supporting role), and once images become digitally imprinted, a record of sorts emerges.

Architecture first. Australian cities, or at least Sydney and Melbourne, are organized more like Boston than like New York City, meaning that a relatively small core, usually coincident with the Central Business District, constitutes the eponymous legal municipality, and surrounding it are progressively expanding arcs or rings of suburbs. What differentiates Sydney and Melbourne from Boston is that the size of that inner core is really small, so once you start walking away from the core the suburbs start almost right away. Still, as in Boston, Sydney and Melbourne’s inner suburbs contain older as well as new buildings; spatially, their layout varies, and they bear traces of an orientation toward pedestrians. We’re told that as the distance from the urban core increases, Australian suburbs’ density diminishes, along with the varieties of experience they offer.

The parts of Sydney we walked through to get from Rushcutter’s Bay, the suburb where we stayed, to the downtown harbor area took us through many ranges of tiny, older residential buildings, some in wood,  DSC04996_DxODSC04997_DxOand others masonry. A few of these areas snuggle up to, or surround a little open area akin to a village green– below, look how some kid just dropped her bicycle and walked in her front door with no thought of locks or bike stands. Just as we all used to do, growing up. Right in the middle of Sydney!DSC04990_DxO.jpgNearby stood larger buildings that served the original community — perhaps a library, a school, a church. What the building below was or now is remains a mystery, but it’s fairly typical of the small Victorian public infrastructure in both Sydney and Melbourne.

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Then there’s the more majestic stuff. Victorian architects in Australia, it seemed to me, relished their distance from the stodgy old colonial mothership. They seemed to take a good deal of enjoyment in designing over the top– these two building are both in Melbourne, the bottom is the central train station on Flinder’s Street.DSC05171_DxODSC05248_DxO

Others, of course, contented themselves with Monumental and Sedate. This the former Royal Mail Exchange Building, now the Whitehouse Institute of Design in Melbourne.  DSC05390_DxOThat red-brick/yellow-ochre detailing is a common combination in public buildings in both cities.

As for more recent buildings, our impression was that the general design quality is higher than in the US — see below, an ordinary luxury residential tower, where the architect at least tried to entertain the eye as it travels, wittingly or not, from base to crest.

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Then, there was the special. I’ll wait on a wonderful project by the ever-uneven Jean Nouvel, because it fits best into the urban landscape entry, but here’s a surprising success by the also ever-uneven Frank Gehry, a business school at the University of Technology Sydney.

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The canting of the windows on the exterior did just wonderful things with the clouds. (Lucky we caught it on a nice summer day.) And the texture in the brick façade, created by projecting and recessing passages of bricks as they followed the building’s complex curvature, was very successful.  DSC05092_DxO

Inside, the building had the same spatial mess of “some cool moves and a lot of afterthoughts” that I’ve come to expect in most Gehry buildings, except the superb Guggenheim Bilbao. Here, the cool move was an element built up of wood blocks that looked as though it fell out of some Brobdingnagian child’s playpen. DSC05086_DxO

The real treat was seeing the Melbourne School of Design, designed Nader Tehrani of NADAAA and John Wardle of John Wardle Architects, which, in the central element-within-atrium motif, may look similar, but I assure you, the resemblance is only superficial. I will write about the masterful MSD elsewhere, so I’ll spare my breath and fingers here. Here are a couple of images, though.

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The architects transformed the internal corridors into habitable spaces (see tables and desks at left) and the wire mesh allowed them maintain a degree of visual openness to other floors while abiding by safety regulations.DSC05196_DxO

 

Through that crisscrossing network of family relations that life is, Nader introduced me to John, with whom I spent a good deal of time. One afternoon, Danny and I scoped out a library he did for the Melbourne Grammar School, a tony private school whose original buildings must have been designed with Oxford or Cambridge in mind. DSC05262_DxO

Respectfully, Wardle did something very different, with some beautiful details, inside and out.DSC05289_DxO

Look (below) how the vertical brick headers (are they headers?) project out of the surface as the wall’s plane cants back! DSC05292_DxO

The library’s stacks become an object of curiosity when you get just a peek, from above. DSC05277_DxO

We also saw OMA’s MPavilion 2017 in Queen Victoria Gardens, just because. When you’re passing something branded “Rem Koolhaas”, you stop to poke around a bit– although in this case, not even long enough for a cup of coffee.

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Finally, a very nice new building which is the cornerstone of a billion-dollar campus upgrading ongoing at the University of Technology Sydney, by Durbach Block Jaggers, buddies of John Wardle. Appropriately enough, it houses the Graduate School of Health. A ton to say about this one, too, but I’ll just leave you with teasers and eye candy.

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— Sarah

Easy come, easy go

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Finally, blogwise, we are on to Australia. The bounty in words and images will be less plentiful, not for the reason attentive readers might imagine. Yes, we’ve made it clear that New Zealand captured our regard and affections to a degree that is unlikely to be matched – even by as welcoming and giving a country as Australia. But that’s not it. The incident in Auckland which I only glancingly mentioned took center stage in Australia, radically curtailing what we did and therefore what we have to convey.

Gideon collided into a serious concussion on the (obviously) rough and tumble – or I should say heads-crashing and elbow-to-head smashing – basketball courts of central Auckland. To dub it serious is to convey much and nothing. As the medical and responsible sports worlds have come to recognize, there’s no such thing as a non-serious concussion. Gideon did not lose consciousness, so that’s a positive. But for the next few weeks, he suffered from fogginess, light sensitivity, headaches (they weren’t that bad or lasting), and working memory problems. For the better part of almost four weeks in Australia, he barely went out and, because he required continuous care and comfort, Sarah and I did somewhere between comparatively-and-amazingly little. DSC05035_DxOWe departed Sydney ahead of schedule, after but a few days, to a recuperative place, Palm Beach, an hour north, where the din (noise bothered him) and bustle of the city were replaced by the quietude and seaside rhythms of nature. DSC05130_DxODSC05096_DxOThe most obtrusive sounds came from the many birds flying around, especially in the early morning, with some (most notably, a faithful white cockatoo with a yellow crest), to our thrill, visiting our veranda. Gideon loved our place there and what constituted the thereness of there.

In the service of convalescence, we cancelled our trip to Cairns, Port Douglas, the Daintree Rainforest, and, truly sadly, the on-the-ropes Great Barrier Reef, dying as the (global) warming water kills its coral, bleaching it skeletal white. Sydney, Palm Beach, and Melbourne was to be our Australia. We almost stayed for additional weeks, when it seemed that Gideon needed more stasis and ease, but then one day in Melbourne he (or his head) turned things around, not in the sense of making a full recovery but in emerging from the debilitating mental fog, which meant he could carefully, if prudent, resume activities. So, we saw more of Melbourne than we had of Sydney (where Sarah and Gideon didn’t even manage to tour the Sydney Opera House). Melbourne is a lovely city of many manifest virtues, which contribute to its regular designation as one of the best cities in the world to live in.

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St. Paul’s Cathedral, Federation Square, Melbourne

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Seafarer’s Bridge, Melbourne

Sarah managed to do some important professional work, helping a future heart center open its own heart to good and wellness-promoting design. We met some lovely friends of a friend. We saw a museum exhibition of one of my favorite contemporary artists, Del Kathryn Barton (what luck!), hardly known in the US (she’s Australian), DSC05186_DxOexplored the magnificent Royal Botanic Gardens,

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Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne

and walked and looked, DSC05159_DxOand walked and looked, which, after all, is just about our favorite urban activity – especially when the walking and looking amply reward.

 

— Danny

An unembarassment of riches

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So, a little mop-up in the guise of a recap is left to somewhat compositionally-AWOL me.

We began in Queenstown, which is charming, offering a well-conceived and articulated built environment as the human crown jewel set within, or the comparatively inevitably impoverished jumping-off point into, the spectacular and varied landscapes dominated and structured by the inestimably beautiful Southern Alps. DSC03989_DxO_DxOTo give Queenstown its due, it is perhaps the most beautiful and monumental setting of any urban area (it’s a small one) we have seen.

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Typical street scene in Queenstown (republished)

The town offers a hubbub of activity, as it is animated by its narrow streets and pathways, its small-scale and muscular urban and building design, and its energetic, on-the-go, hiker-accentuated human aesthetic. To use the indistinct (not my favorite way) but evocative (that’s good) phrases: The place and the people are happening, have good energy, give off a good vibe.

 

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The vibe in Queenstown: there were dozens of these on the hike up Queenstown Hill

DSC04157_DxOThe landscapes of the region we have justly gushed (never enough) about. Even the humdrum among them – the city park, and an elevation-static walk starting in Queenstown along the lake and then beyond – are memorable and prospectively never tiring. Our one disappointment, not being able to walk/hike the three-day Routeburn Track, reputably among the most exquisite in New Zealand, owing to a minor injury Gideon sustained, turned into a compensatory boon of us getting to explore by car and foot more of the Queenstown region. After leaving the urban and in its own way urbane area of Queenstown, we drove through the seductive temperate rainforest

 

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Nature’s extravagance: a roadside embankment on the West Coast

– it was, mostly on and sometimes off, wet with rain – DSC04319_DxOand mountainscapes of the west coast, fittingly named West Coast, and then across the mountain isthmus of Arthur’s Pass to a more conventional and more distinctive urban experience of Christchurch.

In composing our journey, we usually seek to alternate types of places, so as to maximize contrasts — which constrains that assassin of experience, habituation — and the wonder of novelty. Though there are several of these types of alternations, the most obvious and frequently employed is the rural-urban one, which also often can be characterized by hiking trails vs. walking pavement and urban parks, and what each respectively brings us to.

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Botanic Gardens, Christchurch (“the Green City”), with Sarah’s favorite flowers: irises

So, we ended our rural bacchanalia of the South Island with a few days in Christchurch, its largest city, the third largest in New Zealand.

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Old Government Building (1912), now a Heritage Hotel, Christchurch

Even though I have nothing to add to Sarah’s magnificent portrait of reemerging Christchurch, I will mention a humdrum item – although many such items exist on the trip, but a nonprecious few make it into its official portrayal here. We discovered Macpac, a New Zealand analogue of Patagonia. When we were preparing for this trip, having resolved to bear gear and clothing of low volume and weight (essentially what hikers tote), which means hi-tech polyester, I of sensitive skin found only one line of shirts (from Patagonia) I could withstand. I got six of them for the trip.DSC00570

 

One problem: Sarah hates their appearance. She says, because they are objectively hideous. In a willing bow to her, I have checked out a generous helping of outdoors stores, including those we happen upon, without success. Enter Macpac, which had a shirt of all the magical qualities — light, low volume, wicking — which I could epidermally tolerate, was more conventional material-like in feel and look, and which Sarah (and Gideon) liked.20171208_135209_DxO.jpg

Instant wardrobe replacement of short- and long-sleeve shirts, transforming me from a daily advertisement for Patagonia into one for Macpac.

Needing to fly somewhere in the North Island to resume our urban-rural alternation, we decided on the small Art Deco city extraordinaire Napier,

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Napier, on the North Island, has a Miami vibe

DSC04545_DxO where we strolled for a few hours thinking of an architecturally unsullied Miami Beach and disputating the desirability of returning to Napier someday for a longer stint, before heading off by car to Tongariro, and its justly famous transalpine tramp. After four days of our rural and hiking wonders of Tongariro DSC04669_DxO.jpg(Sarah: “I would do that hike every year”) and Rotorua – both of Hobbit/Lord of the Rings fame – we finished off our New Zealand romp with two solid days in Auckland’s Viaduct area, with a splendid view of the harbor, urbanity, and enough worthy activities to keep us happy.

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Waterfront and Historic Ferry Building (1912) in downtown Auckland

Gideon went off on his own to do his solo-city-thing, this time to the concussive detriment of his head. Sarah and I went off to do our art and architecture thing, most notably at the lovely Auckland Art Gallery,

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New wing, Auckland Art Gallery, FJMT and Archimedia (2011)

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Old Wing, Auckland Art Gallery (1888, originally the Auckland Public Library)

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John Pule, Kehe Tau Hauaga Foou “To All New Arrivals” (2007), detail, Auckland Art Gallery (note façade of St. Peters, center bottom, and Taj Mahal, center top)

having already in the Christchurch Art Gallery seen a wonderful Bridget Reilly show and discovered a fabulous kinetic artist, Len Lye,20171108_144731 20171108_144845and in the a Napier museum, receiving the unexpected pleasure of being introduced to a merging of arts we had not imagined in the body (really body-covers) of historic Art Deco Kimonos!DSC04565_DxO_DxO.jpg

 

In sum, in New Zealand we drove ourselves South to North and then again South to North snip_20171207183720.pngimmersing ourselves in the experience of the most magnificent landscapes of nature’s pacific and tumultuous offerings, getting a taste or more of the largest (Auckland, 1.5M), third largest (Christchurch, 400K), sixth largest (Napier, 130K), tenth largest (Rotorua, 60K), and barely-large-enough-to-be-one, placing 27th (Queenstown, 15K) city, and many larger and smaller towns in-between, and taking pleasure in some of the finer products of human creativity. Everywhere and without exception, the New Zealanders were friendly, helpful, informed, and well-spoken in, at least to me, their charmingly accented English. They appear to know that they have something extraordinary going for them, DSC04895_DxO.jpgand, generous lot that they are — here’s a woman who runs a weekly open-air soup kitchen in Auckland, offering us a meal — 20171028_162545_DxO_DxOthey don’t mind sharing the natural and urbanistic wealth.

We were, and left, and shall return, the richer for it.

— Danny

We’re talkin’ heat

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From what we saw of New Zealand’s more populous, though hardly human-overrun, North Island, its landscape suffers a poor comparison with the South Island’s. But with hardly anywhere else’s! We appreciated its wonders, at least the ones we targeted, with a deep sense of fulfillment (which Sarah has already conveyed regarding the Tongariro Alpine Crossing). In retrospect, we should have journeyed from North to South because the nagging sense that, with takeoff from Christchurch, we had left nature’s paradise, slightly occluded our capacity to experience the North Island with as much wide-eyedness as it warrants.

DSC04736_DxOOne place that succeeded in earning a top spot in our greatest hits album (maybe that’s this blog) was in the volcanic Rotorua region, which includes the Tarewera, a volcano that has erupted 5 times in last 18,000 years (one so extreme that it cast volcanic dust as far away as Greenland), as well as the Waimangu. The last major eruption of the volcanic craters all along Waimangu valley was in 1886, which falls easily within the era of photography. The Waimangu Volcano Valley Park exhibits pictures of what the landscape looked like before, and then immediately after the massive eruption which reconfigured the entire surrounding area.

Curated beautifully for a leisurely two-hour stroll, the Park took us past many wonderful landscapes, some of which introduced new words into our vocabulary. Here, for example, is a fumarole — that’s steam emerging directly from the crest of the mountain itself — as well as from the water below. DSC04769_DxOThe Waimangu regaled us with hot waters,

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DSC04814_DxOand with a tiny, even cute little geyser (below, at the left side of the image), wholly unlike the more conventional tower of water we saw a few years ago outside of Reykjavik in the gushing font that gave its name to this natural though relatively rare phenomenon, Geysir. DSC04807_DxO

In all, lovely vistas and perspectives. This entire area of the central North Island, full of volcanic activity, gives lie to common metaphors such as that a person is “grounded” — meaning stable– and that an evidence-based assertion is “on solid ground”. In earth as in nature, it seems, all is entropy, or at least, restless, perpetual change.

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New Zealand prides itself on its trees, and its lumber industry is one of the largest contributors to the national economy. At the Waimangu Park we ran across a stand of trees DSC04840_DxO that reminded Sarah of one of her newish-ly favorite paintings, by Gustav Klimt, which we saw in an exhibition of landscape art from The Paul G. Allen Family Collection at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. artland-poster-leinwandbild-klimt-gustav-birkenwald-landschaften-wald-malerei-braun.jpg

We also visited a redwood forest, DSC04879_DxOoffering a skylet-high tree walkway, DSC04861_DxO.jpgright outside the city of Rotorua, the forest the result of a tree growing commercial experiment which brought the trees over from California way-back-when-enough that the (skinny) redwoods reach (from unverified memory) three hundred feet and more.

And we saw miles and miles of commercial tree forests, some half-denuded.DSC04856_DxO

The commonplace hillocks of the countryside of (we’re told) now worldwide Hobbit-fame are everywhere —

DSC04719_DxOmake Maya Lin’s land-sculpture in Storm King Sculpture Park,

02artswe.span.jpgwhich we once admired, a bit self-mocking. Driving through hours of such hillocks made for the greenest mad-undulating landscape this side of our known experience.DSC04762_DxOSarah’s favorite tree — its name escapes us — was that black-barked fern, plentiful in much of New Zealand, which, in rain-forest-y Waimangu Park, grew really tall.

— Sarah and Danny