Of all the distinctive ways that street life is enlivened in Santiago, the most artistically enticing concerns the city’s myriad cast-iron-supported wooden benches. For the past decade, art dealers have been commissioning local artists — a dash of the internationally known, a smattering of the well-established, and many neither– to choose a bench and do their thing. The program spread from a single commissioning gallery on a single street to many benches spread through three neighborhoods. You may now set down your derrière and lounge on works of art in the city center, Las Condes, and Vitacura.
Some artists have adopted the shout-it-out, Peter Max approach, indulging themselves in the wavy shapes, lilting lines, and acid-inspired colors that also recalled Hans Eidelmann’s 1968 Yellow Submarine album cover for the Beatles. My favorite was the quintipartite-structured composition enlivened with flat, child-like images of faces and hands, and inscribed with awkward script that exhorted: nada mas noble que VIVE HOY (nothing more noble than to live today). Words which, if lived by, forfend the kind of melancholy perseveration that destroys too many people’s days.
Animals and insects appeared repeatedly, sometimes diaristically (as in “Oh my gawd, don’t you think my wonderful dog is SO cute!!”), but more often than not, artistically. Whatever that Alice-in-Wonderland insect is on the left, I like it. The bench on the right elicited thoughts of a well-painted detail from a historic Japanese landscape.
In several instances, folk art provided inspiration.
My favorites, I suspect predictably, were mainly abstract, though the bottom right bench does hearken back to the ever-popular dog motif.
And the absolute, all-time winner, with its allusions to earth, horizon, sky, and water, its hasty, indecipherable script, and its slightly skewed perspective, almost a quirky modern riff on a scene by Piero della Francesca:
In all, these benches rarely failed to delight and give pause, prompting me to muse, yet again, on the potential for cities to offer moments of vitality by aesthetically enriching even the humblest of public places.
I could show many more, but then, that might discourage you from heading off to see and enjoy them for yourself.
— Sarah
But every part of the city that we saw – even the poorer, more downtrodden neighborhoods– bore the character of an invitation. Walk here. Look at this sculpture, this fountain.
Slow down. Perhaps an espresso in an outdoor café?
Like so many Latin cities, Santiago’s urban fabric and streetscapes were designed with strong bones, the scaffolding of a robust, unending public life. 
What did these streets look like during the Pinochet regime, I wondered? As we explored the city, I couldn’t but imaginatively replace what we were enjoying with scenes from the last part of Isabelle Allende’s House of the Spirits, when terrorized aristocrats hid behind lace curtains while learning of disappeared friends and acquaintances. What did Santiago feel and look like then?
a busy two-way street corralling cars onto a different highway, this one headed north toward the airport; and the Gran Torre Santiago, a 64-story tower designed by Cesar Pelli, the tallest building in South America. 
Oh, also: between us and Pelli, the heavily banked, mud-filled, brackishly yellow Mapocho river gushed and rushed, its elevated banks lined with strips of parkland.
But at street level, the Gran Torre crashed into la Costanera, South America’s largest, monstrous, indoor shopping mall. Anyway the Pelli tower proved a convenient landmark, forfending all manner of navigational ruptures, and marking the transition from Providencia’s mid-rise apartment blocks to the beginning of Santiago’s newer business district, to the northeast of the city’s historic center.
The architect-owner (coincidence? Not likely), Mabel, had meticulously restored the exterior 
and carved the vast interior into three loft-ish apartments which she kept nearly continuously occupied through Airbnb.
A “centrally located, luxury alternative” to Santiago’s expensive hotels.
Even when her design taste veered toward over-the-top-Latina, 
Mabel’s gesamtkunstwerk was gratifyingly distinctive in the way that three-to-four-star chain hotel rooms and hotels never, ever are. She had brightened up the dark interior by cutting in a double-height window in the back and lofting the second story bedroom area over the first. Some of the art hung inside was better than decent, too.
we nabbed the restaurant’s one free sidewalk table. It was a two person, small, square, wood-topped pedestal, separated from its neighbor to the side by just enough inches for us to feel we were at a private table, but not too many inches as not to afford natural-feeling, inter-table conversation. 
A kind of perfect placement, if conversational options are your eating-taste. Friendly, as we are, we struck up a conversation with our neighbor, which he actually initiated more than we did, which lasted an hour-and-a-half or more of our leisurely lunch of one-course plus coffee. Travelers, it should be a truism, are more likely to converse with strangers than non-travelers are. After all, travelers are underway for adventure and newness and discovery, and their world of available family and friends and colleagues and acquaintances has radically shrunk, so what better way to seek out the new and to fill in the social void than by talking with people seated nearby in cafes, particularly when they turn out also to be travelers and therefore of a similar conversational positioning?
We learned a bunch about his business and saw cell phone photos of the recently unveiled super-first-class 70th anniversary cabins on Singapore Airlines, the production of which (if I understood correctly) he oversaw. We told him that the Boeing 787, called Dreamliner, has, with its better air, quieter interior, expanded overhead clearance, and improved lighting, made our travels notably more pleasant. Beyond the what-do-you-do conversations, which were more extensive and substantive than is usual in such casual encounters, our good-natured exchanges included Iran, as Ash is of Iranian descent, the UK, Brexit, world order, high-tech education, Israel, Jerusalem, and, all but unavoidably, Trump. He told us that he can’t go to the US as he’s subject to the US travel ban. This is so even though he’s a UK citizen and even though he’s through-and-through British, as he was born there. Because he holds dual nationality with Iran, he’s Verboten-fruit.
Comprised of a series of buildings, each a slightly different but equally horrible bastardization of some also-horrible Daniel Liebeskind-ish idea (he was on the jury that chose the principal designers), Federation Square nevertheless contains many deep pockets of agreeable urbanity, woven into the eye-smarting silliness of its architecture.
In front of the Christmas tree, we spotted a woman swathed in hajib posing with her daughter for a picture. Later, discussing the ways Australia’s changed in the past two decades, a remarkably voluble Uber driver — who once worked as an advocate for occupational health and safety in the mining industry — told us that the country’s welcoming immigration policies has created a far more tolerant, open society than the one in which he was raised.
The most clever thing Gehl did was to link together a series of unprepossessing back alleys and reconfigure their street-level frontage to admit teeny-tiny storefronts, just the right size to create arrays of specialized restaurants and shops. 
These new open-air pedestrian malls were threaded into the pathways of two preexisting historic shopping arcades; this one, below, even more exquisite than the photo conveys, opened in 1870.
A stubby, fat palm that defiantly sat in our path. 
A gossamer, red-berried wonder that you spied only if you looked straight up.
One with gnarly-fingered branches encased in bark so deeply incised that half your hand would fit into each of its grooves. 
The 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.
Scattered 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.
In commerical and higher-density residential neighborhoods, the taller structures indicate that Melbourne, like Sydney, takes its towers seriously.
I 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.
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.
Since 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.
and 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!
Nearby 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.
That red-brick/yellow-ochre detailing is a common combination in public buildings in both cities.
To 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.
The 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
and 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.
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 
(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.
and 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 
immersing 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, 
and, generous lot that they are — here’s a woman who runs a weekly open-air soup kitchen in Auckland, offering us a meal — 
they don’t mind sharing the natural and urbanistic wealth.
The Maori people were never very numerous on these islands; currently, they account for three per cent of the country’s population. Such gestures go part way to redress past wrongs to these indigenous people, to be sure, but I suspect it and all these other historical markers serve a larger function: that of constructing a robust narrative of NZ nationhood and identity.
which creates a subtle, compelling dynamism in the nave,
Building has proceeded slowly in the Central Business District — Christchurchians grumble about it, then shrug, adding, it’s a great city. The CBD has been divided into precincts for retail, “innovation” (which I gather means hi-tech), health, performing and visual arts, and “justice and emergency services”. Dozens of large new buildings are under construction: a new metro sports facility, a new central library, a new convention center. A new transit and bus station opened recently.
A couple of days of walking around the city suggested that the Little Black Hut’s design finesse was not unusual: most homes are small, but the detailing and compositional sensibility even in little cinder block, wood, or corrugated-metal-sided homes looks pretty well done.
How little we missed the “sense of history” so prized amongst Americans! Running into the few remaining Victorian houses, grand and modest, provided enjoyment but not the sense of relief one finds when stumbling upon even modest historic structures in the United States. What we found in Christchurch substantiates the argument I advanced in WtYW that the problem in the US built environment is less old (better)-versus-new (clueless), but the poor design quality and craftsmanship of new construction. In Christchurch, high quality new homes, commercial, and retail buildings could be found everywhere. Even the mediocre buildings are good. 
Stay tuned, then, for the new iteration of New Zealand’s garden city — and dream.
Coordinating Goldhagens 