Street Life, III: Santiago’s Benches

August 20, 2018August 12, 2018 / coordinatinggoldhagens / Leave a comment

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

Australia express, musings on urbanism 2: Surfaces hard, softer, soft

January 6, 2018 / coordinatinggoldhagens / 3 Comments

FROM all the building going on in Sydney and Melbourne, one gets the clear impression as far as real estate development is concerned, good money is being made. Yet unlike what too often happens in the States, private profit appears not to come at the expense of an investment in the shared social spaces that are somewhat loftily (and too inchoately) called a city’s public realm. (For an instructive and dispiriting contrast to what we found in Australia, read this, on the ongoing disintegration of New York City’s subway system.) Here, it seems, it’s not one or the other, but both. Public and private. Everybody wins.

The plenitude and variety of welcoming open spaces in Sydney and Melbourne’s newer (or newish) developments suggest that those in charge of urbanism operate with both a robust commitment and sufficient resources to ensure that cities offer pedestrian amblers-around many opportunities to choose from, on and off the street, to meet a friend or just take a midday pause. Places where strangers graze elbows without stepping on one another’s toes.

Architecturally, some are distinctive, others not. Melbourne’s Federation Square, below (completed ca. 2003), epitomizes the complexity of this relationship between urbanism and architecture — and now, it’s become the focus of this never-ending discussion about balancing private and public space, as Apple proposes demolishing one of its buildings to erect a new retail store (read about that here). 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.

Tourists, by definition peripatetic, will find the complex difficult to avoid. Each day and time we found ourselves in Federation Square, its low-slung and high-rising steps and sitting areas, its recessed spatial eddies and quarkily-configured common spaces, teemed with riots of people, color, and activity. Amphitheater-like steps offer up seating areas for school kids eating lunch, mothers on outing with toddlers in strollers, all manner of passers-by and lingerers. 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.

Compositionally, the Federation Square complex offers up nice moments, here and there. Such as this one, on a staircase tucked off the busy, main thoroughfare, where a maintenance worker on break set her blue knapsack down and started in on checking her cell phone, not even bothering to remove her latex gloves.

Among the urbanistically-preoccupied, the best known urban project in Australia, besides Sydney’s Opera House, remains Jan Gehl Associates’ transformation of Melbourne’s Central Business District from a litter-strewn, post-5pm-and-weekend urban graveyard into a vibrant, crowded, see-and-be-seen, free-for-all (I seem to be on some kind of adjectival run) place of urban congregation. 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.

Royal Arcade, Melbourne

As Danny and I traversed the entire loop, courtesy of a map obtained from the tourist information bureau, I idly mused whether it might be possible to spend all the money earned in a month in a single afternoon walk. Restaurants, art galleries (including one selling what its proprietors claimed were original drawings by Dr. Seuss), clothing and jewelry and hand-mixed cosmetic stores. Certainly the retinue of shopkeepers and restauranteurs milling around, expectantly, held out hope that wallets would empty, and empty again. Ours didn’t, but we enjoyed the show.

Sydney’s Central Business District retains more of its Victorian-era architecture; the newer developments we sought out lie in neighborhoods at a remove from the city’s neverending, serpentine shoreline. In Chippendale, not far from the University of Technology Sydney campus, we were stopped short in our tracks by the sight of this spectacular, justly celebrated high-rise by Jean Nouvel, designed in collaboration with Foster & Partners and Patric Blanc, the French botanist who invented the green wall. Pretentiously, audaciously named One Central Park (the developer’s promotional materials represent it, fatuously, as a vertical version of New York City’s emerald gem), it’s a luxury residential-cum-retail complex defining one edge of a block-sized green, something between a plaza and a park. The day we visited, the plaza-park bubbled with shoppers en route to the supermarket, construction workers on lunch break, seeking shade. The attractive multilevel retail complex encircles a green-walled atrium filled with cascading natural light, and spinning around the void was a blur of parcels leading their human owners hither and yon. How did the architects manage to project natural light so deep into a multistory, partially underground atrium? That large shimmering cantilever projecting off the façade: it’s a metal grid hung with mirrors programmed to follow the rays of the sun, directing and redirecting them into the atrium below.

Streetside, the building’s green facades project a soft-edged, appealing presence, and Blanc made sure that all the plants are native to Australia.

We continue to pursue green, especially in cities, even with New Zealand long behind us. Neither Sydney nor Melbourne disappointed. Foremost among the urban pastorals is landscape architect Peter Walker’s newly opened Barangaroo Reserve Park. Stunning.

10,000 blocks of rich, creamy sandstone create a graduated, semi-permeable shoreline edge (professionals call this riprap) that helps to mitigate flooding; Walker, recognizing the stone’s beauty, made it the design datum for the park, using it for much else, too.

Sitting stones (left).

Benches, parapets, stairs, terracing.

The Barangaroo Reserve opened only recently. The day we visited it was practically empty, but that’s because it’s currently pretty inaccessible, surrounded by a busy thoroughfare and a huge construction site. Soon enough, I predict, it will earn its rightful place as a treasured part of Sydney’s urban fabric. You can read more about it here.

Finally, the magical Botanic Gardens in both cities.

Just one prospect of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne.

This also displays astonishing set pieces in the form of weird, wonderful trees.

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. And one tree that reminded me of Edward Weston’s wonderful green pepper photographs, or, for a more recent reference, of Del Kathryn Barton’s exuberantly multi-breasted women.

All in all, Australians seem to appreciate the wonders of their cityscapes and their landscapes. More than once, we found its soft surfaces celebrated in the hard ones.

The country’s two principal cities make a good exemplar for urban livability, one that other cities and countries might take a good, long look at– and take heed.

— Sarah

Australia express: art

December 20, 2017December 20, 2017 / coordinatinggoldhagens / Leave a comment

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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. 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.

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.

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

December 18, 2017December 18, 2017 / coordinatinggoldhagens / 1 Comment

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, 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.

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.

Others, of course, contented themselves with Monumental and Sedate. This the former Royal Mail Exchange Building, now the Whitehouse Institute of Design in Melbourne. That 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

— Sarah

We’re talkin’ heat

December 2, 2017 / coordinatinggoldhagens / Leave a comment

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.

One 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. The Waimangu regaled us with hot waters,

and hot (and cool, in both senses of the word) colors,

and 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.

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.

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 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.

We also visited a redwood forest, offering a skylet-high tree walkway, right 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.

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

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

which 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.Sarah’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

Volcanos and Calderas: Tongariro Alpine Crossing

November 27, 2017 / coordinatinggoldhagens / 3 Comments

New Zealanders, with their seemingly infinite capacity to charm, charmingly call trekking or hiking “tramping”, which constitutes something of a national pastime. Tourist brochures and government-sponsored websites alike advertise the Tongariro Alpine Crossing as the best one-day tramp in the country. Not for the faint of heart, though. It’s 19.4 kilometers (nary a water source along the way), with official estimates advising that hikers to plan on between six and eight hours, with the ominous addendum, “depending upon your condition”. You are also repeatedly reminded to pack for different kinds of weather events: you can shiver in pelting sleet and sweat in blazing rays of sun in a single day. Or you can find yourself at the peak of a dry, sandy, 10-foot-wide ridge huddling against 65 mile-per-hour winds, as happened the day after we set out on this monumental — just no other word for it — journey. Some years ago, authorities, knocking their heads together about how to adequately alarm hikers (any number have died here over the years) into packing sensibly, settled upon the seductive, but probably ineffectual name change, and the generations-marinated Tongariro Crossing became the Tongariro ALPINE Crossing.

The path goes up a valley to the saddle between Mt. Tongariro and Mt. Ngauruhoe, both active volcanos. We and our fellow hikers — a simpatico, hail-fellow-well-met, mostly international crew — are repeatedly exhorted to stick to the designated route. If you do, you pass a sign below Tongariro, the largest, offering instructions in the event that it erupts in your presence. Item one: “Move away as quickly as you are able”. I laughed, and we proceeded without bothering to read the rest.

How to convey the experience of that day? Readers may thank me for discarding my first idea, which was to snap a photo every five minutes through the entire trek and to post every one here, sequentially, with the logic being that nothing else would suffice to impart the dual sense the day gifted to us: arrested time, infinite space. Instead, I offer, in sequential order, highlights of some of the awesome moments which came to us, step by step by step, at the infinitesimal pace of human locomotion.

When we started, clouds draped Mount Tongariro in shades of white. Slowly, the ground cover changes: less grass, and less green, now scattered in wheat-colored clumps aside low scrub brush and lichen-covered rocks.

Eventually, the proportion of grass to dirt tips decisively in favor of earth, as the pure conical shape of the Tongariro crater comes into view.

Surprise number one: Red! The Red Crater rises 6200 feet above sea level.

Eventually, you enter a desolate, soil and rock-strewn bowl which leads around the active, still steaming vent.

As you approach the Red Crater to circumambulate its perimeter, all flora disappear and you are left with acres liberally strewn with black, volcanic rock. The last eruption was in the late 1970s.

At the crest of the next peak, this culminates in a succession of extraordinary compositions. The pictures illustrating this post were culled from the 140+ photos I shot that day.

Circumventing the Red Crater (you couldn’t actually ascend it) brought you into view of the vaginal-looking orifice from which all that lava spewed during its last eruption. From there, you began your multi-houred descent. Around one bend, you see this: the Emerald Lakes (at right). At left-center, in middle distance, you can just glimpse the Blue Lake, and behind it in the horizon, Lake Tapuo, which is a caldera of a different volcano, about 90 miles away.

The Emerald Lakes sit at the edge of a large, grass-covered pan which resembles, a bit, the Amphitheater at the Drakensburg in South Africa. This was shot from the other end of the pan, looking back at the Red Crater.

On the way down to the exit (which entailed some climbing up, too), the landscape serves up an exuberant riot of muted color.

Near the top of the descent:

And slowly, again, the proportion of volcanic rock to ground cover and grasses shifts.

By late afternoon, you’ve spent over an hour trekking through an absurdly dense, all-embracing rain forest. Nothing to shoot except deep shadows, ferns, moss, and spreading palm leaves.

And then — you’re done.

One last shot, taken en route to our next destination, showed where we’d been, from a distance. All three of us completed the trek in seven hours, without rushing. Reveling in my inexperience and my enthusiasm, I declared the Tongariro Alpine Crossing the best hike in the world.

— Sarah

Morocco’s Architecture and Tradition

November 2, 2017November 1, 2017 / coordinatinggoldhagens / Leave a comment

Frozen in time. From the first day we entered the Kasbah in Marrakesh through the end of our trip to the UNESCO World Heritage site Aït Ben Haddou, that was my overwhelming impression of Morocco.

The exception was Casablanca, but Fez, people tell me, confers this impression with even greater intensity. In its sense of arrested time, Morocco felt very different from other developing societies I’ve encountered. Take India. In India, people’s lives are saturated with tradition, but they do not, or at least did not appear to me to reject modernity. In some of Morocco’s most distant reaches, people seem only dimly aware that modern societies even exist. What are they watching on satellite TV?

Traditional Moroccan architecture, which is most Moroccan architecture, can be characterized thus. Walls, walls, and walls.

That’s first. Next: extreme complexity in surface patterning.

Last: extreme simplicity of spatial organization. Whether it’s the riad courtyard houses, or a palace complex such as Bahia Palace, or the Ben Youssef Medrasa, spatial arrangements vary very little. Small rooms, or concentric layers of smaller and larger rooms, encircling open air courtyards.

Sometimes, in larger buildings, internal rooms with tiny windows butt up onto rooms opening onto subcourtyards with skylit roofs.

Spatial organization, spatial sequences – all are straightforward, even banal. (If the site varies topographically, sometimes there’s a little more action, as in the palace at Telouet.) So the colorful, intricate patterns constitute the only means of arresting our visual interest — or, to invert the formulation, to compensate for the lack of design complexity.

On the drive from Aït Ben Haddou back to Marrakesh, Danny, Gideon and I discussed this, noting that although we’d seen many of central Morocco’s premier monuments, we’d discerned scant artistic development. Always, Zelig (ceramic tile mosaics) stretching from the floor to shoulder-level; intricate, lacy plasterwork above; then wood, painted and carved, on top (the wood needs to be on top because it spans ceilings, windows, doors).

In no place we visited did that differ.

To explain to Gideon the difference between the architectural tradition as we’ve encountered it in Morocco and the western one, I used painting, with which he is more familiar. Think about what a Giotto looks like, I said. Then compare it to Leonardo’s Madonna and Child in the Louvre, and then compare that to Michaelangelo’s Madonna and Child. The subject is the same; the paintings don’t look at all alike. Each artist, in some way, was trying to express something new, even if he was also building on established traditions. Here, the mosaic work in Telout’s Kasbah (early 20th century) resembles the mosaic work in Marrakesh’s Ben Youssef Medrasa (16th century).

So, art or craft? Reluctantly, I concede: Danny’s correct.

That’s it for Morocco.

–Sarah

Coordinating Goldhagens

here, there, and (sort of) everywhere

Pattern

Street Life, III: Santiago’s Benches

Australia express, musings on urbanism 2: Surfaces hard, softer, soft

Australia express: art

Australia express: architecture

We’re talkin’ heat

Volcanos and Calderas: Tongariro Alpine Crossing

Morocco’s Architecture and Tradition

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