So my friend Andrea messaged me on Facebook wanting my thoughts on a building project in Louisville I hadn’t ever heard of. I ended up kinda going on at length and I thought that my quickie analysis might be amusing. She mentioned Stonehenge as a descriptor in her initial take on the design.

—

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=127240
– bunch of renderings, better context and diff viewing angles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H-qhbIIMyk
– pitch film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisville_Museum_Plaza

At first blush I was reminded of some of the Ground Zero proposals, as I recall there were a couple of linked two-tower ideas. The pitch film seems to give the most context, visually.

I did not find info linking the design of the building to the Ground Zero proposals. BUT:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Prince-Ramus
– “partner-in-charge of the Seattle Central Library”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/arts/design/14pogr.html
– “Joshua Prince-Ramus Leaving Koolhaas’s O.M.A. to Start New Architecture Firm…”

The film clearly links the building to the Library; giant rooms with dedicated uses piled onto one another in ways that presumably reflect and express the use structurally – or so reads the promo literature, anyway.

I like the giant video screen thing as an idea because of Blade Runner, but in real life I HATE video in my field of view when I am driving, even other driver’s little DVD screens distract the shit out of me.

Take my increasingly skeptical opinion of the new Seattle Library:

• it’s confusing to navigate even when you know it’s confusing;
• it’s noisy pretty much no matter where you are because of the lack of interior sound baffling and the open insides of the building;
• it’s hard to understand visually because of the solid intensity of the color schemes of all the interior spaces except for the top-floor reading desks and study carrels and the ground floor.

Looking at that list, the overriding quality underlying each of these critiques is a building that actually emphasizes noise, meaning sensory overload, at the expense of usability. The big video screen on the Louisville building actually takes that problem and expands it into the city itself. I rather doubt that interior of the building would be any more conducive to clear and rational thought.

Oh, look, Prince-Ramus worked on a Guggenheim museum project based in Las Vegas. The aesthetic line I am seeing looks at Vegas’ lines of blinking distraction and robbery machines and casts that as a good and desirable thing. I see it as a mechanism to increase the concentration of power and wealth by making it that much harder for Joe Average to think clearly about his life and role in the economy, something that actually threatens participatory democracy itself.

So, Stonehenge? If Stonehenge is a place of religious spectacle and intoxication, maybe so. I think, however, it’s currently thought to be a sort of astronomical observatory, right? That sort of constructed artifact celebrates the cyclical, the predictable, the knowable, and the real.

These buildings I looked at this morning don’t seem interested in that set of values.

Ha, it’s fun to just come up with stuff like this on the fly!

On Sunday, the League convened for an all-too-rare – although much more frequent in Seattle than most other burgs – screening of the wide-screen amazement device entitled Lawrence of Arabia.

I’ve seen this film three times now in 70mm at the Cinerama, and each time, my head spins for days afterward, usually on new topics. For example, since the last time I had seen this, I participated in a couple of film shoots, and it clearly altered the way I was looking at the film. The clearest example of this was in my electric awareness of the frequent use of one-take shots in the film, shots set up by the film crew with the clear knowledge that the first-take of a shot in a setup would in some way always be visually superior to any subsequent takes.

The best examples of these are in some early shots of the journey to Feisal’s camp, in which Lawrence and his guide traverse sand which has clearly not been previously marked by earlier takes, and in a shot depicting a lost Hadith raider, stumbling across an ‘impassable’ desert just before dawn. As the camera catches the actor, the actual sun appears, camera left but very much in the center of attention, a burning sliver above the horizon. What a shot! It defies the imagination to consider the difficulties the setup poses, and yet it’s clear that the result is wholly worthwhile.

Seeing this again, now nearly five years into the Iraq war, shifted meanings within the film one more time. Now I knew several of the physical sites mentioned in the film as places referenced at one time or another in reportage of America’s campaigns in the desert, not least of which is the name of the film provide for Sherif Ali and Prince Feisal’s tribe, the Hadith. It rings with the sound of a town in Iraq: Haditha.

Watching the film directly after an afternoon spent in the company of Roman sculpture was interesting, too. Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, and Iraq were all under Roman dominion after Pompey’s campaigns, so these places have an arguably closer tie to the culture of Rome and Greece than we do here in the New World. In the film, the characteristically arabesque decorative surfaces and architectural details owe much to the late-period art of the Roman empire.

It should be noted, though, that the film’s interiors were all shot in Spain; while it had been hoped that Jordan and in particular Petra might be used as location scenes, illness disrupted the plans. I’m guessing that informed the choice of the stone city as a location in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

As the League was in attendance, after-film imbibery led to a number of questions and I chased a few down.

Picking up a few threads:

The wikipedia article includes some interesting notes on casting – Marlon Brando was considered for Lawrence, and Laurence Olivier was originally set for Feisal.

Also, I had said that the film was shot in Tunisia (as was some of Star Wars). I was incorrect. The film was set to shoot in Jordan but mostly was shot in Spain and Morocco.

As Lawrence arrives at Feisal’s camp, it is under bombardment by a pair of Turkish biplanes. Much to my frustration, I was unable to ID either the planes actually used by the filmmakers or the model of airplane they had been dressed to resemble.

The planes were DeHavilland 82 Tiger Moths, a 2-seat british trainer of the 1930s, dressed as Rumpler CIVs, sez here.

Finally, for years I have associated the journalist character in the film with Lowell Thomas, correctly (note lower left pic in first section of the page linked to). Here is a link to the Google books result for Lowell’s “With Lawrence in Arabia,” oddly treated as an under-copyright work although it was published in 1924.

For years beyond my certain knowledge of Lawrence, I have associated Lowell Thomas with a Saturday afternoon matinee show shown on WGN Channel 9 Chicago throughout my childhood. I had thought he hosted the show into his dotage. I was entirely mistaken. The actual host of Family Classics was a longtime WGN employee named Frazier Thomas. I still think it’s possible that Family Classics showed Lawrence in a bowdlerized form; the show did introduce me to more than one of the great masterworks of midcentury Technicolor spectacle.

We spent Saturday out and about, getting starter plants and seeds for the garden after starting our day at SAM’s twin traveling exhibits, The Gates of Paradise (hurry, it closes April 6) and Roman Art from the Louvre, through May 11.

It was wonderful to see the Ghiberti panels so intimately. Unfortunately, as the Louvre show is a certified blockbuster, they use timed ticket entry and I was unable to head directly to the panels for some leisurely, intense looking prior to joining the jostling masses one floor up.

The Roman show is flat-out terrific, with a couple of minor exhibit-based quibbles. First, audio-guide numbers are sparsely sited and hard to see, leading to much poking and jostling as people try to figure out what entry they should listen to as they observe this patch of mosaic over someone’s shoulder or that left eye of a head between those two tall persons standing very very close to the sculpture.

The effect is to divert attention away from the art and artifacts, both for the persons desperately seeking a layer of interpretive information to mediate their looking and for other members of the onlooking throng as the seekers dodge in and out of the knots of would-be viewers. Especially in chilly Seattle where personal space is so important, that produces room after room of people uncomfortably twisting away from one another, casting their eyes about in order to mee no other’s gaze, backing away from that tiny grey-haired woman only to bump into the gladiator-huge man standing directly behind your head.

And that, of course, is the other issue. Certainly, by attending the show at midday on a Saturday, we almost certainly experienced the galleries at maximum attendance. That maximum, to put it simply, was too much. The art was not satisfactorily observable. It was truly impossible to look at any one object long enough to develop the least moment of concentrated observation.

However, the objects in the show and the arrangement of them in relation to one another were really quite stunning, well worth another trip at a less trafficked hour, and I surely intend to return. Vivian especially enjoyed comparing the information and nonsense (surprisingly little of that, really) obtained from our relatively recent viewing and appreciation of
the HBO miniseries Rome, which included historical accuracy as a primary production goal.

Viv’s favorite pieces were the twin full-figure sculptures of Augustus and Livia that announce the main body of the show, in a room mostly occupied with portrait sculptures of the family of that founding dynasty of the Empire. I’m not certain what my favorite was, but the amazing mosaic panel in the introductory section of the show may be the one I’d choose.

Given my recent home projects, I would have loved it if a bit more time had been invested in information concerning both formal residential gardens and kitchen gardens in the Empire, but obviously that is outside the scope of the show. Still, I’d like to know about Roman spices and herbs, for example. My intuition is that many of the European herbs we commonly use today such as lavender and oregano would have been in the garden and in the larder, while most Asian and Oceanic herbs (such as black peppercorns) would have been unknown.

Afterwards we drove all the way up to Sky Nursery in Shoreline and returned with a wide array of starter veggies and flowers. Despite all my pissing and moaning I have been forced into book-larnin’ to grok the intrickasees of the planter’s art, which appears to revolve, in spring, about the last frost date for your area. Hereabouts it is March 26.

Thus, most of my flats will go out the weekend before the 26 while I hope that the cold won’t come in those few days. Over the next week I’ll be starting sprouters inside, too.

One unexpected wrinkle is that the books seem to suggest I should wait until mid April to start working on outside tomatoes, which is a pain in the butt from my perspective – I moved my plants in over the winter and they have grown into enormous, vining monstrosities that make it hard to move around in the solarium. I guess I’ll just cage them inside for now and disentangle them from the furniture and so forth.