Even though it has been a long time since I was in school, September still always feels like a new year to me. Summer’s over, vacations are done, everybody’s work life gears back up after a slow August. It seems like a good time to reassess one’s life, more so than January does. This feels [...]
Archive for the ‘Out & About’ category
Happy Talk
– I am walking home from dinner with my host in London, a good friend from NYC, around 11pm. Almost everything in Bloomsbury is closed by this time of night, so we are surprised to hear some lively singing coming from somewhere above us in the street. We stop to listen, and then my friend [...]
Spray the paint berlin style
I was very much taken by the combination of greenery and graffiti that Berlin has to offer: I was also greatly impressed by some of the more intelligent points made by German street artists: Granted, some criticisms were less clever, but amusing nonetheless: There were also some extremely positive messages, the likes of which I [...]
Stella and the magic carpet
Stella has followed the hallowed footsteps of Scotty G. to Berlin. She will now attempt to communicate an art installation in photographs. All good art installations are of course impossible to capture and document. Nevertheless, Stella will risk diminishing the work to share it with you. It takes place in the Neue Nationalgalerie designed by [...]
Eastern architecture pt. 3: Fernsehturm Berlin
One of the more famous landmarks in East Berlin is the TV tower (or Fernsehturm Berlin), which was constructed by the GDR in the late ’60s as a way to showcase its technological superiority over the West. My first impression as I exited Alexanderplatz metro station was that I was not moved either by its [...]
Greetings from London!
1. I should have packed more comfortable shoes. But this was a good excuse to pick up some cute brown sneakers at the Camper store. 2. I got briefly unnerved by the currency problem, but only because there was the splitting of a seven-way check involved. We ate delicious Ethiopian food. Still can’t figure out [...]
Home tour
In downtown L.A., on a street that comes to an end where the Santa Monica freeway whizzes by overhead, architect Michael Maltzan has built a new apartment building called the Carver Apartments. There are a few things that are unusual about this. One is the shape: the building is like a doughnut – a cylinder [...]
Eastern architecture pt. 2
After leaving Berlin, I was thrilled to come across some really fabulous cold war architecture in Dresden: Prague: Brno: and Budapest:
