Travelogues & History
During the recent International Pool|Spa|Patio Expo, I stayed in New Orleans at an unfamiliar hotel three or four blocks off the waterfront and a couple blocks from the French Quarter. I arrived late and didn't have the opportunity to get my bearings, so I started the next day by opening the drapes to survey the city from my 13th-floor vantage point.
It was a first for me: In all of my travels, I've rarely ever stayed in a hotel with a 13th floor, let alone been assigned a room on one. And as unluckiness would have it, the view to the horizon wasn't much, just the tops of warehouses with a big bridge in the middle ground.
But straight down below me was a strange sort of park with odd walls, a clock tower, a colonnade and a structure that suggested the Grand Canyon to me. I checked it out before heading over to the convention center and saw that it was called Piazza d'Italia. In walking through the space, I soon recognized that the canyon-seeming formation was a fountain basin and that the "excavation" was shaped like the Italian peninsula, with Sicily lashed on at the toe of the boot to complete the package.
The view from my hotel window. (Please pardon the glare!)
I took some snapshots and, when I returned to my room that evening, learned that the space had been designed by the internationally renowned post-modern architect Charles Moore in association with Perez Architects, a local New Orleans firm - and that it had started a steady slide to dereliction almost as soon as it was completed in 1978.
I also learned that the piazza had been fully restored in 2004 - but I can't swear by it's current status, because it wasn't operational for the week I was there. It's often called the first post-modern ruin, which is amusing. But it was just plain sad to see how much effort had gone into creating a space that just didn't seem to belong.
It's a nasty twist of urban planning and New Orleans history: The piazza was intended to spur a neighborhood revival, but the city never caught up with the program despite the fact that several nice restaurants, including one of Emeril's local outposts, had come to the area.
So instead of being the core of a vibrant village, Piazza d'Italia is caught in the shadow of a huge hotel and cut off from nearby streets by a big parking lot that replaced a bunch of old buildings that at some point had the misfortune of catching fire. In fact, if I hadn't found the space from above, I seriously doubt I would ever have spotted it from street level.
It's almost beside the point that I don't really like the piazza, with the fountain operating or not. There's little to love in the self-indulgence and self-satisfaction that marks so much of post-modernism, from the winking references to antiquity and classical forms to the rib-nudging use of neon in the lighting program. I know I haven't seen Piazza d'Italia at its best, but in both concept and execution it seems overblown in the way so much architecture was at the close of the last century - too divorced from the immediacy of human experience to be beloved, a stage without actors, an uncomfortable public forum.
Maybe splashing water would help, but don't quote me on that because being inoperative when I saw it was only one problem among many. It's still worth seeing, I'd say, but it's just so weird!
To learn more about the fountain and piazza (and see many more photographs), click here.
I recently enjoyed my umpteenth visit to the Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens. It's an amazing estate in the city of San Marino, Calif., a well-heeled enclave near Pasadena, and was established by Henry Huntington, nephew and heir to transcontinental-railroad magnate Collis Huntington. This is a place that shows you what a serious fortune could buy in the early years of the 20th Century.I like the library and appreciate the art collection, but the reason
If you see it at the right time of year, Minneapolis is a wonderful place to visit.
When I lived in Oregon in the 1980s, many of the flights I took to the East Coast paused there, and on a couple occasions I found myself grounded at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in weather delays that gave me the opportunity to get away from the terminal for brief periods. These stops all occurred deep in winter, of course, so mostly I recall being miserably cold.
The place intrigued me, however, so I was happy some years later to attend a trade show there and took advantage of the gorgeous fall weather to walk around. Just a short hop from the convention center was Loring Park - the highlight of my wanderings and home to the Berger "Dandelion" Fountain, an extraordinary composition with quite a story behind it.
Benjamin Berger was a Polish immigrant who made good in his adopted hometown. He was 16 when he arrived in 1913 and was successful enough as a businessman that he later became a part-owner of the Minneapolis Lakers, who won six National Basketball Association titles during the 1950s before moving to Los Angeles a couple years after Berger sold his interest in the team. (Maybe he knew it'd be 15 years before the team would win another title.)
He owned restaurants and movie theaters and started programs that helped ex-convicts readjust to life outside prison - an all-around civic-minded, solid guy.
At some point in the 1960s, he made a trip to Australia and saw a fountain that knocked his socks off to such an extent that he just had to get one for Minneapolis. It was the El Alamein Memorial Fountain in Sydney (seen just above) - a sphere made up of circlets of water issuing from nozzles placed on the ends of long rods. It definitely captured Berger's imagination.
Returning home, he blanched when he learned what it would cost to reproduce the Syndey original and set the project aside. Then came his life's great windfall: In 1973, Berger's theaters were the only ones in town that had booked The Exorcist, and he made enough in box office and concession receipts from that one movie that the fountain project moved back onto the front burner.
He'd originally hoped to install his big dandelion near Minneapolis' famed Walker Art Center, but the curators there declined the offer because the work was a reproduction rather than an original. Undaunted, Berger, who was at that time a park commissioner, shifted his focus to Loring Park - and the rest is history.
Berger's Dandelion Fountain (seen at right) is in a great setting in a wonderful urban greenspace - well worth seeing the next time your travels take you to Minnesota in a time of fair weather.
I understand that the fountain is now in need of some restoration, which is no great surprise given such long service by all of those precision nozzles. So far as I can tell, no repair timetable has been set; if the city takes as much time to raise the necessary funds as Mr. Berger did in waiting for an unexpected box-office smash, it might be quite a while before the water goes off and the restoration begins.
Minneapolis has other cool fountains, too - well worth considering if you can get past memories of Linda Blair and her head-turning antics!
For a brief video of Berger's Dandelion Fountain in action, click here.
In the final installment of their series on the history and development of the shotcrete method of concrete application, William Drakeley and Lily Samuels examine the industry's current state of the art -- then cast an optimistic eye toward the approach's future.
It's been many, many years since I visited Bordeaux - and when I did get there back in the 1970s, I had yet to develop my appreciation for the French region's wonderful wines. As a result, I was the swiftest of sightseers out on a day trip, and one of the few things I recall with any strength of memory was the Bourse, a set of grand riverfront structures that now serve as the region's central commercial exchange.
Under construction from 1730 to 1775, the complex was designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, probably most renowned for his work on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. He was an ardent exponent of neoclassical symmetry and certainly didn't ease off his preferences in this case. When I saw it in 1978, I was impressed by its balanced grandeur and spectacular level of detail.
here.
To see his own gallery of images of the Miroir d'Eau, click here.
A brief, late-spring visit to San Francisco gave me the opportunity to be just a tourist there for the first time in many years. Judy and I stayed at a place near Golden Gate Park and spent a long, full day in its huge expanse, moving from one great and wonderful attraction to another. The fact that the Park's museums
This is my second Travelogue in a row that has resulted from a chance encounter. Last time, a visit to a Seattle-area green space with a big swingset led me to discover the water system at Downtown Bellevue Park; this time, a rendezvous for lunch with an old friend confronted me with the fountain at the Americana at Brand, a mixed-use
I recently spent several weeks in Kirkland, Wash., doing what I could to help my daughter and her family prepare for the arrival of our grandson-to-be. One of our outings on a sunny Sunday was to a playground in nearby Bellevue, a place where the cityscape is
I have always been inordinately fond of fireworks. Indeed, and as my children will not-so-patiently attest, my year isn't complete if I don't get to spend part of every Fourth of July either watching a big fireworks display or, better yet, helping to stage one myself.
In the summer of 1978, however, I was in France for most of the month of July and wasn't shocked to find that the Fourth passed with nary a skyward pop. But when I arrived in Aix-en-Provence on July 15, one of the first things the manager of my hotel recommended was getting up early the next morning to grab a seat in a sidewalk café on the town's main plaza to watch what he promised would be a breathtaking pyrotechnical display that evening.
My French was quite good back then, and I had a great time getting to know the people around me, all of them French and many of whom had grabbed their Bastille Day tables well before breakfast, as I had.
The display that evening was indeed glorious beyond expectations, Bastille Day supplemented by a huge jazz festival that filled the town and had everyone hopping, especially the folks who were jamming what seemed to be an endless supply of fireworks into mortars to send them rocketing up over the plaza. But as the day wore on, I started noticing a huge fountain at the center of the large traffic circle by which I sat: It, too, was more than a bit interesting.
On that Bastille Day, however, there was no access to it and its extent was mostly masked by all of the pyrotechnical staging. So I went back the next morning to check it out more closely. Known as Le Fontaine de la Rotonde, I learned that it had made its grand debut in 1860.
At about 70 feet wide and 40 feet tall, it would have dominated the plaza on any day other than Bastille Day. With a basin edged by lions and filled with dolphin-riding angels, birds and other elaborately carved figures, there's a central structure rising as a platform for a trio of figures representing justice, agriculture and the fine arts - key themes for what even a century earlier was a bustling provincial center.
What a great place! What a wonderful fountain! And I'm convinced that one day I'll go back to see it again - and I'll do it even if there is no chance of seeing any fireworks!
i don't get to san francisco as often once did and that's a shame because there so much see do. on the plus side, however, when do make one of my infrequent trips bay area, there's always lot brand new me, even if it has been around for while. monument i'll discuss here example since 1998 or but i'd never come across until had reason visit moscone center downtown in 2007 convention centers go, is both modern imposing, real highlight me was yerba buena gardens,two-city-block= park situated such way that part actually over center. it's wonderful space highlighted by martin luther king jr memorial, set glass panels celebrating his life legacy. those engraved are mounted granite behind waterfall measuring 20 feet tall 50 long devised artist sculptor houston conwill collaboration with poet estella majoza architect joseph de pace.
And as you move away, you appreciate the fact that the sound of the waterfalls also masks a great deal of traffic noise. And the same can be said for the perimeter-overflow fountain on the terrace just above the waterfalls: It's hard to get a break from general urban clattering in a place like downtown San Francisco, and these watershapes succeed at it to a wonderfully welcome degree.
We have a trip to San Francisco planned for this summer: This will definitely make it to my short list of stops while we're there - provided I don't get distracted by something new!
For a video that puts the waterfall on full display, click here. For a look at the watershape on the upper terrace, click here. For a glimpse inside the memorial, click here.
