the one you put on a pedestal

Jerónimos Monastery, 1501, Lisbon

When I set eyes on this crowded house, it made sense of all those empty pedestals at the Rosslyn Chapel and other ruins of worship in Scotland. Nothing left to the imagination here at Lisbon's Jeronimos Monastery! Someone is home in every niche. Rosslyn was built to show gratitude for Scotland's Sinclair family fortune. Similarly, Jeronimos went up as a gesture of thanks for Portugal's successful voyages to the New World. Unlike Rosslyn, no waves of reformation shattered Lisbon's idolatrous statues. Even the calamitous 1755 earthquake/fire/tsunami failed to unseat these stone occupants. To bookend an earlier post, I gratefully submit these sun-warmed, populous facades in Lisbon.

with respect to gravity

Edinburgh sidewalk

The women (and some men) who negotiate this urban terrain in high heels get kudos for balance! Even in flats, I'm learning to walk more attentively than ever, avoiding puddles, slick cobbles, mud and crevasses. A great deal of my tourist experience is spent looking down. Each day I slip less and can pay more attention to the steady child of gravity, the horizon line.

I will not be moved

The 15th c. Rosslyn Chapel has dozens of platforms created to support statuary, inside and out (see orange blobs), but no one's home! Some theorize that 17th c. parishioners of one sect, anticipating plunder by a reforming sect, spirited away the occupants of the niches and hid them --too well! Since the chapel was not completed before the death of the man who funded it, it's possible some niches were never occupied. An added insult to the building, Scots complain, was that Cromwell used the building as a stable.
What's interesting is the stones that were not removed: the carved support stones for the statuary and stone members of arches that support openings. They had been carved into figures of a secular or pagan nature, or events any flavor of plunderer might fear or respect. Being structurally riskier to knock down, that green man or the bagpipe-playing figure remain in place today. Because they were like motherhood and apple pie are to Americans, might masons have preserved deeper-seated subject matter according to the structural role a stone played? Did these icons' deeper cultural roots make them structurally safer?
Possibly a worst offense to the building took place in the 1950's. In a preservation attempt gone-wrong, a thin coat of cement was applied to the entire structure, inadvertently cloaking and suffocating the colorful, living rock within its own grey baggie. In what some say is perpetuating another false image,  Hollywood is providing funds to repair.

space cowboy

My visit to Rosslyn Chapel included a hike down the steep ravine beyond in search of the spot from which JMW Turner painted the Rosslyn castle ruins. From where did he see that awesome color-fields of atmosphere? I would sketch it, too. Wandering the ravine I found lots of mud (Scotland) but no dark crag, no crashing rapids. It turns out Turner embellished. Fabricated. For a nanosecond I felt cheated. The ruins exist, but the rest of the landscape is studied free-association. He made comprehensive preliminary sketches one can see @the Tate: a bounty of view angles, accuracy on building detail, but no time for foliage details in the field.  The rugged unruliness of nature was turned up to eleven later.
I suspect Turner bothers to include a representational tidbit to indicate the distance he's about to travel from reality. I like my Turner with very small bits of reality.

o drap'd figure where is thy top half?

Since the top of the figure IS missing, one can read the inscription that asks,
O death where is thy sting
O grave where is thy victory
Was the figure always incomplete, or is it Mother Nature's dark humor that's weathering the stones at Greyfriars Kirkyard? The nearby Flodden Wall, in contrast, stands strong after 500 years, and is testament to a more sobering event of a Gettysburg hue, although probably not the darkest.

iron age real estate

Double-wall masonry is sometimes thought of as cheap, because it uses fewer bricks for wall area, but it can be quite strong, since the walls are usually connected at intervals with a tie-stone that spans both walls. My first lesson in the durability of double-wall masonry was during additions to a building by idiosyncratic engineer-builder, Carr Jones. What? Masonry, in earthquake territory? Garden-variety double-wall construction is referred to as rat-trap masonry, a bond popular for its insulating properties and economy of materials. Jones' California walls used steel ties, and his early 20c. homes are real estate manna. Pictured above is one example of the QUEEN of double-wall masonry, unique to Scotland: the broch. They're dry masonry: no mortar. They take the idea of tie stones and insulating cavities to another level! Given the severity of Scotland's environment, one appreciates the need for insulation, but the cavities in broch walls are unusual enough to provoke speculation about additional functionality. To get an idea of the technical sophistication of these dry-stone, iron-age structures, check out this trailer for a recent broch-umentary.

round house

How many creatures make their nests in rectilinear form? Earth-form circles large or small don't seem so mysterious if we look at the nesting methods of our furry and feathered kin. Whether to enclose real or imagined occupants, dead or alive, arranging earth in circular form seems like standard M.O! How'd so many of us get to thinking right angles were top choice? Most early people's constructed homes appear to have been round. Before aerial photography, the sure clue to an ancient site was leftover stones, depressions and berms. Today, hi-res satellite imagery can suggest previously overlooked sites to ANY amateur. Here is a Edin's Hall, one of supposedly few similar structures in the southern Scottish borderlands. But really? Look for yourself on Google Earth. This amateur sees similar scars nearby.

why didn't I think of this?

The dining table in this 19th c. Edinburgh flat is just big enough to roll out fabric for some trousers (or a kilt)or a dress. It has a couple shallow drawers and a sturdy brass yardstick, set flush with the table surface & bolted along one edge. Perhaps it formerly saw duty in a shop. In my home it would be as useful today as it was when the table was made.

this bird has flown

First the predawn birdsong
Clacking of tiny feet on wood
A soft rap on the flatmate's door
The startled peal of parting tears
Cut short by stiff upper lipness.

The shuffling of thrice her volume
Swiftly down 3 runs of stairs, and
Up for one last, squeaky valise.
Then a pause, while the taxi idles:
Last gaze from the edge of this nest.

how deep is your love?

The opening sequence to the movie Up in the Air was worth the price of admission. Google Earth has made the virtual traveling done by us map-geeks so rich that it reduces the curiosity to visit some places. Alas, as with most things virtual, we forget the power of the real deal. Viewing the ever-closer landscape of my birth during descent in a plane evoked a core feeling of home-ness. As I gazed at the woodlands and prairie around O'Hare Airport, 30 years of walking communion with my beloved San Francisco fell away to a siren-song from home. How deep is the home bond rooted in the terrain itself? 
David Abrams wrote about poet Gary Snyder driving with an Australian Pintubi man named Jimmy Tjungurrayi to his ancestral territory in a pickup. Being on site was necessary to collect ancient & living stories from Tjungurrayi's culture. Driving through a particularly rich location, the fellow began to recall events unintelligibly fast, like a tape at high speed. No one could understand him. Everyone was frustrated. Eventually they realized the tale was SO linked with footsteps on specific terrain that they would have to slow the vehicle to walking speed for the story to be comprehensible.

the squeeze

Maybe it's a sex thing or a childbirth thing, but early on in my schematic design experience,  I got the idea that the entry experience should be a kind of squeeze, a tightness before you get to where you're going in a space. Not just a visual portal, but a time-sensitive transitional experience long enough to give "entry" its own experience, perhaps to lend relief to its end. Not every project can spatially afford this (think Ben & Jerry shop), but it has been fun to try and interject and illustrate this element in projects. I was reminded of the squeeze during a recent trip through airport security and started to wonder: just how long has probing, wanding, multiple ID verification and the possibility of a pat-down or body-cavity search been a prelude to travel?  What a squeeze on the front end of a trip! It makes the anonymity and indifferent solitude of exiting the plane and the airport liberating. When I get home my dog will kiss me. It was kind of depressing to learn that dogs, a little like an insecure spouse, only do that to check what the missus was eating while away.

road memoir#3

Leaving Arizona on US 93 brought us down to Black Canyon, an area that, save for the Colorado River at its bottom, is seemingly all rock and bereft of water. It's so close to the expanding basin-and-range province that one is easily disoriented by the pull of seismically-warped gravity. It just feels different there. We crossed over the Hoover Dam, an ambitious engineering design built under extraordinarily brutal economic and climatic circumstances. In this desolate corner, how celebrated can such a structure be? Can something requiring such calculation and cooperation be an unembellished industrial object? Or is it crafted to make our spirits soar? We crossed over and sketched for a while from a pullout halfway up from the dam road. I was a goner! I made this drawing and swore to come back and draw the whole thing, inside and out. The next year I did.

road memoir #2

Elevation/defense. We scramble to a hole in a high wall to get away from danger. We build walls as monuments to our separateness, our vulnerability, our superiority, their madness, their sociopathy. I wondered what forces carved the shapes out, the forces that create Negative Space. The picture got really big for me, and the time line was geologic. (took years to follow up on that) In the meantime, we noted how things were not really so empty. There was the Desert Version of everything:

road memoir #1

 A friend and I met in Phoenix for a Western road trip in the early 80s. Here are my best shots of his Heitzness. He had a pickup, sketchbook, knife and movie camera. I had an SX70, sketchbook and garlic press. He possessed exquisite visual filters which recharged at the Flintstone Motel and fed on reptilian souvenirs. I hadn't yet marked spatial relations as my turf, but curiously, the most potent stops for me had everything to do with elevation, horizon line and engineering.