Update on Good Shape

More like "good form"

Here's a revealing comment by Christopher Alexander:

[F]orms must arise that come from the technology and economics and social circumstances of that era. So that if one sets out a program where you're essentially sort of copying old forms in any version, you're liable to be in a hell of a lot of trouble...But [people] don't know what to do about it...And I think that it is necessary to spend time - I would say major amounts of time - thinking only about form and geometry. Thinking about the language of form that is appropriate now.

This puts a lot of things into perspective, which I had only subconsciously understood until now.

Almost all of my colleagues, professors and acquaintances in the art and design fields seem to be stuck on this search for "the language of form that is appropriate now."

Hence:
- The name "experimental" for the avant-garde group of current filmmakers, of which I was a member for a few years. There was (is) great emphasis on finding new techniques, and even branching into non-film media such as digital and computerized manipulations. Thus calling themselves "experimental."

- A recent bizarre project by fellow board-member (at a post I had at Trinity Square Video), whom I posted about here, who uses jello to simulate water in a fountain. In trying to find a new way to design fountains, she tried to redesign the water instead!

- A textile "artist" who has been experimenting with the very ugly, thick - in all aspects - fiber felt to try and come up with sculptural elements. The problem is that felt is not solid, unless stuffed. Trying to find this intrinsic sculptural element in a non-sculptural material hinders the real emphasis. Which should be representing the object itself.

- Textile designer Looolo makes biodegradable, organic and toxin-free home accessories. The simple pillows range from a steep $100-$150. The price is for the dubious material. Design not included. Also, biodegradable fabric! Isn't the idea that it last as long as possible, and not get tossed in the green bin when a little worn? And aren't cotton, silk and wool naturally biodegradable?

What's going wrong here?

As film theorist Siegfried Kracauer quotes avant-garde filmmaker Jacques Brunius: "The cinema [of the avant-garde] is the least realistic of arts."

This holds true for the three examples I've given above. In the single-minded effort to find "the language of form that is appropriate now", these designers, artists and filmmakers have given up on reality!

It's as simple as that.

There is something noble in this experimental, almost scientific, attempt at finding the right form. But, I think where they are made their fundamental error is in their disengagement with reality. Form comes from the real world. Trying to find form without the real will only give us deflating sculptures and giant jello for water.

Left: Chung-Im Kim's undecipherable object (worm, horn, shell, ice cream cone?)
made with sewn pieces of felt with a hollow inside.
One clutch and the object is flattened

Right: Gwen Macgregor's "Pool." Water made from jello as part of an "installation"
project with wading pools. Even the project is misdirected, looking at the pools
instead of the structures. The kids don't look too much like they're enjoying themselves.

Looolo pillows:
Left, "Fly" at $140; Center, "Janthur" at $190; Right, "Windows" at $140

The Fly and Janthur pillows defy leaning back on their irregular surface. Isn't that what pillows are for? And design is wanting in the Windows series.

Ten second preview of Bruce Elder's experimental film "The Young Prince"

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Good Shape

Why it matters in design

I am in the middle of reading architect Christopher Alexander's epic four volume work entitled: The Nature of Order describing how recent (he actually dates this from 400 years ago) man-made environments have alienated man from himself, from his surroundings and from nature.

We only have to look at the atrocious modern architecture (and designs) to realize it. Here is my favorite worst:
The new ROM extension - again. (It will never go away)

The book is really a treatise for all designers and artists, and not just architects.

Basically, a good shape is composed of simple, elementary shapes. He cites the following that he has discovered to be building blocks to a good shape:

Square, line segment, arrowhead, hook, triangle, row of dots, circle, rosette, diamond, s-shape, half circle, stars, steps, cross, waves, spiral, tree, octagon.

Here's an example of a bad shape:


With its amorphous, unsimplistic and undefined elemental shapes:


And how a design of a flower can actually be composed of elementary squares, triangles, diamonds, making the overall shape into a good one.


The two bad shapes feel like they have no balance. It feels like the chair would topple you off as soon as you sit on it, and the ROM extension will collapse on you as soon as you pass under it.

Here's Alexander's wonder at a simple, sturdy, and as he calls it beautiful good shape of a simple Japanese teapot stand:

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Update On Urban Development Keeps on Going...

How Ryerson University envisions the future

Basically, it is glass, glass and more glass. (Read the blog entry here.)
The glass look planned for the downtown area on Yonge street and on campus

The plan for the Image Arts building, right, and the already constructed Centre for Computing and Engineering


Seattle Central Library

President Levy wants the new library extension to resemble the "modern" Seattle Central Library which was designed by one of those glamor architects, Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands.

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Urban Development Keeps On Going And Going

And how universities are scrambling for the spoils
Statue of Eggerton Ryerson
Founder of Ryerson University

Ryerson University is touted as the "down-town" University of the city of Toronto. The Ryerson campus is expected to receive $210 million over 20 years to dramatically expand the campus. So far, $45 million have been promised by the provincial government. This 20-year project hopes to fund itself both through public and private monies.

A lot of this rationale for this expansion comes from increased student applications, which rose by 20% since last year, and which are expected to spiral up in the upcoming years. The school currently has about 20,000 full time students, and expects this to at least quadruple.

Since this a blog that deals with art, culture and society, I will focus on:
- Architects
- How the aesthetics of Toronto's landscape is changing for the worse
- Multiculturalism

Architects:

I don't have a great deal of respect for contemporary architects as I've outlined here, here, here, here and here.

No less than four architects are now part of the Ryerson campus expansion, with more surely to join the fray in the future. The lucrative deal between university and architects (funded by public funds and generous wealthy private donors - individual or corporate) is not to be take lightly.

Urban aesthetics:

One of my most poignant posts was when I noticed a beautiful three-storey building along Gerrard street across from the Ryerson campus proper, and decided to reproduce it in charcoal and pastel. To my dismay, about a year later, this building was being demolished to what I presumed would become a high rise building.

Well, I was right in that it would be a several-storied building. But, the ultimate irony is that it belongs to Ryerson, who built it as accommodation for its students.

Multiculturalism, which I will now call Immigration:

Much of my reasoning to explain the drive for urban development and expansions comes from information provided by blogger Dispatches from the Hogtown Front, and his detailed analysis as to why Toronto's downtown skyscrapers are flourishing.

Succinctly, his point is: immigration. The city of Toronto receives about 1000,000 new immigrants, mostly from India, China and other Asian countries, a year.

And they have to live somewhere, and go to school somewhere.

The president of Ryerson, Sheldon Levy, also commented in an interview that it is immigration which will bring this unprecedented increase in student number.

Hence, Ryerson's ambitious plan to cater for this "growing number of students" by its spectacular development projects, all in all costing upwards of $200 million.

I will later on elaborate on the consequences of this urban development scheme fueled by high levels of immigrants from Asiatic countries, many of them also Muslims.

Addendum:

I should add that the most authentic, and deserving expansion comes from my alma mater department of Image Arts, where the Photography Gallery and Research Center is to house the famous Black Star Historical Black & White Photography Collection which was donated to the department. This has nothing to do with accommodating the latest governmental policy on population regulation, but on the hard work, wise connections and academic excellence which the department has fostered.

That is why universities should expand, and not as boxes to refuge students who have unexpectedly inundated their campuses.

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Cross-Cultural Influences

Moorish Revival, with a twist

I've consistently said that Canadians are either very naive or deeply irresponsible. A recent article I came across from Spacing Toronto entitled Toronto meets Marrakesh leads me to think that the sin lies in irresponsibility.

The online blog, which is part of a print edition, describes itself thus:

Spacing Toronto is your hub for daily dispatches from the streets of Toronto to cities around the world, offering both analysis and a forum for discussion. Our contributors examine city hall, architecture, urban planning, public transit, transportation infrastructure and just about anything that involves the public realm of our cities.

Clearly a blog and magazine that tries to understand the urban landscape of cities across Canada.

But, the writer of Toronto Meets Marrakesh, Thomas Wicks, is incapable of differentiating between a benign, and even flourishing, urban landscape, and that which is endangered.

European and American artists have always had a fascination for foreign cultures, from African masks, to Chinese ceramics to exotic "Moorish" styles. Often, they lived in these cultures for some time, or spent years traveling back and forth, while borrowing from and being inspired by their alien friends.

Still, the bottom line has always been that they never transformed their societies with these strange and foreign elements. Whatever they brought, somehow and not always tidily, fit into their European or American environments.

Wicks' great description of the Toronto landscape of the early 20th century, when there was a general Moorish Revival through architecture, art and design, shows that many of these elements (they were actually very few) somehow blended in, albeit a little incongruously, with the rest of the city, and Toronto went on being Toronto, and nothing fundamental changed.

Yet, Wicks' attempt to favorably compare the latest "Moorish" incursion with the original one is completely erroneous and dangerous.

There is no Moorish Re-Revival. There are no artists and architects who, enchanted by these faraway lands, tried to bring a little of that exoticism back to their hometown.

What we have now is actual "Moors" right here, who are adamant about changing the landscape to fit their world view. They are not building mosques and minarets as quaint additions to a northern city, but as buildings which will transform this city. There will not be one or two buildings dispersed here and there, but whole regions which will be under the visual and aural spell of this new landscape.

Wicks appears to be a regular writer for Spacing Toronto. I hold him responsible for his myopia and wrong analogies, since he appears to be a professional. He will be directly responsible for the innocent bystander who will have to hear chants five times daily from the minaret that was built just across his home. And even if he moves to another place, a new one is sure to rise up again.

Canadians are certainly not naive. They have ample evidence, information and proof. They are ultimately profoundly irresponsible to their society, their environment and their landscape.

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Collapsing Architecture

The warning signs of Toronto's latest architectural addition

The new Royal Ontario Museum's (ROM) extension sits on the narrow curb of Bloor street as if ready to fall on the innocent pedestrians. Its architect, Daniel Libeskind, who also started the Twin Towers memorial, but later on had to cede the design to another architect for fear of an unstable structure, has been very buoyant during his interviews about his new Toronto structure.

The new Royal Ontario Museum exterior

The new Royal Ontario Museum interior

Interviewer: Your addition is radically different from the existing ROM building. Along with the praise, you’ve heard lots of criticism of it.

Daniel Libeskind: When the Eiffel Tower was built, it was condemned universally. But what would Paris be without the Eiffel Tower?

Libeskind hubristic response equating the Eiffel Tower with the new ROM extension is not even correct. The Eiffel Tower was built in the spirit of triumph, celebrating the one hundred years of the French Revolution and man's perceived victory against fate, at least the fate of ordained Kings and serfdoms, by lofty (if misguided) ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. It was also an ode to the science and technology, and the achievements of the industrial age.

What has Libeskind's convoluted structure to offer? Libeskind's consistent response is that his buildings are "different" and "progressive." That's it, according to him. That's their value.

But there is another undeclared layer that Libeskind is not articulating. Either he doesn't really know it, or is too clever to mention it. His buildings all convey destruction, the opposite of architecture. But why is that? I think primarily because of uncertainty. Libeskind has no principles to build on. Liberty, equality, science, centennials? None of these words figure in his interviews. Instead abstract and empty ones like "different" and "radical" describe much of his intentions.

Libeskind is essentially a nihilist. And since art is always the projector of its creator's thinkings, his buildings emerge as potentially (imminently) crumbling edifices. And his interiors are no different. There is a sense of claustrophobic despair inside his structures, as though the wall are about to fold in. In fact that was one of the strongest criticisms of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, another of his buildings on the verge of collapse.

Whenever architects and artists distort our structures to the point of collapse, I believe that danger is nearby. This was what happened just before the horror of the Nazis. German filmmakers were making their own nightmarish films, and claustrophobic buildings about to cave in figured prominently in their stage sets. But there was at least a sense of awareness of impending doom by the German filmmakers. They chose, unwisely, to deal with it in metaphorical terms. Libeskind, on the other hand, keeps cheerfully giving interviews about the renaissance of Toronto, with, of course, his exemplary contribution.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Robert Wiene, 1920. Exterior and interior scenes

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Priez Pour Nous et Pour les Musulmans

Notre Dame d'Afrique

Notre Dame d'Afrique across the Mediterranean from
Notre Dame de la Garde

During their colonization period in Algeria, the French built the Basilica Notre Dame d'Afrique in Algiers. Miraculously, the place still stands, and is still used as a place of worship for Catholic Algerians. The Church lies at the northern coastline of Algiers, and is thought to be a complement to the Notre Dame de la Garde across the Mediterranean in Marseilles.

Religion is a combination of tradition, architecture, geography and symbolism. And the French Catholics were susceptible to all of them when transferring their Catholicism to Algeria.

The statue of Mary in Notre Dame d'Afrique has fine Caucasian features, but is ebony black. The reasoning has to be that this metaphorically black Madonna would be a gateway into the rest of Africa at this point of entry, and act as an incentive for and a familiar guard over her new converts. It is also a clear indication that Algerian and French Catholics are two different peoples.

The positioning of the Basilica is also very important. As a new church, facing the hill-top Notre Dame de la Garde across the Mediterranean would give Notre Dame d'Afrique the support and the protection (and the prayers) from her mature brethren in Christ from across the sea.

Finally, the French modeled the Basilica after the Byzantine Eastern churches, which influenced the great domed mosques of the Ottoman period, who took their example from Constantinople's Hagia Sophia. Mosaics, also a feature borrowed by mosques from the Byzantines, figures both inside and outside Notre Dame d'Afrique. Thus this north African church, in the land of the Muslims, who wished to draw them into her interior, wouldn't be so strange and alien in her Islamic surroundings.

And what an interior, with the prayer: "Notre Dame d'Afrique pray for us and the Muslims" written across nave facing the alter. And what a difference from Constantinople's Hagia Sophia, which after being converted into a Mosque by the Ottomans, now bears Islamic calligraphy plates which cover Christian images.

God helped the French to build the perfect church in Notre Dame d'Afrique. The proof is that it she still standing and performing her rites.

The Interior of Notre Dame d'Afrique with the mosaics,
the Black Madonna and the inscription "Prier pour nous
et pour les Musulmans"

[Click images to see a larger versions]

To get more information on the French presence in Algeria, Gallia Watch covers it along with several posts on Sarkozy's trip to Algeria, and also mentions Notre Dame d'Afrique at this post.

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Toronto's Latest Casualty

To urban "development"

This lovely house



which became my inspiration for this rendition



and later on this repeat pattern design



became yet another casualty in the Toronto architectural landscape sometime last summer.



And just as I predicted, a condo-style building is rising up to accommodate all those mystery tenants, and progress is going fine, as of September 2007.



I've blogged about it, and those suspicious new tenants here.

Funny how intuition works sometimes. I wonder who will thank me for making a historical record

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Conceptual Art

An arrogant snub




Conceptual Art is art where the idea matters more than the actual piece of work. The artist doesn't require any skill in the traditions of drawing, painting or sculpting, and rearranges objects to fit a concept - or an idea.

My whole critique of conceptual art would be too long for a blog posting. Suffice to say that it irritates me endlessly. Although I "get" it each and every time, I can never make art (or design) with such criteria, because really, my mind doesn't work that way. I feel that I would be cheating myself, and whomever sees my humble efforts, by using mental jig-saw puzzles to put my artistic projects across.

I also find contemporary conceptual artists to be cold and indifferent to the public despite the inordinate amount of time they spend to come up with "public art". This is very clear to me with a contemporary "artist" Gwen MacGregor, who recently used giant jello cubes to fill up a "public space" - a fountain, in this case.

There is something creepy about wading through jello cubes, of the very type that you might eat as dessert one of these days. I'm quite sure that the young children walked through it with trepidation, and it is only the adults who were gleefully amused.




The shortcoming is of course that MacGregor can never design a real fountain, either as a two-dimensional painting or drawing, or as an architectural piece. So, her "concept" becomes the art of the gimmick. And an arrogant snub.

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Foundations

I Corinthians 3:11-17


A message for all walks of life.

11For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, 13each man's work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man's work. 14If any man's work which he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward. 15If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire. 16Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? 17If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him, for the temple of God is holy, and that is what you are.

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The Errant Architect

In search of the concrete


The National Assembly Building in Dacca Bangladesh, by Louis Kahn

Is architecture the last frontier?

Any self-serving, "artistic" architect can have his day in the field. Once his buildings have been commissioned by the "in crowd", and built, they are there to last. And hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people will get to visit these "emperor has no clothes" structures.

Paintings, on the other hand, go to the single individuals, albeit at exorbitant prices, and no-one else need see them ever again.

So, this is the ultimate conceit of these modern architects. It is a means of forcefully interjecting into society their inner drives and inconclusive ideas.

I think that is why they are such globe-trotters. They cannot commit to a local style, where eventually the inhabitants will demand a building they can relate to.

By shifting geography constantly, they can dot the world's landscape with their inner musings, until they either get rejected, or find another location and move on.

This was how Louis Kahn lived.

His last piece that was built, having taken close to 20 years from design to finished structure, was unsurprisingly in South Asia.

The formidable fort-like National Assembly Building in Bangladesh is another one of those buildings which bear absolutely no relation to the geography, culture and I would venture to say, even the aesthetics of that country.

I would have thought the Bangladeshi would have had more insight than bringing in another foreigner (haven't they been through that already?) to dictate one of the most important buildings of their country.

The National Assembly is where democratic decisions are made, at least in theory. Yet, looking at this building, what comes to mind is a prison.

But then, what we choose is a symptom of who we are. Perhaps it is in the psyche of the Bangladeshi, and let's be fair, of all us modern people, to accept submissively these buildings that get tossed out at us.

Kahn collapsed in a bathroom in New York's Penn Station, and his body was not identified for three days. He had just returned from a trip to India.


The Interior of the National Assembly in Dacca Bangladesh

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Self-expressing Architects

The Turning Torso

Architecture these days seems to be a balancing act, literally.


Toronto's new Royal Ontario Museum

The new Royal Ontario Museum, to be completed in June 2007 (I had last posted that it would have been in January 2007) is one of the latest examples.

Architects these days juggle between engineering, artistic and functional roles. But, they hold on to the artistic the most. And true to modern traditions, that means primarily self-expression.


The Turning Torso

The Turning Torso, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, is supposed to represent the twisting human body from a drawing that he made. It took four years to complete and was millions (of Swedish currency, I presume) over budget.

In the end, the building looks as incongruous as the new ROM, and just as unstable.

So, what is behind this rush of strange and daunting buildings? I believe it is a disconnection between the architect and his environment, as both the ROM and the Torso testify, and as I wrote in these earlier posts on a number of other buildings.

Geography is of paramount importance in all the arts. Once we start ignoring the reality of our surroundings, what else do we have left but our imaginations? Then any twisted shape and form can take over our buildings.

In a later blog, I will write about one of the most important and spectacular examples of how geography influenced architecture, down to the perfect last stone.

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Commerce over Spirit

The New Royal Ontario Museum Extension


The Crystal addition
[All images can be clicked to view larger ones]

Architects these days are spending an inordinate amount of energy building delicate glass structures. And Daniel Libeskind, chosen for the ROM project, already had a dubious attempt at designing one.

He somehow got unofficially elected to build the “Freedom Tower” where the World Trade Center once stood. But his design later appeared so unstable that a second architect - David Childs - was put in charge to solidify it.



Original Freedom Tower design..............New Freedom Tower design

The Crystal at the ROM will have no such problems. Libeskind opted for sturdy rather than delicate. I would have called it “The Tank”, like Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. Libeskind is cultivating some kind of tradition, after all. But unlike the Freedom Tower whose faulty structure only architects could see, we the public will forever wonder if these discombobulated cubes will cave in on us.

I’m astonished that the Berliner Jews allowed their sacred, Biblical sign to be so irreverently disfigured. Libeskind’s various slits for windows are parts and pieces of the lines that make the disjointed Star of David.


Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin

There is no concern for the sacred when designing the ROM extension. But should there be? I don’t know what it is with architects in Toronto. Diamond (of the Toronto Opera House fame) complained about lack of funds, when it is more likely a lack of talent. What is Libeskind’s excuse? I must conclude that at the heart of it is a propensity for selling himself, covering up the real problem which is once again a scarcity of artistic ability. Testament to this is his Freedom Tower debacle.

And it’s not only Toronto that is short-changed. One of the finalists for the New York project came up with a spiralling set of glass towers. The simple symbolics of two towers (joined in the middle) spiralling upwards, with light emitting into the dark heavens above (carrying the souls of the departed?), would have surely garnered the appreciation and thanks of New Yorkers and visitors.


Design by finalists Frederic Schwartz and Rafael Vinoly
from THINK Designs

The THINK blueprint was the original recommendation by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Instead, Libeskind’s salesmanship won the show. And he offered New York a faulty tower that's unable to carry the ghosts of the departed to their rightful place.

Once again, his ulterior motive becomes apparent. Salesmanship is easier than spirituality.

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Our Own Private Opera House

Toronto's Four Seasons Center for the Performing Arts



Architect columnist for the Toronto Star, Christopher Hume, described the new Toronto Opera House (known as The Four Seasons Center for the Performing Arts, after the famous hotel of the same name, whose owner was a big donor) as "at least Le Corbusier would have approved".

Perhaps he means the famous Corbusier domino house prototype “Maison Dom-Ino” depicting tall vertical structures as “machines for living”. Or he may mean the functional low-income housing designs Corbusier initiated – now notorious for those French suburban Muslims who set off the riots last year.




Top: Dom-Ino Designs by Corbusier; Bottom Clichy Sous Bois low income houseing (HLM)

Or, in the ever-expanding lines of influence, perhaps the Toronto designer, Jack Diamond, did have a real, French Opera House in mind. But, it is likely the more recent Opera de la Bastille (which always reminded me of a giant swimming pool interior), not the grand old dame which Parisians still keep dear to their heart.





In any case, aesthetics and grandeur were not on the agenda. And what is opera without that?

Diamond talks about lack of funds in making some of his decisions. He also describes his desire for the building to blend in with the surroundings (to the extent that the back of the building resembles a
warehouse!).

But, I somehow think it was more of a lack of skill, coupled with a lack of imagination. Look at the environmentally attuned, beautiful Sydney Opera House.


Top: Opera de la Bastille; Middle: Opera National de Paris; Bottom: Sydney Opera House

But, if there is ever an equivalent center that is both modern and dignified, it is surely the Lincoln Center, which didn’t sacrifice anything for the sake of functionality and modernity.

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Preserving Memory

But is that enough?


Repeat Pattern for textile or
wallpaper print of "Lilac Bush"

One of the many ways that we can remember things is by making records of them. By pure chance, I had made a record of the the building from my previous post before it got demolished.

I'm not sure what will replace this building, probably a high rise since the neighboring building is one too.

There has been a construction spree going on throughout the downtown. Blogger Dispatches from the Hogtown Front talks about the skyscraperization of Toronto, at least the downtown part. His point is that it is probably increased levels of immigration that is fueling this rapid increase in development.

Although Hogtown Front mostly talks about the encroachment into green areas, where farmland and delicate natural sanctuaries are being destroyed, how different is that from demolishing attractive, sturdy buildings of some historical significance?

Geography and culture are being eroded for the sake of accommodating people from miles away with no compassion, understanding or even love for the real Canada.

I think the issues are more subtle than urban sprawl caused by immigration. Unlike ever before, new immigrants are transforming the symbols of this country into things totally alien to any of the residents here. Even within the diverse immigrant population, these symbols are not interchangeable. What we’re witnessing is replacement not for the better, but by the different, and in many cases for the worse.

Well, my small part has been to inadvertently record this, and what better way than as a textile design, full of the comfort, texture and tradition of cloth.

A larger part will take some thought.

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Lilac Memories

An early intuition



I was struck by this beautiful stone house late last spring. There were a lot of contrasts that attracted me: the light grey walls with the dark outlines around the windows, the lilac bush's spontaneity and curvature alongside the rigid architecture of the building, the swirls under the balconies contrasted with the railings. Besides, it looked like a great study on dark charcoal drawing against a more colorful pastel palette.

After taking numerous photos, at various angles, I managed to come up with this cropping that seemed to work.



Here is the end result.



Yet, this year, while I walked along the street (Gerrard Street, just blocks away from Yonge), I came to this shocking discovery! The house was being demolished. And the beautiful lilac trees were gone.



I guess you can call it an early intuition. But, I'm very glad I took the time to make some kind of recorded memory of this understatedly beautiful house and its lovely lilac trees.

Makes one wonder though, who gets to decide which building stays, and which one goes. I assume that the empty space will soon be filled by a bland high rise.

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