Red Lodge, Montana, my father’s hometown, was a booming, raucous place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following the discovery of coal in upper Rock Creek Valley in 1866, Finnish, Scottish, Welsh, and Italian immigrants – my great-grandfather and his family included – converged there, sustained by the mines that brought workers out… Read more »
We’re coming to the end of daffodil season in Seattle. Everywhere I go, the flowers have been announcing spring, trumpeting forth the news with their proud center coronas and blaze of yellow. It took me a long time to see something more than the daffodil’s bold color and message of seasonal change. These perennial flowers… Read more »
“America’s identity lies in its open spaces, the space of possibility, but also of speed, movement, and unobstructed will.” – Rebecca Solnit, “The Desert: Scapeland,” As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, page 87 I grew up mostly ignorant of football. My Dad would listen to it on the radio occasionally,… Read more »
Last week, a new pope was selected from among his cardinal colleagues. He is the first Jesuit to assume the position, the first pope from Latin America, and the first to choose Francis as his papal name. Saint Francis, namesake to former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, is something of an anomaly in the… Read more »
In November, Bank of America launched a virtual exhibition, sometimes accessible from the homepage of its website, called Bearing Witness: Documentary Photography of the 1930s. Composed of works from the Bank of America Collection, the show highlights American photography made during the Great Depression. The images present both rural and urban scenes. Figures, many of… Read more »
A few weeks back, I heard a geographer speak as part of a panel about women and the urban environment. She said she’s often asked about the nature of her discipline. In response, she said she talks about thinking about space as structuring human relationships. She talks about how the city has a geography, home has… Read more »
Paris, in April, was teeming with people: spring break tourists queuing up to see the famous sights and the politically passionate, or perhaps just paid, papering its telephone poles with images of and messages from politicians who would meet their fates in the elections just after we left. The elegant Museé de la Chasse et… Read more »
Last month at the Reykjavik Art Museum in Iceland, I saw exhibitions devoted to the careers of two Spanish artists: Antoni Tàpies and Santiago Sierra. Divided by two generations and chosen mediums and subjects, Tàpies and Sierra nonetheless share a basic preoccupation with human bodies. Before he passed away earlier this year, Tàpies built up layers… Read more »
When we talk about someone being unable to see the forest for the trees, the characterization is disparaging. We represent this hapless person as overcome by a mass of detail and lacking the means to perceive the organizing pattern that binds constituent parts. But I like to get a little lost now and again in… Read more »
On this day of love, relationship advice from UCLA architectural historian and theorist Sylvia Lavin to architecture and contemporary art: “‘To be one with’ may make a nice romantic fantasy, but ‘to be two with’ makes more profound politics. And possibly more gratifying as well. When kissing and enmeshed, architecture is surprised into responding, made… Read more »