Category: Architecture & Design
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Everything Changes: Shooting the Domtar Lands
Since mid-winter, I’ve had the pleasure of photographing the Domtar lands with a team of volunteers from the Workers History Museum in Ottawa. Windmill Development Group, Inc. is poised to re-develop the land which has been home to pulp and paper giants E.B. Eddy and Domtar since 1891. Because of the placement of the buildings, there isn’t much… Read more
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William H. Whyte, People-Watcher
William H. Whyte (October 1, 1917 — January 12, 1999) was an American urbanist, organizational analyst, journalist and people-watcher. ((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Whyte)) While working with the New York City Planning Commission in 1969, Whyte began to use direct observation to describe behavior in urban settings. Employing still cameras, movie cameras, and notebooks, Whyte described the substance of urban public life in an… Read more
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What a Fleurt
Excerpt from A Tale of Two Hotels: The Gladstone (Part 1), November 2011 We were lodged in Room 303, the Red Room (or the ‘REDRUM’ as I joked in my best Jack Nicholson voice), designed by Kate Austin and Kristin Ledgett of RUCKUS. It was, all at once, intimate, stylish and homey… In a strange small-world occurrence on Friday, I… Read more
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Winnipeg: Stuck in the Middle
A couple of days ago I posted a piece trumpeting Winnipeg’s virtues and shortly after this appeared: https://twitter.com/HolmesDoug/status/525013976028311552 Of course I dove into winnipeglovehate.com, and discovered the book Stuck in the Middle: Dissenting Views of Winnipeg, photographed and written by the dynamic duo of Bryan Scott and Bartley Kives. Thanks to the miracle of strangers on the internet… Read more
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Winnipeg is the Most Interesting City
Over dinner last week in Manhattan I declared to our three local hosts that Winnipeg is The Most Interesting City in Canada. They appeared politely skeptical as I tried to explain. I’ve written about the city before here, here, here, here, and here, praising it up one side and down the other. I can easily list the qualities I… Read more
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The Color of Water
What a deceptively simple way to capture the colors of a seasonally changing river in an historic/site-specific installation. Not that I hadn’t walked this portion of the High Line before, it just took a fourth go to stop me in my tracks. I might have to try this at home with my own river… ************ The River That Flows Both… Read more
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The Splendiferous Redpath Museum Montreal
A shrunken head. Mummies. Dinosaur bones. An anaconda skeleton. Shells the size of a child’s head. A life-sized origami Pterodactyl. A gorilla guarding the staircase. With nearly three million objects spanning natural history, ethnology and mineralogy, the Redpath Museum Montreal is the ultimate Victorian curio cabinet. The first purpose-built museum in Canada, it was commissioned by Peter Redpath and opened in 1882… Read more
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Tyndall Stone: Hidden in Plain Sight
A few weeks back I was taking my morning coffee on the expansive patio of a friend’s house in Winnipeg. My bare feet had graced this space a number of times, but I had not, until just then, grasped the obvious: I was walking on fossils – a LOT of fossils – which are 450 million years… Read more
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Bethesda Terrace’s Magical Minton Ceiling
Like other great cities, New York is a museum unto itself. It is possible to visit and never set foot inside any building – save for your hotel – and come away filled to the aesthetic brim. It’s all eye candy: the people, the architecture, the street art, the signs of wear, seasonal changes, the movement of everything, the… Read more
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I Want What I Want
I want what I want. This will be my epitaph when they lay me to rest. This is both a boon and the bane of my existence. I argue it’s not about stubbornness or pride, it’s about a never-ending curiosity that expands daily, tugging in all directions. The more I look, the more I see.… Read more