A beautiful view of Saturday's sunset, from the Greenpoint waterfront.
Statue in the sky
This fellow well presides over Grand Central.
The Voice Tunnel
Next Saturday's your last chance to see Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's light and sound installation, Voice Tunnel , for Summer Streets. The experience is disarming and a little chaotic, with a chorus of recordings made by visitors being piped from 150 speakers that ring out in time to flickering arches of light. Still, it's well worth stopping by; afterward, head uptown to the Guggenheim for more light works at the museum's James Turrell show.
Word on the street
Someone in Midtown is looking toward the future with a glimmer of excitement.
Across the water
I stumbled across Peter Detmold Park in Midtown East the other day; it's a hidden gem. What a beautiful view of the river and of the Queensboro Bridge.
Fruitful
Outside a market in Woodside, a dazzling array of oranges, apples, pears, mangos, and what have you.
Flora of the Sierra
Thistle, lavender, leaves, and other flora of the mountains.
Folded newspapers
Who says print is dead?
On the road in the Central Valley
Just a few snapshots from an otherwise mundane drive, crawling from Sacramento up past Sonora: the blue skies atop yellowed plains and rolling hills are summer embodied.
Le Corbusier's landscapes
In hopes of dancing through the Rain Room, we headed to MoMA a few weekends ago. But not being people overly fond of waiting in line for more than four hours, we decided to check out another exhibit instead: Le Corbusier, An Atlas of Modern Landscapes, which will run through September 23.
This is MoMA's first major exhibit of the work of Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), curated by Jean-Louis Cohen; it "[encompasses] his work as an architect, interior designer, artist, city planner, writer, and photographer ... [and] reveals the ways in which Le Corbusier observed and imagined landscapes throughout his career, using all the artistic techniques at his disposal, from his early watercolors of Italy, Greece, and Turkey, to his sketches of India, and from the photographs of his formative journeys to the models of his large-scale projects."
Although Le Corbusier's architecture is examined in depth, it was some of his earliest works and his loosest sketched plans that I found most intriguing; being primarily acquainted with how his work has translated into the modern city of Chandigarh, it offered an intimacy and a closeness that I hadn't associated with, say, the Capitol Complex or his towering Open Hand. (They're also a far cry from his later theorizing on the Modulor, so regimented and orderly a system.)
Going back to his youth or the beginnings of his career offers a different view of his vision, glimpses of the world captured in pastel or ink as he passed through different places. For instance, a mountain study in watercolor and gouache from 1904-05:
Or consider silhouettes of Istanbul, from 1911, in haunting blues; trees and reflections on water at Tène, from 1915-16; or a 1917 seaside landscape, light washes of color lapping against the horizon.
His 1908 landscape with flowers and fields, too, is a treasure:
Images from the Jean-Louis Cohen book published to accompany the exhibition.
Up in the mountains
Spent a bit of time in the Sierra Nevada last week, where cabins hide among the trees and the sky is a clear, true blue.
Sierra sunset
The view from a trail in Confidence, the sun sinking beyond the trees.
