Beautiful Structures
Previously I started a discussion called "Beautiful Things." So, I'd like to start a similar thread with pictures of structures. Primarily beautiful or well designed ones, but craptacular ones are welcome. Houses, skyscrapers, bridges, communities, churches, warehouses, government buildings, ruins.... Beautiful (or egregious) architecture, engineering, decoration.
I live in a formerly industrial town in Massachusetts. Driving around, I see evidence of that history. New England comes as close as anywhere in the US, except for former Spanish colonies and some American Indian pueblos, to being old. I particularly love bridges. The railroad came through this town in 1848. Here are some of my favorite bridges and a tunnel. As you can see, the rails have been removed and a rail trail built. It is a bit controversial, partly because adding safety railing is not very aesthetically pleasing. I understand the sentiment, but, as an engineer, seeing the structures reused makes up for that.
I live in a formerly industrial town in Massachusetts. Driving around, I see evidence of that history. New England comes as close as anywhere in the US, except for former Spanish colonies and some American Indian pueblos, to being old. I particularly love bridges. The railroad came through this town in 1848. Here are some of my favorite bridges and a tunnel. As you can see, the rails have been removed and a rail trail built. It is a bit controversial, partly because adding safety railing is not very aesthetically pleasing. I understand the sentiment, but, as an engineer, seeing the structures reused makes up for that.
Comments (62)
Incan architecture. Machu Piccu:
By Martin St-Amant (S23678) (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Cusco:
By Martin St-Amant (S23678) (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Partial building front, Thailand. Took it the other day. Three people liked it on Instagram so it must be awesome. That aside, I find these types of structure both craptacular and fantabulous.
Are these all also both egregious and wonderful?
Do they come under the heading of "vernacular architecture," buildings that might be commonplace or ugly by themselves but which contribute to the character of their neighborhood?
The first one is part of a relatively new business district in Southern Ningbo (Actually, they have a building there that looks very like the Chrysler building in NY. It's funny how from nothing, these places spring up). Anyway, fairly typical new China and well-integrated into its own mini-neighbourhood. I just liked the lines from that angle. The second one is the back of a more traditional restaurant (as far as I remember). A bit more character to it, and I liked the colour. The last one is an art gallery or museum or something along those lines nearer the centre of the city. Certainly one of the better designed newer buildings and it caught my eye for that reason. There's nothing particularly special about any of them.
Yeah, but when you compare the total number of followers to likes, you're like a quantum Kardashian.
Does it need to be manmade? I love seeing places like this...
My new female alias. Love it. :100:
As long as it's in the spirit.
That's Mt. Olivet Methodist Church on the right. I was an acolyte there - sort of a low-rent alter boy. I was Senior Patrol Leader of the Boy Scout troop that met in the basement.
My grandparents lived about an hour away on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
The town was always a mix of very rich people, very poor people, watermen, and farmers. I was born in the hospital there while my mother was living with my father's parents while he was in Germany in the Army. Here's another town on the Eastern Shore where my wife and I were married.
I love the way buildings sit in small towns, usually none standing out too much but all fitting together. Everywhere I've been I've seen these types of towns. I especially like the ones in the Middle Atlantic states - Delaware, Maryland, Southeastern Pennsylvania. The buildings have a feeling about them that's different from New England and the South. The church, which is not the one where we were married, is a good example.
My other grandfather was born in a small town in Vermont where we spent a few weeks in the summer. My mother is buried nearby along with her father and mother.
There is a modest trail fee.
A few years later, around 1900-1910, the place was looking a lot more prosperous.
Here's the place quite recently.
I attending first and second grade in this nice old brick and limestone building with slate roof and copper trim. After second grade I was dragged off to work in the iron mines of SE Minnesota with just my little pick, shovel, and little tin pail. Life was cruel back in the 1950s. People don't realize how much we suffered. It was salvaged in the 1960s--taken apart for the fine old-growth lumber in it, and nicely cut limestone. There were only 8 rooms -- but big, with very high ceilings. Maybe it could have been adapted for some use (don't know what, really). Salvage was probably the best way to reuse it.
Chatfield has a Carnegie Library. It had a distinct bookish odor to it. It's still there, but has had an architecturally appropriate addition.
I don't see an emoji in your post. Did you really have to go in the mines?
I do love the towns. And every town I've lived in or even spent time in had a library where I spent much of my time. The town where I live now has a Carnegie library also. It also has been renovated in a reasonably appropriately manner.
Didn't everybody?
Why should you?
After second grade we were moved to a cheesy new elementary school building in like...1955. They attached it to this old building and to the high-school which was built by the WPA in the '30s. They recently tore it down, much to everyone's relief. Nobody misses it. That's a sign of bad architecture.
These are great. I assume that's a termite mound. What is glowing?
And what's with the goat?
:up:
https://www.google.com/search?q=view+from+manhattan+bridge&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS768US768&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiWq8P1g_rZAhUlnOAKHR5zB84Q_AUICigB&biw=1393&bih=730#imgrc=_
If you like bridges, you might like the 'Stone Arch Bridge' across the Mississippi in Minneapolis. It was built by James J. Hill for the Great Northern Railroad in 1883. It served railroad traffic until 1978. By then passenger service had ceased and the large Great Northern station had been torn down. Freight traffic was routed on other lines that didn't go through the middle of DT Minneapolis. It's about 2100 feet long and 38 feet wide. It's the only stone-arch bridge on the Mississippi.
Today it's part of a very popular bike/walking trail and historical park scene.
The SAB is next to the former center of Minneapolis's flour milling industry. Water from above St. Anthony Falls was piped to turbines which drove milling equipment. Shown here are the out-fall streams from the turbines. All of those mills are now gone, though the foundations are buried under the West River Road embankment.
This is the site where Gold Medal and Pillsbury flours were once milled and shipped to a store near you. Milling is now done elsewhere.
I love arch bridges. You can feel the forces from the trains pushing down and being distributed by the arches onto the supports and onto the piles under the river. It doesn't seem like it should work, but it's been working for thousands of years. I wonder what people thought the first time someone built one. "No effiing way I'm crossing that!"
The little arch bridge I showed on my first post was for a branch line that carried sulfuric acid and other chemicals to a chemical manufacturing plant.
The most terrifying bridge in the world. This is a fire-ant bridge, constructed to get ants across bodies of water. Incidentally, here is a fire-ant raft, just in case you thought you could sleep well tonight:
The pile in the background is Minneapolis.
Did you read "Leiningen Versus the Ants?" It was standard fare for high school students in the US. It's a short story about a plantation owner's fight against army ants in Brazil. Pretty scary.
After your story about iron mining in the third grade, I'm reluctant to believe anything you write.
Woah. Just read a synopsis. Pretty scary indeed!
New York is my favorite city. My mother grew up there and we visited often. Such beautiful buildings.
Tell me one thing. Why did they change the name of the Triborough Bridge to the RFK? As if NYC traffic isn't bad enough.
Leiningen Versus the Ants -- great story.
It seems like there is a large hairy bushy-tailed animal menacing the abandoned termite mound.
Now, it says that fireflies are beetles. Didn't know that. But they don't feed much as adults (which is when they do their light thing, I suppose) but they are vicious predators when larvae -- they throw up stomach acid on their prey. That would make a great horror film.
I commend the bower bird for it's excellent taste in blue plastic.
A wise policy.
I don't live up there, but I know it as the Triborough Bridge; so I can't say. I live quite near the Verrazano at the moment.
It says they changed it at the request of the Kennedy family.
So, just like that. Somebody at Kennedy HQ picks up the phone and calls Mayor Bloomberg and says, "you know, we'd like the Triborough named after Bobby. Don't you think that would be nice? When will the new plaque be ready?" (It was in... 2008?)
Along the Mosel River
In Alsace
Also Alsace
Northern France
Luxembourg
Just imagine reading on this hammock after a morning stroll, the little home between lush green and sea. Perfection.
Given your desire to do good, it is unlikely you will be able to afford anything extravagant, so I'll continue to picture you in the cottage with the yellow door. I'm sure there will be plenty of room in the yard for a hammock.
Quoting TimeLine
As you may be able to tell, I have been surprised and gratified by how much these threads on beautiful things have moved me. I like this, love that, love this, like that one at a time. Putting them all together in one place is a little overwhelming. I think that reflects how much I love the world. How at home I feel here. Notice most of the things I've showed, including in the previous thread, are from the human world.
Quoting TimeLine
It does suit me. More than that it is me.
This is the Olympic stadium in Munich, designed by Frei Otto. Otto designed his 'sails' by using soap bubbles to model the surface area so that he could achieve the most efficient use of materials. This is architecture literally modelled off nature.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/oct/04/architecture
Really love this.
More stonehengey than traditionally mosquey, but wonderful. I went on the web and looked at some stills of the interiors. Wonderful, but I already said that.
Those Finns - here is a hockey rink in New Haven Connecticut by Eero Saarinen in 1959, for goodness sakes.
Like the exterior. Love the interior.
The world is such an incredible place.
Eero Saarinen and his Detroit-based firm were commissioned in 1955 to design the TWA Flight Center. Saarinen, who projected a high patronage for the terminal, conceived the terminal to speed up processes.
Eero Saarinen designed a social hall and education annex adjacent to the church (1962). I has classrooms, a commercial kitchen, dining rooms, and a full sized gym. All this used to get used quite heavily when the church was much larger and city churches had basketball leagues, and there were many more social activities in the church.
The 1960s were the first and leading decade of dramatic membership losses in most American churches. Quite a few churches expanded at this time, expecting to see decades of solid growth which just didn't happen.
Here is the Luther Lounge, s nice meeting room, and the gym
It is an ordinary gym, but the floor is about 18 feet below the the lawn, to avoid having the structure overpower the neighboring houses, which are close to the north side of the church.
I live across the street from the church, and am the resident atheist member. My main project in the church at this point is cleaning. Cleaning has a nice concrete quality, (especially in a building with concrete floors) and unlike social service, you can tell immediately what you have accomplished.
Yet another Eero Saarinen structure, the Gate Way [to the west] Arch in St. Louis, MO. The arch was built in a former slum on the river, occupied mostly by blacks, many of whom moved to (or were relocated to) Ferguson, MO which they and their police made famous recently.
Then it was no longer the tallest building. I forget, was it the World Trade Center buildings that took it's place? Since then, many other's have taken their place as the tallest. I remember driving up the New Jersey Turnpike and seeing it on the horizon. Then the WTC was added. Then the WTC was gone again.
I've always wanted to go up in the arch.
So much modern stuff seems lifeless to me, then I see something like the church in Minneapolis you showed and I get the point.
Another thing I like about Minneapolis and St. Paul is the Skyways. I remember walking in St. Paul in the winter. It made me feel differently about cities. Like somebody took a knife and cut out a slice of St. Paul cake. Or like a pop-up book.
This display hangs in National Veterans Arts Museum in Chicago. It contains the dog tags for every U.S. Serviceman and woman killed in Vietnam. I have never felt so small as I did in standing in the shadows of those who gave the ultimate gift for Liberty.
I love some parts of St. Paul -- DT isn't one of them, anymore.
The skyways are a good thing, but they have a downside: it greatly reduces pedestrian traffic at the street level, outside. I like walking outside. On the other hand, many cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul both) have long stretches of streets downtown where there is nothing to see anyway. On the skyway level there is a lot to see.
Then there is the weather -- cold in the winter, hot in the summer. We like living in the indoor temperature range of 69-72. Above and below -- can't survive.
It wasn't that long ago (40 years, 30 years, not less) when downtowns had lots of stores, cafes, and street traffic. I miss all that.
One of the reasons people like going to malls is that there is more to see. There are lots of people and lots of store windows with displays, whether one has much interest in the stuff or not. Its an agora, a forum -- except that it's private, of course, which makes a big difference. There are definitely limits on what can go on there -- a plus and a negative both.
The Empire State Building was always, and will always be, far more attractive than the WTC buildings that aren't there anymore, and the one that is. Art Deco was a very tasteful style, and like several other design styles, it stays quite fresh with a very long shelf-life. Only the very best of the 50s and 60s International Style (like Lever House or the Seagrams Bldg.) remain fresh and attractive. Buildings that start out as looming hulks generally stay that way.
The company I worked for had an office right at the end of the Skyway in St. Paul. Quoting Bitter Crank
That's one of the reasons I liked those pictures of towns - they always mean life to me. People walking. Talking to each other for no reason. Hardware stores. I was just thinking about Woolworth's a few days ago. 5 & 10 cent stores. What a concept.
I was going to include the Chrysler Bldg. too, but it doesn't really have as much personal meaning to me as the ESB does.
I love New York. I love cities. I love towns. I love buildings. I love bridges. I love the refineries and petroleum smell at the northern end of the New Jersey Turnpike. There's a place on the turnpike in northern NJ where there's the Port of Newark and a rail line on one side and Newark airport on the other. That says everything that needs to be said about the human world right there.
So much of it IS lifeless. Of course, a lot of buildings are built for utilitarian purposes and the building owners decide what the cost and quality will be. If the owners don't want to pay for elegance and beauty, then the building will be a box covered with composite stone material, the windows will be small and regularly spaced, and the structure will be totally forgettable but unfortunately not missable.
Odor is a neglected topic.
I can't say that petroleum refineries are my favorite smell, but there are some industrial smells I like. One, which some people find objectionable, is soybean crushing plants. Bunge Crushers used to have a large operation near the University of Minnesota where they crushed soybeans for oil. I thought the smell was delicious, but a lot of people don't like it, for some odd reason.
Archer Daniels Midland has a flour mill not far from where I live; up close it smells like ground grain, the sort of smell I remember from the small buildings where farmers stored ground feed for hogs and cattle. It's a good smell. There is also a slightly sour-dough smell to the place.
I can summon olfactory memories of the coal-powered Chicago North Western train that used to roll into my little hometown once or twice a day. It was a warm odor of lubricating oil, coal, smoke, dirt, the small stockyard next to the railroad, country air, etc. When they started shipping iron ore from a nearby mine out on this line, they switched to diesel, which just isn't as great a fragrance.
The Koch Brothers operate a refinery south of Minneapolis (like 20 miles south); it refines oil from the Alberta Tar Sands. Bad stuff. I can't say I really like the combination of ammonia, and various other volatile chemicals. It's been there for... 60 or 70 years.
Horse manure smells much better than cow manure which smells much better than pig manure which is pretty much the limit on tolerable smells.
Grant, Kresge, Woolworth...
Dentists use acrylic for some procedures -- making small impressions, lining of temporary crowns, that sort of thing. The stuff is VERY odorous, and it get's hot when they mix it up (endothermic). It smells like the cheap plastic crap you found at Woolworth's or Kresge's. Of course, at one time this cheap plastic crap was the latest thing.
I agree about industrial odor. Your post brought lots of ideas to mind - diesel fumes, creosote, asphalt. All have childhood associations for me.
Madrid.
Scotland.
Russia.