yellow stairs and brutalist buildings

Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London

Monte Amiata housing, Gallaratese, Milan

(Carlo Aymonino, archt.)

separated at birth: rows of circles, in a grid

quilt on view at

Chapman Museum,

Glens Falls, N.Y.

October 2024

Nadia Gould

Because I am Young, Beautiful & Talented 2

1964

in exhibition at dieFirma (gallery)

October 2025-January 2026

Endeavor and Voyager

NVIDIA's new campus, designed by Gensler, consists of a triangular and a hexagonal building. It is featured in an article in Metropolis that I'm indexing for Avery. The names of the buildings are Endeavor and Voyager. Call out to the library vendor Endeavor and its Voyager system?

If Caillebotte were a photographer ...

Randy Tarampi, from Flickr

https://www.flickr.com/photos/randytarampi/32046695624/

 

funnels

For thirty years and a bit more, I have been involved with the Art NACO funnel of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. It enables us art catalogers to participate in authority control more fully than we might be able to do individually. I coordinate the efforts of a dozen or so art libraries that create or revise name records that are included in the LC/NAF international authority file. There's also an Art SACO funnel that allows us to propose subject headings to add to the Library of Congress Subject Headings file. So "funnels" has been a (good) trigger word for me for a long time.

Imagine my surprise when I got an email announcement from the SS United States Conservancy today that announced that the "second SS United States funnel [was] to be preserved." They use the word "funnel" to describe the smokestacks that were so prominent on the ship.

This illustration is a rendering of the proposed SS United States Museum and Visitor Experience designed by Thinc, LMN Architects, and Buro Happold. More information here.

Milan: changing skyline

When we were in Milan in spring 2018 and stayed near the Bosco Verticale, this was the view toward the Porta Nuova development.

Last week when I was indexing the May 2025 issue of Architectural Record with its Building Type Study of tall buildings, one of the featured buildings was the new Unipol Tower designed by Mario Cucinella Architects.

Edmund White

When I review the books that I've read over the course of a year, the titles are generally split about equally between fiction and non-fiction. I am reading Edmund White's obituary (Times) and the author notes that Edmund White's more than 30 books are almost equally divided between fiction and non-fiction.

There is also a wonderful essay on White in the Times: The very gay life of Edmund White by Aaron Hicklin who is working on a documentary about White. Hicklin writes about how influential the cover of A boy's own story, as well as the story, was in his life.

The Ecstasy of the Magdalen

This morning's Artle stumped me. I was guessing various Italian Baroque artists and my fourth guess was Annibale Carracci. That was not correct but the linked biography noted that the right artist was the son of Ercole Procaccini the Elder who studied with Annibale Carracci.

Giulio Cesare Procaccini (1574-1625) was born in Bologna and moved in his teens to Milan with his family, where his father ran an art academy. He began as a sculptor but shifted to painting after working in Modena and Genoa where he was influenced by, respectively, Correggio and Rubens. A bunch of places that I have enjoyed visiting.

The Getty calls G.C. Procaccini "Bolognese" and the National Gallery of Art calls him "Lombard" in their pages on the web. Authority work (and art history) can be subjective. He only lived in Bologna as a child. The medieval Lombard League and its allies covered these cities but Milan is the only city among them that is in modern Lombardy.

The brief essays from the Getty and National Gallery mentioned that his beginnings as a sculptor are "betrayed" in the sculptural quality of his paintings. My grad school chum, Sara Jane Pearman, was also intrigued by the connection between sculpture and painting, but in Netherlandish painting.

Oh, the painting. It is The Ecstasy of the Magdalen by Giulio Cesare Procaccini, painted 1616/1620, and now in the collection of the National Gallery. https://www.nga.gov/artworks/121887-ecstasy-magdalen

And perhaps the most fun is just saying "Procaccini."

Francis, pope 2013-2025

I've been watching some videos of the procession of the coffin of Pope Francis through the streets of Rome, from the Vatican where the funeral was held to Santa Maria Maggiore where he will be interred.
The NBC reporter on the street near the beginning of the procession was talking to some Americans who happen to be in Rome for a photography workshop. One mentioned what an honor it has been to be in Rome at a special moment. (The picture is a screen grab of the statues on the top of the facade of Santa Maria Maggiore.)

Francis has been special to me too, for personal reasons. We happened to be in Sicily when he was selected as pope in 2013. We had found a parking place and I went to call a B&B that looked promising. It was a few blocks from where we parked in the middle of Noto. Christie stayed in the car with her iPad, watching the papal news and studying the map and listings. It took most of an hour to call the B&B host who wasn't at home, walk to the B&B to meet him there, look at the room, accept it, and walk back to the car. The news of "Habemus Papam" (we have a pope) happened during that hour.

We moved the car closer to the B&B and watched some television in the room and in a nearby restaurant where we went for supper. We liked the location well enough to stay for three nights, using it as a hub for day trips to Siracusa and the southeastern corner of Sicily. 

in the mood for travel

Daniel said he was hoping that Americans would still be welcome when he traveled outside the United States, adding that he could always say he was a New Yorker. That reminded me that I was once rewarded with a hug and a kiss on each cheek in Modena, Italy, when I said I was from New York City.

Christie and I were traveling around Emilia-Romagna in October 2001, just a month or so after the attack on the World Trade Center. On our first night, we found a hotel in Modena and went out for drinks and then to supper.

We were somewhat jet-lagged and tired. The woman at the hotel had noted a few nearby eating places of varying character and none caught our fancy as we walked past them. We got to a small square and noticed a welcoming restaurant across the square. The owner was just writing the supper menu on the blackboard and we talked to her, in a mix of English and Italian and facial and hand expression, about what was on offer that evening. After we'd determined that we were really ready to eat there, she said she was Italian and was from Modena. She said you're American and you are from where? When I said "New York," she said "Il principe" (the prince) and gave me a hug and kisses.

The supper was extraordinary. We ended up chatting with a couple Italians who sat at a small table next to ours. We ended up staying until the restaurant closed and then we four went to a coffee bar and closed it down too.

I had another 9-11 experience on that trip. I was walking around San Domenico in Bologna. There weren't too many other people in the plaza and an airplane flew over. Not particularly low in the sky but a reminder of the airplanes flying into the Trade Center. Gave me a start.

On another trip to Italy, we were looking for a lunch place in Buccheri on Sicily. I went over to the prominent restaurant on the central square that said it was open but no one was around to ask about a table. When I got back to the car and reported that to Christie, she said that lots of people seemed to be coming and going from the Caffè Roma nearby. We checked it out and had a delightful lunch. The lesson I learned is that a bit of patience and observation can be a good travel guide.