2+2 & steven holl

When you're looking for someone's contact information, it can be very frustrating when the staff list for an organization is totally behind firewalls or the information is so general that you can't get an email or mail address. At the same time, none of us needs any more spam and I guess the crawlers can get addresses from easily available sites. I was looking at the webpage of the Faculty of Theology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and they ask a simple question and then you get a helpful profile of affiliates. The simple question stops the crawlers but not those who know what 2 + 2 is. Go to http://organigram.kuleuven.be/8/50000102.htm and click on one of the names. The page will ask you to give a simple sum (last night, 2 + 2; this morning, 7 + 7) before it gives you any profile page. You only have to do it once, per session.

Wednesday's Times had a paean by Nicolai Ouroussoff to the Bloch Building. It's the new wing of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. When we were there for VRA in March, it was possible to visit the library even though the rest of the building wasn't ready for the public yet. The Bloch Building, designed by Steven Holl, has now opened. To get to the library, you went through some of the main circulation space and it was magnificent: layers of building and space, light, angles. The picture in the Times looks magical with the building glowing and being reflected in the pool along with the original neoclassical building. http://www.nelson-atkins.org/

And then yesterday's paper had an article on Philip Johnson's Glass House (complex) in New Canaan which opens this month. Most of the article is comments from art world folks. I went there on an SAH tour in the early 1980s and it is surprising even if you've seen a million pictures of it. I guess that's the genius loci.