walls, windows, archways

"At the Last Bookstore in Downtown Los Angeles,

books literally form walls, windows and archways."

Beth Collier for the New York Times

"Finding Yourself in Los Angeles"

Travel section, New York Times, July 29, 2018

washcloths: to eschew or not

Several years ago, at Bill's for Christmas, Barbara insisted that he should give me a stack of washcloths they encountered while out shopping. Bill said that he and I didn't usually exchange Christmas presents but Barbara can't help herself. They weren't a rainbow of colors and I cannot remember for sure if they had a ribbon but they did look rather like this stack of washcloths grabbed from the net. I've always used washcloths so I can use some more.

Now I read in "White people are noticing something new: their own whiteness" by Emily Bazelon in The New York Times Magazine from June 17, 2018: "For a long time, many white people assumed it was our due, as the majority, to encounter various racial others and marvel at the exotic things they ate, built or wore. Now we can go online and find people of color doing the gawking, offering jokes and anthropological scrutiny about white people's underseasoning food, mistreating potato salad or eschewing washcloths." Who knew? I sure didn't.

Gund Hall & Fondazione Feltrinelli

Today's email news from Docomomo notes that Herzog & de Meuron and Beyer Blinder Belle will be expanding and rearranging Gund Hall which houses the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Gund Hall is a brutalist masterpiece from 1972 by John Andrews. Its distinctive angular top houses The Trays studio space. The pillars and use of raw concrete are both familiar in brutalist buildings.

(Peter Wanderwarker / Harvard Graduate School of Design)

The most recent work of Herzog & de Meuron that I have seen is the Fondazione Feltrinelli in Milan. It also has an angled top. It will be interesting to see what happens at Gund Hall.

These are my pictures of the Fondazione Feltrinelli building as viewed from the nearby streets. I enjoyed seeing its distinctive shape in the city landscape, as I enjoy seeing Gund Hall when I'm walking the streets of Cambridge.