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.

what are you reading?

Every week in the New York times book review, there is a box on the "Letters" page with two or three short notes listing "what our readers are reading." Last week, one of them said "I am reading Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar for the second time. I first read it 70 years ago. It's still a great read!"

I was reading Marjorie Morningstar way back in the '80s. When I saw Judith one day, she asked what I was reading and I said Marjorie Morningstar and held up my unjacketed older hard-covered edition, bound in basic black. She said that you shouldn't actually admit to reading Herman Wouk.

Whatever. I remember thinking then that it was a good read. At the moment, though, I'm reading the thoroughly modern Family meal by Bryan Washington.

the country house life moderne

This is the new home of Margot Beste-Chetwynde in the 2017 production of "Decline and Fall" based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh. We never get much closer than this but the interiors are extraordinary moderne. I naturally do not know if the interiors were actually filmed in the house shown here. Googling has not yet revealed the buildings used in the three-episode series from Acorn TV and BBC, streaming on Amazon Prime.

But who cares about the real house? There's plenty of good scenery and architecture jokes. If you are wondering how to say "Beste-Chetwynde," the actors say it something like "beastie cheating." The role is delightfully played by Eva Longorio.

short-term rentals and noise complaints

The Alfred Village Planning Board has been working on revisions to the zoning code. One of the new considerations is short-term rentals like Airbnb. Alfred is a college town, rather overwhelmed by its student population. A lot of the houses in the center of the village and beyond are rental houses. Some are big and can be noisy, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights. There is fear that short-term rentals will be occasional party houses and therefore should be limited to the multi-family zones (R-2 and R-3). Some of the bigger houses in the village are grandfathered for greater capacity than two units.

We board members were having an email discussion about which zones should be allowed to have short-term rentals. Someone brought up boisterous parties they knew about in such rentals. It seems to me ungracious to preclude graduation parties in the "collegiest town" in America. As a resident of the central village in R-2, I know about the noise that can burst from the house and yard of some of those group houses, especially on a warm afternoon. The boom-boom from the speakers can be especially irksome. But I do really appreciate being in the center of town, where I can walk to most every place I need to go.

This morning as I ate my breakfast, I was reading last Sunday's New York times book review, particularly the article on Antonio Di Benedetto by Michael Greenberg. "No writer has laid bare so thoroughly the ongoing predicament of the Argentine, for whom the resolution of even minor problems, such as a noise complaint or the collection of one's modest salary, seems beyond normal human effort. Di Benedetto understands this bitter ingredient of Argentine life, where the middle class is as evanescent as melting ice, subject to impoverishing currency devaluations, corrupt populists, vicious military coups, cynical guerrilla movements and useless reforms."

I don't know whether Di Benedetto's books are exactly the thing to read now, as parallels to the chaos of the moment, or the thing to avoid and let yourself slip into comfortable release. Whatever, it will be pleasant when it's nice enough to sit on the front porch and read, even if the ex frat house across the street is boom booming.

the shape of the plaza and the distant view

So I was watching episode two of One Day and enjoying the sights of Rome. When Dexter is talking to his mother outside her hotel, the space in front of the hotel was so familiar. Not just the narrow space there, opening into the wider plaza beyond. The decorated façade of the shopfront across from the hotel. It just had to be the Rome hotel that Carol and I stayed in before we went to Florence for the IFLA art periodicals conference in 1986. Dexter's father comes to the door to meet them. The sliding door has the name "Campo de' Fiori" painted on it. That's it, our hotel.

That was my first time in Rome. I was excited beyond words. Carol had gotten there a while before I did. I had been warned not to take anything but a legitimate taxi from the central train station. My cab was somewhere near the taxi stand but he drove me a very indirect route to the Campo area. I had a map and was able to follow where we were. He was having trouble finding the Campo and stopped at a business on a very narrow street to ask directions. We got close, to the nearby Piazza Farnese which is in front of the French Embassy. I told him this was close enough, paid him, and got out of the car to get my suitcase from the back. He took off. I ran after him and he went out into the clogged traffic on the Lungotevere, along the Tiber River. As I ran, I was shouting something and a guard at the embassy joined the chase. (Was this a movie?) Anyway, the guard stood on the corner and I pointed to the supposed taxi. With a uniformed security man standing there, the driver got out and opened the back of the car so I could get my suitcase. I walked sheepishly the block and a half to the Hotel Campo de' Fiori. By the time we left Rome a few days later, I knew how to take the city bus from near the Campo to the central station.

 

anybody got $170 million?

When I lived in New York City from 1995 until 2009, there was a significant coalescing of art galleries in West Chelsea. Primarily in the blocks east and west of Tenth Avenue, from West 17th to West 29th. Galleries that had been in SoHo were pushed out by rising rents. It was massive fun to go galleryhopping in those days and one of my favorite buildings was 526 West 26th Street.

(James Estrin / New York Times)

I sometimes would walk up and down the stairs as well as back and forth on several of the floors. Other times, I might take the elevator up to the top floor with galleries and walk down. The elevator was operated by a person and had one of those gate doors.

By the time I moved upstate in 2009, the smaller galleries were being pushed out of West Chelsea as gentrification in general and specifically development around the High Line forced up rents and sale prices. Crowds and monster tall buildings proliferated. Even the Whitney Museum of American Art built its new building in the southern reaches of the arts district.

Now, Deb has sent me an article from the NY Times about the listing of 526 West 26th for sale and how the sale could displace many artists and art spaces. (The picture above is from the article.) The building is being sold by the estate of Gloria Naftali, one of the early galleriests that opened in the building in 1995. Her husband had originally bought the building as a warehouse for his garment business. The Greene Naftali Gallery is still operating and has spaces on the eighth floor and now also on the ground floor. I remember how the upper floor space was significantly renovated and enlarged several times. In the picture, I see "LEVENBETTS" on a window. They are one of the smaller architectural firms that I encounter in my Avery indexing.

The building is included in the West Chelsea Historic District so there's probably little danger of it being demolished. Still, it has played, and continues to play, a significant role in the art life and life of artists in New York City.