Another (re)post on Frank Gehry after his recent death -- 2016 road trip report by Aaron Betsky -- reminded me about the Iowa Advanced Technology Laboratories in Iowa City from 1992.
Frank Gehry died yesterday, just a week or so after Robert A.M. Stern. You would not generally mistake the work of one architect for the other but they both designed some really fine buildings. I may get to Bilbao and Arles someday to see probably the most famous of Gehry's museums but I have seen the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi ...
I also remember seeing a couple of Gehry's projects in Los Angeles: the Loyola University School of Law which I walked over to see maybe forty years ago, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall where I was lucky enough to hear an organ concert with Steve Ong probably a dozen years ago.
I was particularly reminded of these buildings as I indexed a house in Ocean Springs, just up the coast from Biloxi. But that was more Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown than Gehry or Stern.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
