books and zines

Pretty exciting. I got to meet my closest parallel book collector in LibraryThing: Paul Ranogajec, a doctoral student in American architectural history. cf. paulranogajec.com He's a buddy of Roberto Ferrari, art librarian and now doctoral student himself, both of them at the CUNY Grad Center. Roberto is Paul's closest LT parallel, or is it the other way around? Anyway, we had a good time talking about our collections and art/architecture interests over a nice brunch in the garden at Bacchus on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I'm not sure that Paul is convinced yet that he should go to library school but we'll keep working on him. After brunch, we went to a couple nearby used bookshops. I escaped without buying any books at either shop or elsewhere today.

On the way to the subway to go to the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), I ran into Bill Jones, former colleague at NYU Libraries. That was fun.

The main reason I was running off to MAD was a panel on "Gay print/queer zines" with Scott Hug of K48, Tony Arena of Anonymous boy collection and other titles, Michael Bullock of BUTT, Jason Lamphier and Noah Michelson of Out, and Dan Avery of NEXT, moderated by someone whose name I didn't catch. Each of them described their magazine or project and then they talked amongst themselves and with us in the audience. I had expected that the hall would be jammed to the rafters but it was fairly sparsely populated. I loved the way Tony Arena talked about his desire for the informal and chaotic. The fellows from Out had some interesting things to say about being fairly mainstream, dealing with print versus web capacity and timing. And almost all of them talked about community as part of their mission. I was intrigued to learn that the founders/editors of BUTT started Fantastic man because they didn't want BUTT to have to go commercial, having started it as a cross between S.T.H. and Index. And the first issue of Gentle woman just came out so there was teasing about covering all the ground now.


This is all fine and dandy but I'm really enjoying the book I've just started: In spite of the gods: the rise of modern India by Edward Luce (Anchor Books, 2008) and I think I'm going to go back to that. I did go read for a while in Prospect Park after discovering and climbing Lookout Hill. The sunset was only just beginning and there weren't enough clouds to really light up the sky with color.

"closed": too early, soccer

It took me quite a while to get going yesterday but I still made it to downtown Manhattan too early for galleries to be open. They mostly open at noon. And ApexArt was playing the Slovenia-U.S.A. soccer game so I didn't go in to see the "Men with balls" show. Artists Space was closed for installation but I did finally get into Leslie/Lohman for "The great LGBTQ photo show" but didn't see any photos that really knocked my socks off. Oh, it's worth visiting.

On to Mercer Street Books, a fine used bookstore near NYU. Getting a bit hungry, I went for the extravagance of a crepe and glass of pinot noir at Shade, a very satisfying lunch. I did hear the guys next to me speculating on the referee in the Slovenia-U.S.A. game. If it wasn't too late or installation, it was soccer but the day was fine altogether.

The Lil Picard show at Grey Art Gallery was on the list so I stopped in. I wasn't familiar with her work and the show is a trip down memory lane, with early postwar and work from into the 1990s. The brochure or wall text included some interesting words about her attempts to be part of the scene but finding the Cedar Bar boys not at all congenial. That is, they just wanted pretty young things, not thinking and acting women. Reminds me of Jo Schaffer's description of visits when she was an art student at Brooklyn College; the girls got to sit in the back row and observe but mostly weren't part of that scene. Thank heavens, we've mostly changed.

It was also interesting to see the drawings of Picard's husband on his death bed in Saint Vincent's Hospital. The last dated drawing in the set was dated June 14th, almost the anniversary.

I ran a couple more errands in the neighborhood and then took off for MoMA PS1 for the "Greater NY" show. Perhaps my favorite moment was the performance in the basement where the artist was putting gold foil on the boiler, using his sweat as adhesive. He was passively standing, brush in hand, on a ladder doing something on a palette. He passed the brush over his neck and then picked up a piece of foil with the brush and applied it to the boiler. Rhythmic and slow-moving. The piece was called "Skewed lies/central governor: a collaborative performance with Saul Melman" by Aki Sasamoto. Among the other works that I liked were Leidy Churchman's paintings, Conrad Ventur's video installation with disco ball, Bruce High Quality Foundation's pedestal exchange, and "Let's face it; we're all queer" (one of the images in A.L. Steiner's "Angry, articulate, inevitable"). Ismail Randall made some interesting mountains out of magazines (sculpted stacks of Vanity fair) in a piece addressing the U.S./Mexico border. Michele Abeles's fine photos had great titles, e.g., "Man, shadow, table, fan, rock" and "Number, fabric, man, hand, rock, icons, cardboard, potatoes."

After I'd done about enough art in GNY, I went to the bookstore and then ordered a cafe au lait. Then, I checked the watch: it was almost 5:30 and I was supposed to be in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn by 6:30. Well, the coffee got drunk more quickly and with less reading than it might have been. Good old 7 to Q however did get me to Cortelyou on the same train that Heidi was on. We went to The Farm on Adderley for some yummy food, with their specialty being local and small-farm stuff. The service and setting were too Manhattan (pretentious) for Heidi's taste but the food was good.

I definitely am of the "eat to live" rather than "live to eat" school but have noticed that these NYC posts from the last few days have all talked about food. The restaurant options in Alfred and environs are definitely thinner than in New York City but the Collegiate Restaurant which has been closed since last fall's fire in the Alfred business district should be open in its new space by the time I get home. Not fine dining, but darn fine food in a friendly atmosphere. When Heidi visits Alfred, she will probably be satisfied that the food and service are a good match.

West Chelsea gallery hopping

These home-made pencils are only one small bit of a platform with many objects by Ben Gocker in his show at P.P.O.W. Gallery on West 25th Street in New York City. I have been especially enamored of pencils since working at the Amon Carter Museum. There, Paula Stewart and I exchanged pencils as a token gift from our travels. She acquired the habit when she had worked in the photo department before becoming the archivist. Now, I just buy more museum pencils than I can use.

Today's adventures centered on West Chelsea. It started with lunch with Ann Morrell who works at the American Friends Service Committee. Ann and her husband Bill moved earlier this year to the ILGWU apartments on Eighth Avenue. They have a sunny living room with bookcases under the windows. Bright and cheerful. We ate at Le Grainne Cafe, a charming French bistro that used to be Le Gamin. My crepe with turkey, goat cheese, and ratatouille was magnificent.

Food's fine but then we went gallery hopping. Ann joined me for the late Monet show at Gagosian Gallery. As we neared the gallery, we ran into Barbara Reed. Retirement allows one to go gallery hopping on weekdays. It's nice to avoid the crazy West Chelsea weekend crowds.

Ann split after Monet and I crossed 20th Street to Tanya Bonakdar Gallery where Uta Barth and Ian Kiaer were on view. The Barths were especially rich, one with feet on the beach. I am looking forward to going to Fire Island one of the days I'm here in the city. From Bonakdar, I stopped in at Casey Kaplan Gallery and found the Trisha Donnelly sculptures interesting. Donnelly carves big blocks of stone with quite refined parallel lines. Then I went to Printed Matter and actually escaped without buying anything.

Sticking to my list of galleries to visit, I next went to Tracy Williams on 23rd Street to see the Barbara Bloom show entitled "Present" ... as in gift. Great work and Bloom arranged for each of us visitors to get a CD. Haven't played it yet but it is apparently the CD used in the piece with a rug of plans of Steinway pianos. Another piece in the show was a table of glasses with a sound board in the tabletop so that it made sounds as you put your hand over the glasses. This was my first visit to the new Tracy Williams space; they used to be in a rowhouse basement on West 4th Street, an awkward but intimate space. They are working at keeping the intimacy in the new space, partly by interacting with the visitors.

Deborah Bell had a couple dozen photographs from America illustrated by George W. Gardner. Fine photographs. One was of "Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Crumb, Marathon, New York" (1975); I can't wait to get back upstate and ask my sister's partner Barb Crumb if she had relatives in the Marathon area. Another photograph -- "Langhorne, Pennsylvania" (1965) -- included the sign for Flannery's Restaurant along with other roadside stuff. Having just finished reading The violent bear it away by Flannery O'Connor, I was easily finding parallels between O'Connor's characters and the "real" Americans and Americana in Gardner's photographs.

On to the Gocker show entitled "There is really no single poem." Gocker graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is now a librarian at Brooklyn Public Library. Lots of his works resonated with my librarian brain: pencils, words, letters.

I stopped in at Mitchell Algus Gallery and found him packing up to move his space to Morton Street in the West Village. The mean economic times make for even more volatility in the gallerist's life than usual.

Further West on 25th Street, I stopped at ClampArt to see the "Jesse Burke: intertidal" show. I'd first run across Burke at the New York Art Book Fair last fall. Really love the photos. And Brian Clamp had one of my favorite John Arsenault photos in the back "alley" of the gallery: "Getting it in Italy" (2000). I just have to get me one of those John Arsensault photos someday. Have to quit buying so many books (but I did do some freelance cataloging before I blogged). As much as I like the sexy Burkes and Arsenaults, the prints by Stuart Allan were really fine, the varying light of different hours of the day. Reminded me of Spencer Finch's work on the High Line.

On to Galerie Lelong for the Andy Goldsworthy show: "New York dirt water light" with ephemeral "sculptures" on the sidewalks of NYC which faded with traffic. And next door was the William Pope L. show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. This last show opened with a print which had the word "melan-colicky" across the middle. Just cruising, not feeling very melancholy at all.

I've spared you some of the parallels drawn from the gallery visits, e.g., Barbara Bloom's adopted Chinese daughter (think Karen Muller), the new assistant librarian at Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies who is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop as is Flannery O'Connor, the whole O'Connor connection to Debra Kruse's art ... well, I HAD spared you those parallels.

uptown

I don't consider myself religious but I am certainly moved by religious art. I'm in New York City for a week or so before going to the ALA conference in Washington. Diana Mitrano is letting me stay at her Brooklyn apartment while she's in Hong Kong. As I left her apartment yesterday thinking about the day's adventures, I decided to go up to the Cloisters, partly to see if I could find Building the medieval art in the bookshop. Being in that space with the fine art is always very moving for me. The view above is of the apse from the Church of Saint Martin in Fuentidueña, Spain with a crucifix from Palencia. Romanesque and Ottonian are probably my favorite medieval periods.

I'm not really sure where the love of medieval art comes from. My 12th-grade art teacher was fond of Romanesque Catalonian frescoes, or at least I got the small books on them that were a couple of my first art books about then. Them, along with the facsimile of the Hours of Catherine of Cleves.

Whatever, I found myself tearing up several times in the Cloisters: for the love of the art, for the joy of being in its company.

From Fort Tryon Park, I took the bus down to the Hispanic Society where I was delighted to find that the Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster show was still on view (closes June 27th so get there soon). She created three dioramas with books as the object in the landscape. There's a wonderful wall of quotations too. Since my last visit to the Hispanic Society, the Sorolla murals have been rehung in the room now called the Sala Bancaja. And it's never a problem to visit the collection of Goya, Velazquez, El Greco, and others.

I didn't have a guidebook with me but realized that the Morris-Jumel Mansion wasn't far away. I was too far South and missed it but did visit the hole where the Alexander Hamilton house used to be, crowded between a church and an apartment building just North of City College of New York. It's hard to believe that the house fit in the space, the hole doesn't look near big enough.

They picked the house up and moved it around the corner. It isn't open again yet but the setting is certainly more gracious and spacious.

Since I was there at CCNY, I figured I'd go say hi to the librarian, Judy Connorton, and see the new space. The architecture library has way more space, as does the school. Part of the library is double-height with stacks mostly on a mezzanine over the offices. The roof is open for visiting and there is a funky yellow amphitheater which also serves as the sunshield for the skylight over the central atrium. The end-of-year projects were up on the walls so there were some fun projects to look at. There were also some models of buildings by Palladio, Neutra, and others.

On to the Studio Museum which is showing highlights from its collection. Lots of good stuff. They have a print version of the Lorna Simpson video "15 mouths" which I first saw at Sean Kelly Gallery a few days after 9/11. The video is a grid of mouths quietly humming. It was mesmerizing and soothing in the days just after the World Trade Center attacks. The print version is quieter, just still prints of the mouths with a CD of the humming barely audible.

Supper was at Chennai Garden on East 27th Street, with John Maier, Elizabeth Lilker, and Dan Lipcan. We shared three of the combination platters and barely made it through them. The food was incredibly tasty. John and I walked down to Union Square and I figured I might as well as well veer off to the Strand and St. Mark's bookshops before leaving the neighborhood. I did find Building the medieval world at the Strand. It wasn't the fabulous study of architecture in medieval manuscripts that I'd hoped for, more of a general picture book with mediocre illustrations. Nonetheless, I figured that I'd just regret it if I didn't buy it ... and the price was down from retail.

Thinking about buying books obsessively, I am thrilled that I'll get to meet my closest LibraryThing parallel on Saturday. Paul Ranogajec is a grad student at the CUNY Grad Center and a friend of Roberto Ferrari's. We're getting together for brunch on Saturday. We get to talk books, books, books until the cows come home or we decide to go to the panel on queer zines, 3 pm at the Museum of Art and Design.

thinking about "insanity" and incarceration

The Willard State Hospital (1869-1995, originally Willard Asylum for the Insane) was open for tours yesterday, a fundraiser for the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Children's Center which occupies one of the historic buildings. My sister Carol and brother Doug, along with Carol's partner Barb, had gone last year. Carol, Barb and I went yesterday. The hospital site was originally the State Agricultural College at Ovid but Ezra Cornell convinced the state, with land and money, to move the college to Ithaca where it became Cornell University.

The hospital and village of Willard sit on the East side of Seneca Lake a ways South of Geneva. The setting is beautiful with the land rising from the lakeshore, not too steep but enough to give you good views from many places on the grounds.

The hospital plays a role in my family history in that Chester Smedley Clarke (1849-1925), my great grandfather, was a patient there for a time between 1904 and 1907. He worked in the shoemaker's shop and there was an old photo of the shop in one of the display cases in the administration building. As I was looking at the picture, some other tour participants were asking about the canary cages that are visible in the picture. The guide mentioned canaries' use in mining but wondered if it was a kind of Muzak for the patients. After being released from the hospital, my great grandfather settled in Binghamton and ran a shoe repair business, and was never in contact with the family again. My brother has the address of the business and it was probably in one of the wonderful brick four-story thin buildings across the train tracks from the current bus station. Several of the buildings have been torn down in my memory and replaced by simple (boring) buildings. Sigh.

There is now a boot camp correctional facility on the grounds of the hospital. It's for minimum security drug-related offenders who can serve 90 days there or several years or whatever in a traditional prison setting. The boot camp is strict and busy and attempts to build discipline and responsibility, no slacking. My nemesis Sonny was given the "opportunity" to serve there and only lasted a week or two. The state was, I guess, no more successful than I in building responsibility in his case. As I took pictures of the abandoned male dormitory, I could hear the prisoners chanting as they did calisthenics or some chore. Being on the grounds of the hospital with both of these personal connections was quite emotional though not spooky. When we were in the basement of Grand View, the old administration building, one of the women in our group shivered as she looked into one of the closet-like spaces in the basement. It probably wasn't a patient room but you couldn't help but think about being locked into a physical space while your mental space was probably troubling you as well.

Especially in the basements of Grand View and Hadley Hall, I also kept thinking about my visit to Eastern State Penintentiary in Philadelphia. I visited in 2005 when they had an installation by Janet Cargill and George Bures Miller. Sonny and I had been to the Cargill/Miller show at P.S. 1 and even though Sonny didn't have a lot of experience with viewing contemporary art, he loved the P.S. 1 show which was marvelous. The Eastern State installation was chilling in ways that the visit to Willard wasn't, perhaps the time, perhaps the space, perhaps me.

There are some more pictures of my visit to Willard on Flickr.

resonances and connections

As you may know if you read this blog or talk to me about life and art, I love it when life wraps around and makes connections. The house above is Carlton Towers in Yorkshire, one of the homes of the Duke of Norfolk. It is the setting for the movie "A Handful of Dust" (1988) based on the book by Evelyn Waugh and directed by Charles Sturridge. It stars James Wilby and Kristin Scott Thomas, along with Rupert Graves, Judi Dench, Anjelica Huston, and Alec Guinness. I cannot remember who recommended the film but I was delighted to see the actors' names as they appeared in the opening credits. I'm quite a fan of Kristin Scott Thomas but Wilby and Graves will always be favorites because of their roles in "Maurice."

So why the opening reference to connections? You see I was looking through The Victorian country house by Mark Girouard (Yale University Press, 1979) just the other day which includes Carlton Towers among the featured houses in the second half of the book. It's got a grand tower with an outsized and rather awkward Mansard cap. As often happens in movies, the interior shots don't seem to have been done at Carlton, or at least they seemed to use a different staircase and what's a country house movie without the right staircase?

Not only the house but when Tony, the owner of Hatton as the house is called in the movie, is "kidnapped" in South America, some of the scenes were shot near some dramatic falls which reminded me of Iguacu Falls which were part of one of my ARTstor cataloging assignments. I guess it wasn't Iguacu Falls since the closing credits claimed the movie was shot in Venezuela and Iguacu Falls are on the border of Brazil and Argentina. Details, details. What good are resonances without a bit of slippage?

At any rate, Tony ends up in the hands of a Barbardian-Indian fellow who just wants someone to read to him. He gives some potion to Tony who falls asleep for two days and misses the English adventure hunters who are given his watch and other mementos which will convince them he is dead. They will go back to England and tell the family that Tony is dead. His widow is ruined, I guess, though it would appear that she marries Jock. And now I wonder if there is a fate worse than being lost in the jungle and having to read for your meals.

Those aren't the only resonances. One could revisit the Klukas plan for my country villa, built like Carlton Towers on an ancient foundation. One could talk about how "resonances" and "connections" are both based in French and there have been a lot of French statuses in Facebook recently, thanks to Jonathan Walz and others. But we'll stop and go to bed. By the way, the next movie that Netflix has brought me is "Desperately Seeking Susan" so I'll probably reflect on Sue Sylvester as that flashes before my eyes.

The picture of Carlton Towers at top is from the Ryan Browne wedding photography site.

art and cataloging and art cataloging

Fannie Hillsmith. "Christmas Tree" (1949)
(Currier Museum of Art)
Just got home the day before yesterday from the ARLIS/NA annual conference in Boston, with day trips on either side for art and architecture. I drove to Boston so I'd have the flexibility of such side trips. On the day before the conference cranked up, I drove up to Manchester, New Hampshire to see the Currier Museum of Art and its Zimmerman House, a Usonian house by Frank Lloyd Wright. An added benefit was lunch with Alison Dickey, currently the librarian at the Currier. The museum has a nice collection. Some of the special treats were Ruisdael's view of Egmont (I've been reading Holland mania by Annette Stott about Americans who visited Holland in the 19th and early 20th century, including Egmont), Fannie Hillsmith (local and NYC modernist, experimenting in a variety of styles), James Aronovich (NH super-realist), "Marc Antony and Cleopatra" by Jan de Bray, and a lovely view of the Campagna by Sanford Robinson Gifford. And they had a fine show of watercolors with several by Arthur Garfield Dove.

The Zimmerman House is nice. The ceilings are even high enough that I didn't feel the need to duck, rather a rarity in a later Frank Lloyd Wright house.

The conference cranked up on Friday with a prelude tour of the North Bennet Street School in the North End. Other than the bird pooping on me in Old North Church yard, it was a lovely morning. The school has a book arts specialty and that was the focus of our tour but we went quickly through the piano and string instrument workshops and up to the furniture finishing room. And I ran into Floyd Zula and his partner Kelly again; they were in Manchester at the Currier as well.

Highlights of the conference for me:

• Table of contents as a marker of clarity and complexity: both the Wittenborn and Dwyer book award presenters talked about the value of a good TOC or other apparatus. It evoked, for me, the work of Alejandro Cesarco who has done indexes and TOCs for nonexistent books. You have to put the book together based on the proximity of index references, for example.
  
  
• The honorable mention for the Dwyer Award was the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative. Always love a new addition to my biographical resources for building NACO records.
  
  
• The Avery Library is thinking about building a Built Works Inventory. It would make a fine complement to the Cultural Object Name Authority which the Getty is working on. More exciting for me is the role the inventory might play relative to our longstanding struggle over the neat bipartite "divided world" in LC authorities land. I hope we can get to a point of an entity authority file, instances and not classes of instances. By the way, there's a CONA webinar on May 4th.
  
  
• The Cataloging Advisory Committee is just about done with the access points chapter of Cataloging exhibition publications--best practices.
  
  
• Cataloging Problems Discussion Group (now in its 35th year, give or take) was a fine gathering. We talked about RDA (testing about to begin), shelflisting (curators at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have enough books in their office that they try to arrange them by call number and notice discrepancies?!?!), OCLC Institution Records (do you make them for all items? no items? selectively? Brooklyn does them selectively and we hope they have criteria to share), and museum publisher contributions to CIP (parallel to a few university libraries that do the CIP for their press).
  
  
• The Joan Mitchell Foundation is funding a pilot project with late-career artists on legacy and estate planning. A database was set up for entry of works. Some of the older artists are being paired with a younger artist. They're also investigating self-journaling and social software. Eumie Imm-Stroukoff talked about this work and the other panelists were Heather Gendron on Cai Guo-Qiang's archive and Greg Hatch on the Utah Artists Project. One of the UAP's treasures is 500K slides from emeritus professor Lennox Tierney and videos and oral history.
  
  
• We western New Yorkers got together with the Ontario folks to begin cranking up for the 2012 conference in Toronto. But first we get to get excited about Minneapolis and the joint ARLIS/NA-VRA conference next year. I haven't been there since the early 1980s and really want to see the new Walker building and the MIA, and Saint Paul, and ...
  

After the Cataloging Section meeting about shelf-ready copy and new sources and energy for NACO work, Daniel and I went back to the hotel to check out. Daniel went off to the bus and I went to Bill's with my suitcase. After taking a deep breath, I decided to walk over to Mount Auburn Cemetery. Like Forster without a Baedeker, I took off and walked around the whole bloody cemetery before I found the Egyptian Revival gates. It was a lovely day in America's first landscaped or garden cemetery. Back to Bill's and then off to have supper with Alix Reiskind and her family.

Next morning, Bill and I went to the Institute of Contemporary Art to see the Roni Horn show. It was really wonderful and the most sublime moments were in the narrow gallery with the audio piece: Roni Horn "reciting" the lines from the bottom of the water photographs. The gallery overlooks the harbor and the clouds were settling in on the northern part of Boston.


Bill went off to work and I went to Calamus Bookstore for a while and then back to Bill's and then took off for home. I had decided that I'd somehow get to New York City to see the Dijon mourners and "Belles Heures" at the Met. I had mentioned to Hugh Wilburn who has a new country house and pottery studio in Great Barrington that I might come by and we finally connected ... by email, from Fuel coffee house in Great Barrington. Great evening but the post-midnight bedtime maybe wasn't too wise.

We awoke to snow flakes in the air but I got to the Met a little after noon. It was tough to be at the Met and realize that it is no longer always there for me, just a subway ride away. Especially when there are special shows but just the permanent collection takes my breath away. I stopped to see some of my special favorites in the medieval galleries and then took off for Alfred. The rain stopped after a while and the sky was clear for the last hour or so. The sunset was magnificent but I was glad to stop driving.

FLW for the main course and dessert

Darwin Martin House, Buffalo, NY, at the ARLIS/WNY meeting on April 8th


Zimmerman House, Manchester, NY, as a personal tour before the ARLIS/NA conference in Boston, April 22nd

giants, sardines, and apples

Who would have thought when I took this picture in January that I would be reading about how the Beach Cliff sardine packing plant in Prospect Harbor, Maine would be closing in April? Today's New York times has an article entitled "A clattering heritage of Maine's industrial past closes in on a final spin."

A 70-year old woman who wasn't ready to retire, Nancy Harrington, is quoted: I don't know how to do anything else [other than packing sardines]. I don't want nothing to do with computers. I don't have one, I don't want to learn. No, sir. I'm going to do my scrapbooking and quilting."

And thinking about computers and the passage of time, there was also an article in the paper about the lines of fanatics ready to buy an iPad. "Matthew Thouvenin, 26, was born the year Apple introduced the Macintosh ..." But wait, that means that I've had a Macintosh almost as long as Matthew has been alive. I got my first one -- a 128K with external drive -- in the spring of 1985. Now on my fourth, a MacBook ... and still loving it.

ideal villas

As we rode in the cab from the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel to Rathbun's Restaurant for supper last Saturday night, we passed an interesting building. There it rose on a bluff overlooking downtown Atlanta, rising over the multi-lane street. The style is gentle deconstructivism (if that's not an oxymoron). The view from the big windows (toward the West) must be glorious at sunset.



After I got back to Alfred, I sent a note to VRA-L to see if anyone knew anything about the building. Frank Jackson, Emory librarian who had done some of the local arrangements for the VRA conference responded with a real estate advertisement for the house which is a 1929 or 1930 garage-like building with a villa atop. Now if you know me very well or not even very well, you know I love the works of Palladio and he is, of course, Mr Villa. Frank also led me to the post-pessimist who blogged about the house in 2006. (The pictures above are from the blog entry.) And that led to another Atlantan who blogs about unusual architectural sightings. Love this social networking. If somebody with an extra half million buys the house, I'd love to come visit in real time.

And thinking about villas and ideal homes, I was reminded again of the plan that Arnold Klukas drew for me twenty-five years ago. Arnie was a medievalist and architectural history grad student at Pitt when I worked there just after library school. We loved to talk about architecture and things medieval. He one time doodled up a residence for me, actually "being a library with house attached." The house started around the remains of a 1350 cloister and the last part was a new brutalist garage from circa 1970. Of course, by now, there would be new wings in pomo and decon and Ungers- or Krier-influenced late modern, and perhaps a neotraditionalist development down the road, out of sight (I hope).