Little Joys Of Life

Egg with butter and spinach on bagel.

Following Frank

Being in the US is good opportunity to visit some of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright is an architect I always admired. I came across his buildings only through literature and books; I have never actually been inside the buildings he had designed, until now.

So far, I have been in two of his buildings: the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Beth Shalom Synagogue in Philadelphia. The Falling Water - another famous building designed by Wright - is apparently closed at this time of year because of the weather, so sadly I will not be visiting this one, which is considered to be the highlight of Wright's works.

Stepping inside Wright's designs is quite a strange experience. You would expect, having learned a lot about them, that upon entering his buildings, for something dramatic to happen. However, nothing could have been more ordinary. Both the Guggenheim and the Synagogue are mortal buildings and not immortal like what was described in the books. What is more, the buildings are not well kept, they are honestly in quite a bad shape. For instance, the Synagogue's ceiling, formerly made entirely of glass is now covered with semi-transparent material blocking the intended view to the sky and according the tour guide it, nowadays, 'leaks'. Also, the Guggenheim's white and supposedly smooth facade is actually quite wavy and coarse because of the decaying plaster.
At a different level, the Guggenheim's famous spiral ramp is a bad way to exhibit art, I think; it does more for the architecture than for the art. People don't visit the museum because it has paintings by Picasso, Modigliani, Malevich and Kandinsky but rather because it is a Wright's building. And that, for itself, misses the point.

But Frank Llyod Wright was more than what his buildings are and that's why I forgive him. I think the greatest thing about his work is that it changed as time went on and he had such a variety of ideas, which shows that he, both as a person and as an architect, was in search of something. At some point in his life he acknowledged that he was not the best; by the time he was building his village houses, Le Courbosier and Mies Van Der Rohe had ventured the modernist discipline and he knew that he needs to adapt himself and to develop. By doing so he acknowledged his mortality and thus he became immortal. 

Farewell, New York

I spent ten golden days in New York. It has been indeed a phenomenal place to be in. For some unexplained reason I felt attached to this city and it was quite emotional to spend the last night and eventually to pack my bags again and leave. 

I must say that however the compensations New York has to offer it is still not perfect. For one thing, its streets are filled with hardships which is always not a good sign. Beggars and homeless people are simply everywhere and particularly at nightfalls you can hardly walk down a street without being asked if 'you've got a dollar'. And there are always these horrible tourists (such as myself) who would subliminally take their cameras out to 'document this phenomenon' to find that the powerless beggar or homeless had raised his hand to cover his face so as protect his privacy.

Also, the rhythm of life in the city is so hurried. People walk so fast for their destinations and they are always late. It seems that people have no time at all to stop, draw breath and ponder about what they are doing and why. Because of this it seems only natural that while walking down a street to get across the path of a huge, dark, bearded stranger and to mistakingly hit him and for him to shout at you 'come on!' as if this is the last thing he was expecting to happen to him this day, as if being alive was not hard enough.

And, walking through Times Square during the night for the first time, magnificent as it may seem, might just as well make you feel uneasy. Changing advertisements in all colours, passing news updates, flashes of light from all directions; my mind was too slow to decide where to look even after I visited the place for the fourth time. Indeed, capitalism at its peak.

So why did I feel emotional when leaving the city? Why the last night in New York seemed like the final night of a period that would never come again? Well, I think it's because New York might be also the only place in the world in which a group of five people will enter the subway train like all the other passengers and when surprisingly they find that the people in the train car are friendly enough they will take their musical instruments out of their bags and begin to play and sing for the passengers, revealing that they are actual musicians. I was lucky enough to have sat in that underground train heading back to my hotel, and when the train eventually halted in the 96th Street Station, I got off it, onto the platform. The doors of the train closed and I could no longer hear the serenade which was still going inside. The train took off, leaving me standing on the platform, as if I have just been spitted out of a fabulous dream.

Farewell, New York. I am sure we will meet again sometime.

Death Walks

One great way to move from one place to another in New York is using the subway, of course. It's so quick and clear that it hardly needs time to get used to. Having said that, however, you should keep in mind that by using the subway in order to see the many monuments of the city you miss the whole point of wandering and discovering it. So, to avoid that, you need to walk a lot. The walks in New York are apparently so famous for being challenging that people call them the 'death walks', and rightly so.

The Parks

However urban and dense New York is, parks and gardens fill it still. New York consists of some of the most beautiful parks I have ever seen. There's no denying that the most important park of all in New York is the Central Park, which due to its vastness, once entering it one feels as if the the city ceases to exist; you might as well be standing in the middle of a friendly forest. The Central Park to New York is what Jerusalem to the three religion... a sacred piece of land.

Also, if you should walk in New York's streets you can find all sorts of obscured gardens. Entirely different in scale than Central Park, these parks are called 'pocket gardens', due to their smallness. These sort of parks are so magical, in my opinion. My affection to these gardens might be because of the surprise in finding them in such an industrial, commercial and hardworking city.

     

John Lennon Remembered

One City, One Group

Mere Players Of The Stage Of New York

Diversity

Uniformity

Starchitecture [see if you can guess]

First Day In New York

It can be mundane, boring even, to experience something for the first time after you've spent a big portion of time anticipating it and thinking how would it actually be when it eventually comes. For the record, I will say that I have never particularly planned, at any point in my life, to visit New York because I desperately wanted to. It can be very fairly said that I wasn't anticipating New York - not at all. But it somehow happened that I ended up there.

"So, what do you think? Do you like it?" I asked my friend, Igor, a short while later, as we were doing our first steps in the city somewhere in the 6th Avenue, heading south, and after neither of us had spoken a word for quite a while, for clearly both of us were in a state of genuine shock for at least the first fifteen minutes after stepping out of the subway station.

"Well, I don't know," were his first words, "I can't see any Nature here. It's blocks upon blocks of buildings. Too much buildings, I think." 

At first, I thought he was serious. Could there possibly be a human soul that could fail to admire what I was seeing? But, at the same time, I couldn't help but sense a certain reluctance in his voice, as if he was saying something which he didn't inwardly believe in, which I took advantage of. 

"Well, you could say that people are Nature and, by which it follows, that these buildings are Nature too, having been created by them."

The day progressed and we managed, quite efficiently, to see so much in so little a time; it was undoubtedly, by far, the day we took the biggest amount of pictures in. I have consciously decided, however, not to include any of them in this post so as to symbolically convey how much I was astounded, and I still am, by what I have seen.

You might say that what I am writing is common knowledge, that everyone knows New York is great, that it is incomparable and that no human soul can fail to admire it. For this I say that I also knew; I knew that I was heading towards the greatest city in the world - but it didn't stop me from writing it.

On The Road

Prochain Arrêt: New York

The Gallery

The National Gallery, a hideous and clumsy-looking building, is actually quite a piece of art for itself if one should only go inside it. Designed by Moshe Safdie, a Canadian-Israeli architect originally from Haifa (an architect I never really went as far as to trust), the building consists of some great collection of dramatic and sophisticated spaces, and is also the home to some great pieces of art; local and international, two-dimensional and three-dimensional, historical and contemporary.

Being a hardcore photography fan and being a professional photographer himself, my friend, Igor, insisted that we go to the contemporary photography section first. But, unfortunately, soon we took it from a gallery representative that this particular section has been shut down some months ago and that it does not exist anymore.

Whether because he was utterly disappointed or whether because he's a born photographer, Igor spent the rest of the evening taking with his camera his own artistic photographs so as to cover up for the lack of them in the Gallery.

Here's the result, brought to you courtesy of Igor Grushko.

      

   

City Stroll