There are a few private houses in the North Jersey town where I live that are peaches, too: • The Paramount Starlet House, a gem of an L.A.-style art deco apartment building, completely out of place in Northern NJ. I can just see Betty Grable and Ann Sheridan sunbathing outside . . . • The Old Amberson Place. “Hot ’n’ cold runnin’ watah, upstaihs an’ down.” Lovely cream-and-white Victorian cottage, with wrap-around porch, turrets, and all the trimmings. • The Edward Gorey House. It’s Just. That. Grisly. A wonderfully grim 1880s house that I would love to live in, so I could be the Scary Old Woman in the neighborhood. Ooops, too late . . .
The Monadanock is cool, I love the massiveness of the load bearing walls on the N end, contrasted with the sttel skeleton addition on the S side. And the interior really sends you back in time. http://www.ci.chi.il.us/Landmarks/M/Monadnock.html
I’m a big fan of Art Deco. I grew up going to see The Empire State Building (not to mention seeing it in King Kong). I used to build it out of my blocks as a kid. The Chrysler Building is also classic Art Deco, and a favorite of Pepper Mill’s, with its stylized gargoyles and square radiator-cap top.
They’ve gotta be great buildings. They use them both as phallic symbols during the opening credits for Sex in the City.
You mention art deco – also one of my fave styles.
Tomorrow I am travelling to Cincinnati for work (one of my regular jaunts). As usu, I am booked into the Omni Netherland (now Hilton) one of the most impressive art deco interiors I have ever seen. Tho the rooms can be kinda dumpy, the lobby and bar give me goose bumps!
Plus, you get the fun of staying in the Carew Tower complex – immortalized as the Phlegm building housing WKRP!
And the rooms are not cookie cutters. I always ask for a corner room. You never know exactly what you’ll get other than workable windows on 2 (or 3!) walls.
I am looking at The Empire State & Chrysler buildings right now and they never cease to amaze me. I love the way the light hits them during certain times of day.
I love Norman Foster’s Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building in Hong Kong, designed with weird angles because he enlisted a Feng Shui geomancer (not that I think he believes in that sort of stuff, but the people for whom he was building it do). It appears unprepossessing from a distance, like the back of a fridge, but grows on you bigtime, especially in its detail.
And of course there is nothing in the world to compare with the Taj Mahal. It amazes at every scale. The closer you get, the more astonishing it becomes.
I love the Chrysler Building. Gunslinger described it as “the Very Tall Deco Extravaganza,” which just about sums up its appeal to me. I adore Art Deco.
I kind of like the really old stuff.
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*Taj Mahal - Yeah, its a tomb, but a really beautiful one.
*Coliseum - A lot of people died there, but it is till something to see.
*St. Peter’s Basilica - Between the size and the artwork, it is just awe inspiring.
*Rhode Island State Capitol building - Not as old as the others (By a millenium or so :)), but still really neat.
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And does anyone know what 3 of the above 4 have in common?
This may seem like an odd choice, but I’m going to go for the Cathedral of Saint Paul, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
It’s big and screwy in the best Beaux Arts tradition, and it comes raring up out of the ground in the most startling way. “Who the heck put THAT there?” you think. Everything about it is HUGE and overbearing…enormous stone Jesuses lurch out overhead, saints have massive, veiny hands, clutching awful swords.
And I adore Frank Lloyd Wright’s residences (not the Usonian crap, but the Prairie style buildings).
I ought to have a longer list–I’m married to a former architect and we’ve got architecture books all over the house. I was just persuing a Gwathmey-Siegel book while sitting on the commode this morning. But my mind is empty.
Ever since I was 16, I had wanted to work for a newspaper. But only when I visited Chicago for the first time did I know what I wanted the building I worked in to look like.
Behold: Tribune Tower, the epitome of what a newspaper building should be. The area of the building near the ground has chunks of rocks from other historic buildings embedded in it. Inside the main lobby are engraved some of the best quotes about freedom of thought and press ever spoken or written. A Gothic materpiece.
I go there several times a year. Sometimes I’ll just walk around outside and look at it from different angles. Sometimes I’ll take the tour (again) and close my eyes and imagine that Mr. Jefferson is upstairs and will be down in a bit and we can talk about gardening, or how the weather’s been (he kept detailed weather accounts for decades), or politics, or philosophy, or literature, or gossip. He can take the map down off the wall in the entrance hall and tel me about Lewis and Clarke, or show me the mastadon skull. To spend a couple of hours with him, then be treated to a little entertainment by his children and grandchildren, then to have a dinner with him.
For all his faults, and there were many, visiting Monticello and spending some time with Thomas Jefferson would be about the most wonderful experience I could have.
