Our year in photos – 2009
The year featured international travel, musical awards, swimming, and more.
All posts filed under: Heritage Travel
Is This A Great Country or What?
If you have had it up to here with screaming right-wing talk show hosts or pontificating left-wing bloggers or just three days of rain, I have the perfect antidote: the Vintage Roadside 2009 Road Trip Slide Show. Each year Jeff and Kelly from Vintage Roadside travel the back roads from Portland, Oregon to the host city of the National Preservation Conference and take pictures and blog about the experience. (Vintage Roadside makes great t-shirts that honor the wonderful mom-and-pop roadside attractions, motor courts, motels, tiki lounges, drive-in restaurants, bowling alleys and roller-skating rinks found along America’s back roads.) This year the trip took them to Nashville, Tennessee. You will laugh out loud, you will be amazed at the quirky attractions that still remain on America’s roadsides, and you’ll marvel at what a diverse country we live in. So take my recommendation – visit their slide show and spend a few minutes with this great country. Thanks Jeff and Kelly. It was wonderful to spend a bit of time with you in Nashville. Thanks for what …
Why architecture matters: I.M. Pei and Henry Cobb’s Hancock Tower
I’m reading Paul Goldberger’s new book Why Architecture Matters. As you would expect from Paul, it is a smart, well-written work that is designed to help the reader interested in buildings “come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually.” I’ve already come across numerous passages and examples that resonate, but last evening I was reading his take on I.M. Pei and Henry Cobb’s John Hancock Tower on Copley Square in Boston and was reminded of my last impression of that building when Andrew, Claire and I were visiting the city in March 2008. Paul, a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer and a trustee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is describing the Hancock Tower in comparison to New York’s Seagram Building and G.M. Building. All three are postwar American landmarks. It was great fun to introduce Claire and Andrew to Copley Square when we visited Boston in 2008. We toured the great H.H. Richardson-designed Trinity Church, of course, and took …
Christ Church Lutheran Minneapolis: A Sacred Place Captured in Photos
I am in Minneapolis/St. Paul for two days of meetings on saving Modernist and Recent Past places. Minnesota and the Great Lakes region has a strong collection of buildings and landscapes from the Modernist period, so we’re in town to work with and learn from our local partners. Last evening’s opening session was held in a beautiful space: the Eliel Saarinen designed Christ Church Lutheran sanctuary. His son Eero designed the adjoining educational wing. This supreme example of the Modernist movement is Minnesota’s only National Historic Landmark listed for its architectural importance rather than as a site of historic significance. The church – now working with a newly formed Friends of Christ Church Lutheran group – has done a wonderful job of preservation and stewardship of this place. I spent a great deal of time last evening with Pastor Kristine Carlson, who opened with a moving testimony as to why this place matters. As I said in my opening remarks, preservation generally happens when people – not necessarily professional preservationists – see the connection between …
From the Stage of the Ryman Auditorium…
Even for a guy who gets to work with some amazing people and visit some of the country’s most wonderful historic places, yesterday was an extraordinary day. (And not just because I passed 10,000 visitors to More to Come…the DJB Blog – thank you readers.) Nope, the picture says it all. I was privileged to open the National Preservation Conference from the stage of the historic Ryman Auditorium. For a bluegrass loving preservationist to have a chance to speak from the place where Earl Scruggs came onstage some 60 years ago with Bill Monroe to play White House Blues and give birth to bluegrass music was an honor. To be able to tell 2,000 conference attendees why this place matters was a thrill. To be able to hear the bluegrass I’d chosen over the Ryman’s speakers for the 30 minutes before we kicked off the conference was just a rush. I knew it was going to be a great evening when the Laurie Lewis tune Who Will Watch the Home Place? – with its haunting …
Union Station: A Personal History and a Preservation Success Story
Having just arrived in Nashville for the 2009 National Preservation Conference, I find myself in the lobby of the Union Station Hotel waiting for a room and for my meetings to begin. That left me time to think…which can be dangerous. Union Station is a Nashville landmark. It is a beautiful old pile of a building and the lobby (see photo) is stunning. But I think it is a landmark and was – in the end – saved from the wrecking ball because it has so many personal connections to people in Middle Tennessee. Take me, for instance. My parents were part of the post-war (WWII) marriage boom that begat the well-documented baby boom. Both were from the small town of Franklin, located about 20 miles from Nashville. My father had just graduated from Vanderbilt and he and my mom were married in the First Baptist Church in Franklin. Before beginning his life-long career with the Tennessee Valley Authority, my father and his new bride had a honeymoon to take. Luckily, they had relatives (my …
Wright in Wisconsin
Over the past two days the National Trust Council has toured a remarkable collection of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture located in Wisconsin. Along the way we saw icons and surprises. The surprises came first. We went to see a grouping of six houses on Burnham Street in Milwaukee that were designed by Wright in 1916 for what today would be called “affordable housing.” I knew about his later Usonian houses, such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Pope-Leighey House, which were focused on the same audience. But decades earlier Wright designed over 950 plans for “American System Built Homes.” Approximately 25 were built and six survive along Burnham Street. The Wright in Wisconsin organization owns several and has restored one which is open to the public. It provided us with a fascinating look at how Wright approached architect-designed houses on a budget, as you’ll see in the photos below. Yesterday we visited three more Wright buildings. The first was Herbert Fisk Johnson’s home in Racine, Wingspread. This was Wright’s “last” Prairie style home and …
Milwaukee City Hall – Looking Back, Looking Forward
If Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum is a symbol of the city’s optimism for the 21st century (see my previous post), then the City Hall is a fine example of the community’s spirit and optimism for the 20th. But not content to remain in the past, City Hall is primed – after a 1988 interior restoration and a beautiful exterior restoration completed in 2009 – to showcase this unheralded gem of a midwestern city. We were meeting across the street yesterday morning at the Pabst Theatre – another fine preservation project – when a number of us walked over to see what a colleague described as “an atrium you don’t want to miss.” Man, was he right! The pictures here don’t really do the interior justice, but you’ll just have to take my word. This well in the central section of the building in the portion behind the tower is 20 feet by 70 feet and rises the full eight floors. Enjoy the photos of City Hall (plus one I’ve thrown in of the Pabst Theatre). …
Moved by Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum
Oh my…what a building, what a sculpture, what a space, what an experience! The power of place indeed. Just two weeks after seeing his bridges in Dublin, I had the opportunity to visit the Santiago Calatrava-designed Milwaukee Museum of Art today. I had seen the building on a drive-by a few years ago, but this was my first time to see it both inside and out. The internet is awash with both images and verbiage about this wonderful space. I’ll only quote the dean of the school of architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (and a member, along with our host, of the selection committee for the building) who told our tour group today, “We got Calatrava when he was unknown and yet at the peak of his creative powers – sort of like the early Beatles, before they became superstars and started adding too many orchestrations.“ What you’ll see below is a series of photos showing the “flapping” of the beautiful white wings (really a sunscreen) from open to close. Extraordinary as that sounds, …
This Place Matters – Vote for Your Favorites
What do you get when you ask the public to download a simple sign, find a place that is important to them, photograph themselves in front of that place holding the sign and then download it to the Internet? You get This Place Matters. More than 2,000 people took the National Trust for Historic Preservation (full disclosure: my employer) up on their offer, and the results are fascinating. When you have some time, go to the site, click on the slide show, and sit back and watch. I guarantee you’ll love it! And now, the Trust is having a This Place Matters photo contest where you can go online and vote once per day for your favorite This Place Matters photo. The top three photographers win a digital camera. (Full disclosure: I am not eligible.) You can guess which photo I’m voting for: Miller’s Grocery (shown above) in Christiana, Tennessee. (Full disclosure: I do not know the photographer or the subject.) I just love this picture. Perhaps it is because it comes from my home …
MORE TO COME... 