Shalom Formalism

So thanks to Felix from Pin-up we have the synagogue that I was talking about just before,and as noted it is not by P.J. but by William N. Berger. There is a kind of striking similarity between the Roofless church and the Belly Synagogue (melting synagogue? fat synagogue?) so maybe the ghost of P.J. had something to do with this? or maybe the other way around? Or maybe there where no ghosts but it was all a happy coincidence? In any case , the scaffolding at the bottom kind of ruins the effect of the building, but I guess those tiles are falling onto poor shopper passerby.Google doesn't seem to know too much about Berger and I'm just wondering if he did any more wacky buildings like the synagogue on 47-9 White St. (In fact I'm not wondering, I'm just closet-crowdsourcing again)

Harmony is the New Crazy

This is the crazy church Phillip Johnson did in New Harmony, Indiana, and of course it's called New Harmony too. Looks to me like a handkerchief filled up with hot air and dressed up as a building, but of course it couldn't be filled with air because it doesn't have a roof silly me. I was able to find images of the church itself, which is mostly know as "The Roofless Church" and I can imagine Mr PJ presenting the project going all "Roofs are SO last year" or "Roofless is the post-new- modernism". Nobody though seems to post pics of the fabulous gold and black heraldic overdecorated entrance gate. On the subject of the bitterly missed Phillip Johnson, if any of you has pics of the amazing synagogue he has done in downtown New York please please send me some (yes I'm finally CrowdSourcing yoo-hoo) . Its one of my favorite buildings ever and each time I photograph it the camera goes bust or I loose the memory card or my laptop dies or something. The Synagogue (I think) in on Franklin street, or maybe White or somewhere in the Tribeca area, and I think it is of the same period as the church, like 1960 or something. (actually the synagogue was done by William N. Berger as per my successful crowdsourcing)

Notes on Kriti

Seems I'm calling all my travel posts "notes from where I was" but it's just too much work to find sub-themes or concepts and try to group things together etc. Maybe just a big old post will cover everything, so here's my week in Krete, in total randomness:

This house was cut by a road, but it insisted on staying the house where we stayedthe view

sun setting over Messaraa weird abandoned basement, on the beach

the mostly organised landscape

strangest balcony on a thin building
one of the rooms
almost from the right angle this could be elegant
a rock and a churchan illegaly extended church?
a pretend cafe
a pile of sand and pebblesbeach for a day
a hexagonal club called hexagon
snails on a tree
a tree in our "garden", (and an eagle if you look closely)
a funny garden in the village close by
for some reason I had to drive back and take a picture of this
a miniature replica of a house in the museum. Apparently in the house there is a female deity, and peepig from the roof is a dog and two guys, and it looks to me like the guys are kissing, definetly very juicy. By the way the Archaeological museum of Heraclion is one of the the most amazing museums ever, full of totally amazing stuff. Right now it is undergoing renovations so we saw only a small fabulous selection.
another miniature house, this time on a beachsmall rocks can look biga modern monastery with just one byzantine column
the abandoned Xenia Motel on the north coastgreat palm trees in the parking lot
funny tourist miniatures saying goodbye

Krete is Nevada: Double Negative revisited

A couple of posts back, on the melting glaciers trip, I thought of Michael Heizer's Double Negative piece. Well piece is maybe not exactly the right word for an earthwork, but why not. Anyway the glaciers's apparent movement reminded me of this, which I only saw from an airplane.

"Double Negative consists of two trenches cut into the eastern edge of the Mormon Mesa, northwest of Overton, Nevada in 1969-70. The trenches line up across a large gap formed by the natural shape of the mesa edge. Including this open area across the gap, the trenches together measure 1,500 feet long, 50 feet deep, and 30 feet wide (457 meters long, 15.2 meters deep, 9.1 meters wide). 240,000 tons (218,000 tonnes) of rock, mostly rhyolite and sandstone, was displaced in the construction of the trenches"
Now in Krete and a lot of the landscape looks just like Nevada.

Rooms that say U.S.A.

Found this funny book amongst the stacks of forgotten magazines from the 70's and 80's in the house where we're staying in Krete. I could not resist the design genealogy tree, photographed under a real tree,
nor the super complex leopard plus faux bamboo plus Chagall plus everything else you find around rooms

red white and ancient?

architecture is useful too, sometimes

Hysterical Ruins

The Palace of Knossos is the main tourist attraction in central Krete. It was the fabulous palace of king Minos or whatever that got destroyed Phuket-style by a huge Greek tsunami. Anyway the palace looks like it looked great, though we will never really know because of the ultra flamboyant reconstruction by Arthur Evans. Mr Evans decided to really show everybody what Knossos looked like, but in truth he showed what he thought it looked like, and then proceed to reconstruct the whole thing. Actually, even more bizarre, he did not reconstruct the palace it self, but a ruin of the palace. So instead of seeing the ruins of the palace now we see the fake ruins of a presumed palace. These fake ruins of the presumed palace are further faked by having been built in fake materials: Wood looks like wood but it is actually concrete. Actaully it looks like concrete that was cast in wood, but when you touch it you realize that the wood effect is painted onto something that is way too smooth to be concrete... maybe it's porcelain made to look like concrete that pretends to be wood?a cowboy garbage can?

ancient Pacman?This is not a ruin, or a reconstruction of a ruin, or a fake ruin of a presumed house. It is just a house for a ruin.