architecture – Page 102

Necropolis de Colon, Havana

December 29, 2012August 18, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure5 Comments

“Necropolis de Colon, Havana, Cuba,” 2010, by Carol Highsmith, via the Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón [Christopher Columbus] was founded in 1876. The 140-acre cemetery is located in the Vedado neighbourhood of Havana, Cuba, and holds more than 500 family vaults, mausoleums, and chapels.

Carol M. Highsmith is a contemporary photographer who has specialized in documenting architecture and landscape — high and low — in all 50 American states. Her influences are Frances Benjamin Johnston and Dorothea Lange. You can read more about her life here.

Highsmith is donating her life’s work — more than 100,000 images — copyright-free to the Library of Congress. Many of her images are printed in the distinctive black and white style shown here.

A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space – a place not just set apart but reverberant – and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.

— Michael Pollan

Vintage landscape: more snow in Washington, D.C.

December 26, 2012January 23, 2014 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

“Woman and girl standing in icy square, Washington, D.C.,” 1889, by Uriah Hunt Painter, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Uriah Hunt Painter, 1837-1900, took a number of snapshot photographs of his neighborhood around Franklin Square and of downtown Washington using the first Kodak cameras. Painter was a businessman and retired newspaper reporter.

“[The p]hoto shows a woman and a young girl posing mid-square with bundles. The two may be Painter’s wife, Melinda Avery Painter, and older daughter, Eleanor, returning from a marketing trip. Or perhaps Painter took their portrait because the girl is holding another Kodak – exemplifying the growing corps of amateur photographers who took advantage of Eastman’s simple box camera.”

— from the LoC online catalog

Above: “Market scene, Washington, D.C., snow view,” 1889, by Uriah Hunt Painter. I don’t know which square is pictured in these photos.

Above: “Franklin Square, Washington, D.C., snow view,” 1989, by Uriah Hunt Painter.

Today’s quote

Pope’s famous lines, in his “Epistle to the Earl of Burlington,” on ‘the genius of the place,’ . . . surely evoke a conception of The Garden as an epiphany. For Pope, ‘the genius of the place’ does not refer, as it does for many later writers, to the ambiance or natural setting of a garden: rather, it is that which ‘Now breaks, or now directs, the intending lines’ and ‘Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.’ Palpable, here is a sense of The Garden as both a response to and an exemplification of something beyond the control and invention of human beings.

— David E. Cooper, from A Philosophy of Gardens
(Thanks to View from Federal Twist.)

Vintage landscape: the national tree

December 20, 2012January 23, 2014 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

On December 19, 1939 — in the photo above — the White House was being decorated for Christmas. But the “gayly colored” lights on the wreath and trees would not be lit until Christmas Eve when President Roosevelt would also light the “community Xmas tree.”

At that time, what is now known as the National Christmas Tree was called the National Community Christmas Tree (I like that).

For most of the 1930s, the tree was installed in Lafayette Park, on the north side of the White House. In the photo below, workers (in suits) decorate the 1937 tree on December 23.

However, the first national tree had been placed on The Ellipse (also its current location), on the south side of the White House, in 1923 (below).

In the early 1920s, according to Wikipedia, “The Society for Electrical Development (an electrical industry trade group) was looking for a way to encourage people to purchase more electric Christmas lights and use electricity, and [Frederick Morris] Feiker [past editor of Electrical World] suggested that President Calvin Coolidge personally light the tree as a way of giving Christmas lights prominence and social cachet.”

The 48′ tall balsam fir was cut and donated by Middlebury College in the President’s home state of Vermont. The Electric League of Washington donated the 2,500 red, green, and white lights.

President Coolidge lit the tree on Christmas Eve without making any remarks (below). A two-hour music concert was then held. Wikipedia notes that “after the white residents of the city had dispersed, African American residents of the city were permitted on the park grounds to see the National Christmas Tree.”

On December 17, 1924 (below), a live “community” tree was planted in Sherman Park (just southeast of the White House). This had become necessary after Coolidge, speaking before the American Forestry Association that April, had criticized cutting trees for Christmas decorations. (The national tree had to be replaced in 1929 and has been replaced many times since. From the early 50s to the early 70s, cut trees were used.)

Below is a rather solemn moment from the lighting. The Coolidges’ son had died of blood poisoning earlier in the year, and a new Christmas carol, “Christmas Bells” — dedicated to Mrs. Coolidge — was performed at the ceremony.

Wikipedia has an interesting complete history of the National Christmas Tree here. Two more facts from the article:

“During the 1931 ceremony, a buzzer went off when Hoover lit the tree at 5:00 p.m. Because the button he pressed was not actually connected to the electricity, the buzzer alerted another official to actually light the tree. The button the president pushed would not be reconnected to actual electricity again until 1980.”

In 1932, “loudspeakers connected to a phonograph were concealed in the branches of the tree, and Christmas carols were played every night from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. until New Year’s Day. The Singing Tree was a hit with the public, and although music and choirs continued to perform each year, the tradition of the Singing Tree lasted for several more decades.”

Facts about this year’s tree are here.

Photo Sources:

1. and 2. Photos by Harris & Ewing via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

3. to 8. National Photo Company collection via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Season’s Greetings

December 19, 2012April 13, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

Sorry to have disappeared for so long. I went outside to organize my garden by color and got a little obsessed with the process, coming in too tired to blog. I’ll share some photos as soon as the plants recover enough to look like anything.

My daughter Laura visited the U.S. Botanic Garden next to the Capitol in Washington, D.C., last week and sent me these photos of its holiday display, “Season’s Greenings.”

A model of the U.S. Capitol building at the U.S. Botanic Garden. All photos by Laura Koran.

I guess this makes her my first ‘guest blogger.’

In additions to wreaths, garlands, and poinsettias, the indoor display features model trains running by fairy dwellings in an enchanted forest.

The design company Applied Imagination also created models of many of Washington’s landmark buildings (and one fountain) using dried plant materials (supported by acrylic foam boards).

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The show will be open to the public through January 1, 2013, and admission is free.

(a little) Miscellany

There’s an interesting behind-the-scenes video of the U.S. Botanic Garden’s year-long preparations for its “Season’s Greenings” display here.

This video is not terribly recent — from The Washington Post on December 1 — but I thought artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s take on the season’s traditional tree “lighting” was kind of a hoot.

The New York Times had an article last week, here, about the origins of the punch wassail (the word comes from the Middle English phrase waes hael, to your health) and the carol “Here we come a-wassailing ….” They’re actually about singing to the health of trees, particularly apple trees.

“The historian Roy Christian, in his 1966 book, Old English Customs, described the apple wassailing that was still taking place in several villages in England’s West Country: ‘The villagers form a circle round the largest apple tree in the selected orchard. Pieces of toast soaked in cider are hung in the branches for robins, who represent the ‘good spirits’ of the tree. The leading wassailer utters an incantation and shotgun volleys are fired through the branches to frighten away the evil spirits. Then the tree is toasted in cider and urged in song to bring forth much fruit.'”

James Golden’s Federal Twist garden in western New Jersey is just as gorgeous in early winter as in all the other seasons. Please take a look here.

A study in steps: mission dome

November 13, 2012November 22, 2012 Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

Steps to the dome of Mission San José de Tumacácori at Tumacácori National Historical Park, 1937. The park is in the upper Santa Cruz River Valley of southern Arizona.

The photos are part of an Historic American Buildings Survey, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The mission was built in the late 18th century by Franciscan Fathers and local Indian labor. In the early 19th century, Apache Indians attacked and drove away the priests, and by mid-century, the buildings were in ruins. Preservation efforts began in 1908. The building still exists as a National Historic Landmark.

ADDENDUM: There is another image of the mission and more information about the surrounding park in this New York Times article, here.