Category Archives: Architecture

Pictures of buildings

The Jackling Mansion

Great pictures of this controversial building

Click here for a wonderful selection of pictures of the Jackling Mansion, Steve Jobs’s home that he very much wants to pull down to build something useable.

Can’t say I blame him looking at these. It’s what I think of as a Wrecking Ball Special. Jobs probably needs to step up the bribes, er …. computer donations, if he’s serious about tearing down this eyesore which looks more like the No Tell Motel than any mansion I have seen. Once, a long time ago in America, a man’s home was his castle to do with as he saw fit. No more, it seems.

You can see more of Haeber’s work here.

Bricked up

Why do I smell government at work here?

It’s not like only modern architects and builders have the sole franchise on boo-boos:


5D, 24-105mm at 97mm, 1/3000, f/5.6, ISO 400

Now what kind of twit would do a thing like that to a beautiful facade?

Could it be because the building belongs to the local government here in Paso Robles, CA?

Maybe the person doing this was concerned about a Window Tax – something which wouldn’t surprise me given the composition of our local government here and its greed for tax revenues. But wait a minute, no government would tax itself, right? And how could all that material and labor cost be cheaper than a pane of glass?

Eureka! I get it now. The bricklayer was the mayor’s brother!

The Carnegie Library

The idea of a great man.

Paso Robles Carnegie Library, built in 1908.
5D, 24-105 at 105mm, 1/500, f/6.7, ISO200

It’s said that the true measure of philanthropy is not how much you give but how much you have left. By that measure, Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) is the greatest philanthropist the world has seen, having given away almost all of his fortune at the time of his death. Inflation makes comparisons difficult, but if you figure wealth as a percentage of Gross National Product, Carnegie ranks fifth in America, after Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Astor and Girard (d. 1831 – trade and banking).

Carnegie mostly gave his money to build public libraries in the United States, England and his native Scotland. While I see libraries as essentially a waste of real estate in a digital world (the Library of Congress could be digitized for $1 billion, the space put to better use) there is an undeniable charm to a fine library and the tactile enjoyment of good books.

The small town of Paso Robles, a stone’s throw from my home in Templeton in central California, has a pretty town square graced with a Carnegie Library. Sadly, the brick building was damaged in the earthquake a few years ago and the City has finally come around to fixing the damage. While the whole is still surrounded with chain-link fencing, it’s possible to see the results of the rebuilding from a distance.

Many would denigrate Carnegie for his use of low paid labor in his steel mills near Pittsburgh. To me, the choices are simple. You take one or two generations of the poor and stupid, exploit them horribly and confer a priceless gift on the world. The next generation now has no excuse for being either poor or stupid. Or you do nothing and the poor and stupid continue being just that. It’s your choice, but there’s little arguing with the benefits of the Carnegie way.

A great man and a beautiful piece of architecture. Check out the brand, spanking new copper piping in the snap above. Gorgeous.

Except for a very small tweak in Photoshop to fix perspective, the picture has had no post processing.

NYC Architecture – some snaps

Rounding out the Manhattan thing.

Here are some snaps of New York architecture, taken over the years.


Guggenheim Museum, Fifth Avenue


Old and new


MoMA


SoHo


Park Avenue


The Look building reflected in the Helmsley Palace


Sixth Avenue

A fine primer on architectural style is How to Read Buildings – if you want to regale friends with the differences between an architrave and a muntin, this one is for you.

Here’s another worth checking out if Art Deco is your thing: