Winterreise

Winter Panorama

As the snow and cold persisted, we felt sort of obliged to go out and capture some more of the fleeting wonderment of nature to save it, as it were, for enjoyment at a later day.  We first took a walk to Bryan Park, a designation where we normally go to get in a 3-mile run.  The park was quite deserted and the trails not yet all ploughed, as you can see from the picture above.  The frozen swimming pool and colorful water slides looked a bit surreal behind the wired fence.  Now that we've done a snowman, we thought we should also attempt a snow angel.  We picked out a pristine, snow-covered slope in the park and Kirk accordingly plopped down and waved his arms in the snow a couple of times.  I won't tell you what he proceeded to do next; you shall find out in the slide show later.  A big, friendly dog came trotting up to us shortly afterwards and unceremoniously wiped out the angelic impression in the snow, while his owner apologetically remarked on the ephemeral nature of things...

Next we drove up to the campus and walked around there.  The winding paths and footbridges over the little stream, not yet frozen, near Bryan House gave the IU campus a rustic charm in the wintry landscape.  Afterwards, we thought we should go a bit farther and see what the countryside looked like at this time.  The scenery on both sides of the hilly road to Nashville was indeed picturesque.  We drove past a couple of the quintessential Indiana red barns brilliantly silhouetted in the snow but couldn't stop to take pictures.  I suggested that we turn up one of the side roads to the T.C. Steele State Historic Park.  The last time we visited the House of the Singing Winds was in the spring last year.  The Steele's home site stood solitarily on a wind-chilled and snow-bound hilltop, a stark contrast to the verdant splendor when we saw it last.  We were surprised to see that the park was still minded by a woman all alone in one of the small buildings on the site. On the way back, Kirk admitted to being a little jaded after seeing so much snow.  

Here is a slide show of the pictures we took of our outing yesterday, accompanied by one of the songs of Schubert's Winterreise.  

  

YOLO

'YOLO', an acronym for "You Only Live Once", a slang term which had a meteoric rise and fall in the youth culture earlier this year, has in time trickled down to the general consciousness of the over-50s crowd, except that in its cross-generational evolution the term has acquired a more heightened sense of urgency.  No matter how rash the impulse is, for the young, to live dangerously, the notion that they may not live forever seldom enters their consciousness.  It's quite different for those over-the-hill, for whom death is no longer a possibility in the distant future but a foreseeable certainty which each one of us has to come to terms with.  As 2012 draws to a close, it seems appropriate to reflect a bit on what 'yolo-ing' may mean for some of us, though I feel rather terrified to do so for fear of sounding trite, which, I'm afraid, is unavoidable as the subject has been very thoroughly treated in both high and low-brow literature.

Holstee Manifesto

You all probably have seen this poster somewhere on the web before.  It expresses the YOLO sentiment, for the not quite die-hard cynic, pretty well, I think.  Make of it what you will, I keep the poster nearby my desk to remind me that my time is rapidly running out and I must not twiddle-twaddle it away.  In addition, I  also think that I need somehow to turn my attention more outward, outside of my own concerns, that is, and step out of my comfort zone, so to speak.  These are a couple of my year-end resolutions anyways.  Thinking about taking stock of one's life, I recently came across a TED talk called "A kinder, gentler philosophy of success" by Alain de Botton, a pop culture "philosopher", which I think may help reduce anxiety for some of us.  Here is another TED talk about doing something one loves by a female Palestinian architect, Suad Amiry, which is fun to listen to.

Here is to you "A More Adventurous Year, YOLO!" 
     

Greetings from Snowmiz

Snowmiz

Inspired by Judy's comments, our jolly snowman in the process of filling out has morphed into a snowmiz and now she is all decked out for a stroll in the park.  She bids you all a Good Day!









12.28.2012 Update:
After a night out in the cold, my snow lady did not fare any worse for wear; I hope she'll last a few more days longer.

    

12.29.2012 Update:
My poor snow lady was almost unrecognizable after another night out.

1.11.2013 Update:
Alas, such is the remains of my snowmiz!

Let it snow!

Merry Day-After-Christmas from Bloomington!

Kirk and I went out for a walk soon after breakfast to take in the snow condition around our neighborhood from the blizzard of Christmas 2012.  We spotted a couple of deer crossing the street into somebody's yard; we hoped they managed to find some shelter somewhere. The snow is forecasted to continue falling until 8 p.m. tonight, which makes for ideal conditions for building a snowman, my first, tomorrow.  Stay tuned.

Color Wheel House

Color Wheel House

"Color Wheel House" is the result of my latest attempt at house design, which I've been working on since August in fits and starts.  For an idle architect, designing houses is probably the easiest way to keep one's potentially marketable skills in tolerable condition and not to suffer them to rust.  As a way to explore the ever-growing arsenal of modeling tools available in software programs such as Autodesk's Revit, which, by the way, can be obtained for free in their educational outreach program, I systematically give myself design challenges, and for this project I explored the design opportunities in a steep site. 

The circular shape of the house grew gradually from a simple long box positioned at the crest of a hill with a mono-sloped roof opening to the south and views.  After several iterations, I settled on a circular shape design for its ability to open up the indoors to a greater panoramic view of the outdoors, to take full advantage of a steep site with spectacular views.  Circular walls, however, present considerable difficulties for modeling and, for that matter, actual construction.  [For the circular curtain walls in this project, I cheated by creating curved walls with glazing material, instead of painstakingly constructing each segmented glazed panel to make up the curved curtain walls.]   

The name, Color Wheel House, was derived from the geometry of the design, not vice versa, and it in turn gave me the idea of painting certain interior focal walls in various colors, loosely in a color wheel fashion.  There are many more ways to explore the color wheel conceit in the interior design but I chose to err on the side of restraint.

The front (north) side of the house is partially obscured and revealed by a series of circular garden walls, some pierced with vertical slots, and anchored in the center by a large deciduous tree with a circular bench built around it.  The house appears to be a one-story structure from the front but it's actually two-stories high, as the ground drops steeply down right along the center line of the house's circular footprint.  The back (south) side of the house is completely transparent but sheltered in the privacy of the thickly wooded surrounding.  A 15-feet wide deck, on both levels, wraps around the south side of the house, extending the indoor space to the outdoor.

The upper level of the house consists of a carport, an open living-dining-kitchen area, a powder room, and the master suite.  A circular staircase, protruding halfway out of the concave facade, is clad in glass which gives way, as the stairs wind down, to a half-circular wall painted bright red.  An exterior staircase on the east end of the deck provides easy vertical access in the back of the house.  

The lower level consists of an open recreational space with a kitchenette at one end, an office, a guest bedroom, a full bath, and generous storage space.  A lap pool is embedded in the lower deck and a small sauna is nestled into the hill side, next to the exterior staircase.  

Here are some computer renderings of the project. I hope you like them -

Upper Level Plan

Lower Level Plan

North Elevation

East Elevation

South Elevation

West Elevation

N-S Section through Spiral Stairs

E-W Section through Entry Court

E-W Section through Exterior Stairs

E-W Section through main public space

Entry Drive

Entry Walk

Front Lawn

Vestibule

Living-Dining Area

Kitchen-Dining Area

Master Bedroom

Master Bath

Family Room - Lower Level

Office - Lower Level

Pool Deck - Lower Level

North-East Perspective

Upper Level Walkthrough

Lower Level Walkthrough

Encore!

Proof of Early Voting

After months' of agonizing uncertainty, the day of reckoning has finally arrived, or has it?  About half of the nation's population of voting age will finally, at the end of today, heaves a collective sigh of relief for the outcome they have been hoping for. Gone also will be the compulsive habit of checking the 538 forecast every 30 minutes hoping to spot the tiniest uptick in its inexorable prediction graph for your candidate and the no less compulsive shelling out of 10, 15 dollars every other day, it seems, in the hope that your modest monetary contribution will help tilt the trend to your side.  But, perhaps it will be safer to hold your breath for a couple of days longer, until, heaven help us, one of the Presidential candidates gracefully concedes defeat.

Obama in acrylic

You can tell from the picture on the left where our hearts lay four years ago; we, Anne, Judy, Greg, Kirk, and I, devoted one of our Art Sundays, on the final weekend before the 2008 General Election, to copying the iconic Hope portrait of Obama.  A lot has changed since that day, both globally and personally -- the most dramatic of which in the latter category was our move away from the town where we lived for over twenty years; and in the former, there are the many natural and man-made disasters around the world and the political turmoils in the middle east.  "Are we better off now than then?" There is no easy answer to this question, but the silliest sort of answer is to lay all the blame or praise at the feet of one person, other than yourself.  

I'm mildly hopeful that my candidate will win this election and plan to be glued to the telly this evening to the bitter end to have the hope confirmed and translated into more than wishful thinking.

   

Fall Colors

Within the past couple of days something in the air seems to have accelerated the arrival of the fall season and triggered the abrupt change of colors of the leaves on all the deciduous trees around us.  Bright yellow, orange, and russet infuse the atmosphere with an eerie golden tint, like the sky at dusk or upon a pending storm.  A sustained wind of about 15+ mph has been blowing over our area since yesterday evening causing the leaves to rain down on the ground like confetti.  I went outside on three separate times this morning to take some pictures of the amazing fall colors.  Here is a slide show I made of the pictures -

Woodstock Place

An Island Unto Herself

The following is a striking passage I heard on my Audiobooks app. last night. I've always thought that it is impossible for one person to really understand another; it couldn't have been said better than this:

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book One, Chapter Three, Night Shadows -
(click the link to hear the passage read)

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?"

Or this, a lighter take on the same theme -

"That is the case with us all, Papa.  One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."--Jane Austen, Emma

A more positive view on the human condition is expressed in John Donne's No Man is An Island - 

No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thine own

or of thine friend's were.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

What is your take?

Across the ponds

Proxy Agency

I went with Kirk on a short jaunt across the ponds over the weekend to Toronto; he was there to give a talk at York University while the main attraction for me was the chance to visit with Bob and Claudine, friends from the Berkeley era I haven't seen for 10 or more years. True to the soul of an urbanite, they reside close to downtown Toronto, in an area called Cabbagetown, with a cat named Hector whom they rescued (with the owner's consent), from been woefully cooped up at a neighbor's attic. 

Out to pasture

I managed to pack in quite a few sight-seeing activities for our short stay.  Here are some of the highlights.  Taking advantage on our central location, soon after we arrived, Bob and Claudine took us on a quick walk around the Financial District.  At the heart of it is the Toronto-Dominion Center which comprises a group of six towers, connected on the ground by an open plaza and green space, by Mies van der Rohe, with their facades marked by Mies's inimitable, evenly spaced, soaring, slender, steel mullions painted in black.  These stark-looking buildings are somewhat mollified by a group of resting cow sculptures calmly taking in the hustle and bustle of the life around it.  

Allen Lambert Galleria

a conditioned urban alley

We next came upon the Allen Lambert Galleria, by Santiago Calatrava, a light-filled insertion into the interstitial spaces in the tightly built urban fabric.  It joins a diverse group of existing buildings under a canopy created by a series of parabolic steel arches and glass.  It reminds me of the Galleria in Milan and is among the various iterations of the glazed arcade typology made possible by the invention of cast                                             iron and plate glass.

As is my wont whenever I'm on a short visit to a new city, I booked in advance a guided architectural walk, this time, the Art and Performance Tour in the Entertainment District of Toronto.  And as is my usual good fortune, I managed to meet up with a knowledgeable and enthusiastic volunteer architecture buff, and as we happened to be the only two visitors for the tour on that Saturday morning, we got all his attention.  Of the many buildings we stopped by, two stood out - The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and the nearby Sharp Center for Design.  You can see the two buildings in a short video by an architecture critic, Christopher Hume, at the Toronto Star.

A disappearing act

Exuberant curve

Bent wood armature

Bent wood spiral staircase

The most recent expansion of AGO is a rare, self-effacing work by Frank Gehry, a native son, where his own claim to respect a building's context (for once) rings true.  The Concept was exemplified by the building's very dissimilar facades--a curving, billowing glass screen over a bent-wood armature along Dundas Street and a flat, glass and titanium screen painted in blue, with a surreal exterior spiral staircase rising in midair, facing the Grange Park, behind the historic Grange House.  The idea, we were told, was to paint the facade in blue, which at certain moments can seem to merge with the sky, so as not to overpower its smaller neighbor, the stately historic mansion, and the adjacent park grounds.

Gratitude for a leg up

Tabletop

To the right of the park, rises the lively white "tabletop", clad in corrugated aluminum with random "pixellated" black squares and rectangles, sitting on roughly 85-ft tall, colorful, hollow steel legs, hovering above existing buildings on the OCAD campus.  It houses two levels of studio and teaching spaces; its elevated position enabled the architect (Will Alsop) to create the new facility without having to demolish the existing buildings on the site.  

The Crystal

hard to be missed

We continued on our architectural exploration of Toronto further north along University Avenue, passing Queen's Park, to the edge of Bloor Street. There are several notable buildings along this stretch of commercial and university property, but the one which screams out the loudest for attention is the so-called Crystal Addition to the Royal Ontario Museum by Daniel Libeskind.  Its aggressive and over-the-top presence on the streetscape has gotten some bad rap, with a few exceptions, from some critics and the public but, from what I could see, it seems to have achieved the purpose of engaging and animating the street life and drawing the public into its otherwise heavy, neo-Romanesque building from the early 20th Century.  

Canada seems to have sidestepped the banking crisis (due to the conservative lending practice of their venerable banking institutions, according to our guide), and bucked the global trend of economic recession.  According to an article in the Toronto Star, Toronto has been experiencing unprecedented growth in construction, especially in mixed-use, commercial/residential towers, and there were more towers (132) under construction last year in Toronto than any other city on earth, with even more this year.  My overall impression of the architectural scene in Toronto, at least in the downtown area, is that they have a hodgepodge of old and new buildings but do not have a coherent story to tell or a prominent skyline to speak of.  With due respect, Toronto, though in close geographic and cultural proximity to New York State, is no New York City.  No wonder Claudine bemoaned the loss of her beloved NYC when she first moved there.  

We had a couple of curious cultural experiences passing through Toronto Pearson International Airport.  On the way in, we were sent to the Immigration area because of the suspicion that Kirk might be engaging in some covert business consultation as he was to be compensated for giving a "colloquium" ("what is that?", the Immigration Officer asked) at York University.  On the way out, I had an unpleasant exchange with a Canadian Airline agent when I asked her how to get to the Customs area.  (For flights to the U.S. one has to clear US Customs in Toronto.)  She answered me with such thinly veiled contempt that it took my breath away.  I'm not sure whether her sense of superiority was directed to me as a US Citizen or as a person of Asian descent.    

Surveying our kingdom

A bouquet of sage

Kirk and I have recently started a practice (his idea) of surveying our "kingdom," or, more accurately, our temporary possession of a speck of the earth, in the few half-hours of fading sun before the dusk sets in.  It was motivated partly by a sense of guilt for having neglected our garden for so long and partly by a sense of urgency born out of the realization that the pleasant late summer evenings are not going to last much longer. (Perhaps we should also take a survey of, metaphorically speaking, the state of our lives...)  We therefore, after dinner, don our colorful gardening boots (sloggers--they're called) and our gloves, brandish our gardening shears, and work and walk our way through the various plots in our yard, picking up fallen branches, cutting down dry rot, pulling up weeds or what look like weeds, and generally attempting to retrieve a sense of control over and order in our tiny kingdom and combat, however futilely, nature's tendency to grow wild and unmanageable.  

My attempt in the past two years to add color and interest to our yard by planting perennials and herbs has not produced much to speak of, I'm sorry to report; what tender shoots have survived the frost and drought have been so completely smothered by weeds and dead leaves that they are hardly recognizable or distinguishable from weeds. I've since learned that there is much more nurturing and caring work to do than just putting down the little plants in the ground, about a half-day's work at most; I had assumed that Mother Nature would take care of these little plants and that they would just mature on their own and before long look like their glossy counterparts in the nursery catalogs.  Alas, to successfully tend and cultivate one's garden requires much more commitment and hard work than I have expended; Kirk laughingly called my gardening experiment my failed attempt to live like a "gentlewoman farmer." 

Bloomington is currently under mandatory water restriction due to this summer's drought which has hit hard several Midwestern States.  Our hope to have a new wisteria vine planted may have to be delayed. The little wisteria offshoot which we transplanted from our neighbor's vine is not doing very well either and not likely to survive, I'm afraid.  Here's hoping our transplantation to the soil of Indiana will fare better. 

  

Calvin, the Cool Cat

Cool Cat Calvin

Calvin has taken to staying for a couple hours in the Sunroom after we finish breakfast.  He shows up right on time, almost every morning, while we are laying out the table for breakfast.  As soon as we let him in, he jumps onto his favorite chair (imagine Wang-Tzu in his favorite spot at the table), and curls up beside me, pushing me (affectionately I'm sure) so that I end up perched on 1/3rd of the seat cushion, for a treat of love and a massage.  Picture me holding a cup or newspaper with my right hand while rubbing Calvin's skull with my left hand.  He stays on the chair after I vacate it, composes himself for a morning nap and keeps Kirk company while he finishes reading the paper.  Kirk, in the past, would trick him out of the room when he finishes breakfast but Calvin has learned not to take the bait so easily and has shown no inclination in the least to stir out of the chair when Kirk holds the door open enticingly.  Kirk has finally conceded the game to the clever Calvin and taken to propping open the screen door with a broom and leaving him alone there.  I wonder what will happen to our morning routine with Calvin when the weather gets cold and we no longer eat breakfast out in the Sunroom.  Stay tuned...

Wisteria No More - Once More

Wisteria No More

The wisteria vine that was planted 46 years ago [in 1966] when our house and garden were constructed, finally succumbed to the two consecutive droughts we had this and last year.  It was barely hanging on to life in the spring but shriveled up beyond rescue this summer.  We are hoping to have a new one, pretty far along in size, planted in the same spot soon--when our yard maintenance company, Soaring Eagle, is able to get ahold of one.
    

Birth astride a grave

08.06.2012 Update:
Out of the blue, our neighbor, the Bells, whom we rarely see, but who knew that our wisteria died, offered to give us a little offshoot of their flourishing wisteria vine, whose tendrils have already climbed up the metal frame placed beside it.  It was such a welcome gift, for I've not heard back from our landscape guy about finding us a replacement.  I've since learned that his lackadaisical attitude toward running his business is well-known among our neighbors.  He has at least sent a couple of guys over to take down the dead vine so I've not quite despaired about his getting us a bigger specimen in the near future.


 09.06.2012 Update:

Amethyst Falls

Our long-awaited new wisteria vine finally arrived yesterday and was securely embedded in the plot behind that of the original wisteria to give it more elbow room to grow.  It is of the Wisteria frutescens species, also known as Amethyst Falls -- a native, non-invasive species of wisteria, purported to be fast-blooming, in the first year after planting.  We hope that it will thrive in its new home for years to come.

Revived despite odds

With the help of the recent rain, the little wisteria offshoot we transplanted from our neighbor's yard has revived despite being given up as dead less than a week ago; I returned the metal screen to our neighbor thinking that it was beyond hope, O Ye of little faith.