7 posts tagged “architecture”

I'm taking a break from packing up my stuff to post a couple more brick pictures.  These ones seem quite ominous to me, and are of an enormous church on State Street.

Though Portland has a great many beautiful brick buildings, there are of course many that are far more prosaic.  This is one of them:

Ever felt the urge to jazz up your photos beyond a simple levels adjustment?  I know I have.  I don't have the know-how to do awesome effects in Photoshop Elements, though, and I don't have any of those cool novelty cameras (e.g. Lomo or Holga) that do them for you.  That's why I was so happy to learn about Picnik, a website that mimics their effects.  And it's free!  (Well, there is a "Premium" option with even MORE cool stuff, but the free part is certainly good enough for my purposes.)  Here's an example of what it does:

It's a photo of the Clapp House, the former MECA admissions building recently donated to the Portland Museum of Art (to which it is adjacent).  The original of this photo was very blue.  I altered it using a mix of Picnik's "1960's" and "Cross Process" functions.  In the future, I'll tag any Picnik-edited photos with "picnik."  If it doesn't have the tag, it was most likely edited in Photoshop, if at all.

My spring break was last week, and I (finally!) had the opportunity to make a trip back to Bennington.  I took LOTS of photos, including some from the train ride each way. (Tragically, I did not manage to get any images of the BISON FARM we passed by somewhere in rural New York.)
I'm going to start by posting some photos of the "New Houses," the three architecturally-acclaimed buildings that make up the upper half of third street.  Most of my friends now live in these houses, so I spent a lot of time in them while I was visiting... except for the third, Paris-Borden, which is one of the two on-campus residences I've never even entered.  That's out of eighteen, people.

No, not the movie (though it was excellent)... I mean the building material.  Boring ol' brick, in use for over nine thousand years.  Brick buildings became common in New England around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and the region still contains many beautiful old mills, factories, and warehouses.  Portland has an extremely high number of brick buildings, due to an 1866 fire that destroyed most of the city.  Here are a couple:

My art history class (actually, all the AH 101 classes) went to the Boston MFA on Friday.  I stayed after to hang out with my friend Miriam!  Here's a snapshot just to illustrate how different Portland and Boston are:

My brother is in Spain right now with one of his former Spanish teachers.  It's spring vacation week (thank you, Patriots' Day!), though there was initially some concern about missing part of baseball season.  No need to worry; it's been either snowing or raining almost every day since he left.

I've never been to Spain, so I don't have any pictures of Things In Spain... but I did go to Greece on a similar sort of trip a couple years ago.  This is just one of a zillion pictures I took; I chose it to post because it's neither an oft-photographed landmark nor a friend of mine making a silly face.  You've probably never seen it before, and you might actually care.  It's one side of a small monastery courtyard on the island of Hydra, and it was one of my favorite parts of the trip (especially because it wasn't an official trip destination -- I walked into it basically by accident).

In contrast, here's a photo I took at JFK airport while waiting for our delayed shuttle flight home... still beautiful, but FAR less remote: