Hmmm... kinda reminds me of Gehry's Disney Concert Hall which caused its own stir here. I think it's kinda neat, myself. Though I'm left utterly cold by the Los Angeles' Catholic Our Lady of Angels Cathedral (as some wags would have it - Taj Mahoney) It looks more like an upscale mini-mall.

Sigh.

I'm just glad this gorgeous building has been preserved and restored.

James Howard Kunstler (a favorite target of Justin) hates Frank Gehry --

http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore.html

-- which tends to make me a Gehry fan as a matter of principle. (A friend in LA used to work for him, and thought he was an absolute genius.)

I'm really glad they've preserved the Bullocks building as they don't make 'em like that anymore.

Architects, ahhhh, architects! That twisted skyscraper looks extremely interesting. I wish they'd do something at least as good as that, or better, for the World Trade Center (rebuild! rebuild! -- higher than ever!). I, too, was disappointed in that Cathedral when I looked it up. A Cathedral -- especially one devoted to the Lady (the Queen of Heaven) -- should look like a Cathedral.

"Architecture is frozen music."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Last night, I read an excellent article (in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies) on "Mimesis and Expression in Ayn Rand's Theory of Art" by Kirsti Minsaas. Extremely illuminating. I can see that Norma gravitates toward the representational arts (painting and sculpture) while Dawn gravitates toward the structural arts (architecture and music). The styles of it all....

Nope. Goethe, not Nietzsche. Remember, he was the one into color studies and all that stuff.

And why does a cathedral have to look like a cathedral? What about when they made the shift from a basilica to a cathedral? Same worship, different society. And, anyway, arguing over the physical expression of a sacred space is nothing new. Reading about the arguments in the Renaissance between adherents of the centrally planned church and the longitudinal nave church makes for pretty good stuff if you're into that kind of thing.

I like the LA cathedral, though its not my favorite Moneo building. And the Pelli skyscraper? Well, he takes other people's provocative ideas and makes them a little less provocative. Always has.

Sorry, spelled my URL wrong the first time. Thanks.

Goethe. I stand corrected on that one. Yes, I have read his Theory of Color. Fascinating. Nietzsche must have quoted Goethe on that point, he was an admirer of Goethe.

I still prefer that a Cathedral be designed in the Gothic style.

R'lyeh Has Risen!

"Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces - surfaces too great to belong to anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours..."

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn.