PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Casa Mila from Hallucination Generation 1966

Here are the screen caps I took from Hallucination Generation of Antonio Gaudi's Casa Mila.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Weird Homes 1998

I saw Weird Homes on Amazon Prime. It's a 1998 Canadian show about artists who have transformed their homes into unusual places. It was fairly entertaining. Each episode looks at three places and there are 13 episodes. The places were varied and some less interesting than others. Many of the artists are found art types. We've also got a topiary guy in one episode and one of the found artists uses plants and flowers with the objects he brings home.

One of the artists they featured was Mark Bulwinkle. He lives in Oakland. A friend took me to his house in the 1980s. He's since moved into a larger piece of land with his own crane. Why a crane? He often works with big pieces of steel. He still has his old gate which I saw on his house. Someday I'll get those slides scanned and post them.

Lustron Houses - Minneapolis

Back in the 1980s I was more interested in architecture than I am today. I still like buildings, especially for staying in, but I don't have the interest as I did then. I saw something on Facebook about steel houses and thought of the ones we have here in Minneapolis. They were made by the Lustron Company of steel panels on steel frames. They made about 2300 houses between 1948 and 1950 before the company folded. You can read more about the company on the Wikipedia.

There are a couple of dozen Lustron houses in the Twin Cities metro area with most of them in Minneapolis. There are several in a row on Nicolet Avenue, down around 50th Street. That's one of them above. The picture above is from this 2011 article. They look nice but the guy, in that article, who restored one spent a lot of money on it. It's nice that there are a bunch left to see. Many are on local and national historic registers.

The Rise And Fall Of Penn Station

I'd always been somewhat of a fan of the McKim, Mead and White architectural firm. They designed the original Minneapolis Institute Of The Art building in 1915 and I like that building. They built in the popular Beaux-Arts style, something Frank Lloyd Wright was firmly against, I'm sort of in the middle of the two.

I saw a copy of The Rise and Fall Of Penn Station in the library and brought it home. It's a PBS production, part of their American Experience series. It covers a lot of the story of Pennsylvania Railroad and the solution to getting trains to New York's Manhattan Island. All train lines ended in new Jersey where ferries carried the passengers across the Hudson River to Manhattan. After seeing a Paris train station that had tunnels with electric trains, Gare d'Orsay, President Cassatt hired McKim to design the station.

McKim went ahead with the plans and the station was opened in 1910. Cassatt wouldn't get to see this wonder of the world, he would die four years before the station opened and McKim would die the year before it opened. At least they built a nice statue of Cassatt.

The station was massive and the people of New York were amazed, first from the big hole in the ground and later from seeing the station.

That 2 square block area is where they would dig a huge hole. It's where they started building the tunnels. There's a corresponding hole across the river. The two tunnels met up under the river and there was only a 1/16th of an inch difference in height. Pretty amazing, even by todays standards. While the tunnels were being built they covered over the hole with the station. Here's an inside shot from 1962.

The station had millions of passengers pass through it each year In 1945 the yearly total was over 100 million. In the 1950s trains were dying out, the above ground station was demolished in 1963 to make way for Madison Square Garden and a hotel. That demolition caused great strides in preserving old buildings across the country. Minneapolis could have benefited from that preservation, many a nice old building was torn down and replaced with an uninteresting glass faced box. Occasionally things get saved, here's one of the eagles that graced the front of the building.

It was an interesting program. I like shows about that sort of thing, I was happy to have watched it.

Angkor Wat Street View

Google has added Angkor Wat to it's places you can wonder through with Street View. It's very cool. You can follow the footpaths and even go into some buildings.

Antonio Gaudi - A Film by Hiroshi Teshigahara

Because an old friend stirred up my interest in architecture I learned about Antonio Gaudi. I was immediately drawn to him and read several books on him. He didn't build a lot of buildings in his native Catalonia but the few he did build have become known the world over. People travel to see them. Since I'm prefectly happy with a picture, and wanted to spend my travel dollars on stuff I can play with, I never went to see them even though the thought had crossed my mind more than once back in the 1980's. Gaudi's work is like nothing you'll ever see anywhere else. He's got a unique style that evolved from his appreciation of nature, his interest in foreign art and architecture, and his strict Catholic faith. He was one of those guys, Frank Lloyd Wright was the same, who could take his influences, meld them together, build on them, and pour out something breathtaking. Both men where heavily influenced with forms and shapes found in nature but their styles produced a totally different type of work. They both liked a lot of decoration and felt the surfaces of their buildings were a fine canvas. There's plenty of places on the internet that you can go to see the works of these men. If you're interested in reading more about them, Google their asses and see what pops up.

Hiroshi Teshigahara is a Japanese artist and film maker. He's probably most famous for his 1964 film The Woman In The Dunes. It got him nominated for a best directing Oscar. I'd seen it in the 1970's at some theater or film society showing. I can't remember. This was back before home video and you were forced to go out and mingle with the masses. During the 1980's I saw two things that Teshigahara did. One was his 1984 film Antonio Gaudi and the other was his display of Ikebana at the old Dayton's department store auditorium. I have some pictures of the Ikebana display that I will scan in and post soon. 

   

Antonio Gaudi appeared on dvd in 1999 from Image and eventually went out of print. I picked up a copy around 2000 and watched it a couple of times. In 2008 Criterion put the movie out in a nice 2 disc set. Criterion puts a lot of effort into the movies they release and they cost a bit more than a popular movie. Even discounting the $40 list price the price isn't always that great. The price for the Criterion set is currently 23 bucks on Amazon and it's about 33 on Criterion's site. Here are the features as listed on the Criterion web page:

SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer
• New video interview with architect Arata Isozaki
• Gaudí, Catalunya, 1959, footage from director Hiroshi Teshigahara’s first trip to Spain
• Visions of Space: Antonio Gaudí, a one-hour documentary on the architect’s life and work
• A BBC program on Gaudí by director Ken Russell
• Sculptures by Sofu—Vita, a short film by Teshigahara on the sculpture of his father, Sofu Teshigahara
• Original theatrical trailer
• New and improved English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by art historian Dore Ashton, a reminiscence by Hiroshi Teshigahara, and Hiroshi and Sofu discussing their trip to the West.

A couple of days back I was picking through the dvds at the local library and there was the Criterion set waiting for me to take it home. Now I can check out the extra material. Right after the movie, which did look great. I did enjoy looking at the extras. I liked the 1959 footage of Teshigahara's first trip to Spain. He travelled with his father and they visited Dali. Visions Of Space is a 2003 BBC program hosted by art critic Robert Hughes. Hughes mixes images of Gaudi's work with a bit of Spanish history, highlights of the life of God's Architect, along with personal feelings and reminisces. I found it very entertaining. The BBC short by Ken Russell was a nice short overview of Gaudi's life but the images are sadly in B&W. Here's Part 1 and Part 2 on YouTube. The short on the sculpture of Teshigahara senior is interesting enough but his work isn't something I warmed to. The interview with Arata Isozaki was also worth looking at. All in all a nice set. Still not sure I need one but glad to have seen it.

City Gone Mad

 

I have come to believe it was about 1985 that I started to seriously buy some LEGO. The Basic Brick set 350 had come that year and I got 8 of them for about 12 bucks each. That gave me a nice start on some bulk. I started small, mostly just noodling around. It's the stuff you wouldn't take pictures of, and there wasn't anywhere to put stuff like that. I did take a a roll of 35 millimeter film and printed those pics. This is them, scanned, slightly cropped, with the brightness, color and contrast tweeked a bit.

 

I started making buildings first, then it grew into a statement about uncontrolled building. In the world of those small plastic buildings the right to the air space above buildings gets sold and they build in it. The buildings don't have much detail, especially compared to the Micropolis type building, but that wasn't the point. I certainly didn't have much gray back in those days. It just wasn't as common as it is currently.

 

It's kind of hard to see everything. The pics just aren't well enough lit and it's a pretty big lump of plastic. It was about 2 feet deep, 30 plus inches wide and more than 2 feet tall. The smallest buildings are supposed to be 3-5 story buildings, then bigger ones are built over them, finally the giant upside down U-shaped building gets tossed up. You can see more pics at Flickr.

10217 Diagon Alley

  

I was somewhat excited by the new Harry Potter set Diagon Alley. I missed getting a copy the first day it showed up at the LEGO store. The annoying thing was I almost went to the Mall of America at lunch but decided to go somewhere else instead. When I stopped in on the way home from work they were all gone, all 18 of them, sold in a couple of hours. On a visit the following week they had restocked. That was unexpected but then again so much is unexpected with that company. The demand for sets is high and the store always seems to be out of some set or another. I think that happens on the website too, but I don't shop there much. I was at the store earlier today and they were out of the Diagon Alley set again. I am sure it will come and go like a lot of those larger sets.

 
Diagon Alley is the biggest Harry Potter set so far, and the largest set I've ever bought. It's got 2025 parts, including the ten minifigs, for $150.00. That's 7.96 cents a piece, and that makes a guy feel good, even though I know that many of 'em are your smaller pieces. The set makes three different buildings and has some accessories to dress them up for the minfigs. The first things you build after the minifigs are some sidewalk displays. Owls, and a bat, hats, signs, and a couple of rather low lamp posts. Those lamps are minifig head high. Even Wizards don't usually have such low lamp posts. I do really like those owls and that dark green hat is just coming back into style.

     
Diagon Alley, for those that don't know much about Harry Potter, is the Wizard shopping street in London. There's a map from The Harry Potter Lexicon, the place I go to check out HP details. Shops, marketing goods and services to the witch and wizard, line the crooked street. It's a short street, maybe a couple of average downtown city blocks, and there's an even shorter side street, Knockturn Alley, off of that. Two of the buildings, Gringotts and Olivanders, are on Diagon Alley, but Borgin and Burke's is part way down Knockturn Alley. Hagrid doesn't recommend the place:

"Skulkin' around Knockturn Alley, I dunno -- dodgy place, Harry -- don' want no one ter see yeh down there --"

I'd probably go down there but that's me, I never listen.

 

I'd keep my Wizard money in Gringotts. That's the Goblin owned and operated bank. It's hard to rob and we hear of only two times in the books when it was attempted. There are lots of spells and enchantments to stop thieves. The really secure vaults are guarded by dragons. None of that stops our Harry Potter, of course. The set sort of comes close to the movie version of the bank but the columns are tilted differently in the set, there should be a third floor, and sadly, there are no dragons. That would be a good bit of work, huh, seeing a dragon busting through the front of the bank. Wizards, dragons, Goblins and bricks flying through the air. There's yer goddamn yahoo moment!

That's the Mary GrandPre illustration of Gringotts out of one of the US editions. I really like her illustrations, I think they fit the books very well, and I'm sad there might not be any more. The HP novels often don't have a lot of description of the places the story is set in, so GrandPre could be close to what JK Rowling was imagining, or not. Who knows? That's the beauty of those books though, they allow you to fill in a lot of gaps when you read. I think that works to the books advantage. The banks strong point is it's facade. I like the front of the building but the inside is rather barren. The banking hall is really large impressive place in the movie but all the set has is a simple desk, a large safe, and a small chandelier. There isn't as much decoration inside as outside but it looks nice enough when you open it up as a play set. I like that the set folds up into a nice compact building. There's a nice skylight there and some of the building ideas are worth knowing. The facade captures an older style of architecture quite well. I like the white and tan mix. There's some pearl gold accents and lots of tiles of various colors and lengths. Another thing that helps sell that older look is the pair of  large doors. Every collection should have a set or two. This is a new version of the door that came out last year. Now with 60% more woodgrain! It's only been in 3 sets so far. Reddish brown in Diagon Alley and the Spinjitzu Dojo and dark brown in the Battle Of Alamut set. Sadly the Prince Of Persia theme is done. I liked a lot of the colors in those sets. I don't seen the new Pharoah's Quest line quite replacing them. Low part count and silly gimmicks in some of the sets will keep me from buying them. Not that it matters, there's always too many things to buy, and a guy like me likes to go for sales when he can. After Christmas the local Twin City LEGO fans had a really good run of clearance sets at the Mall of America Lego Store, and there were many POP sets in the mix. Many of us have plenty of ostrichs now. Now to figure out something for them to do.

  
Olivander's Wand Shop has a really nice look to it. There are lots of nice sand green and dark green parts. For some reason I have come to like that brick with a deep groove. There are a bunch of them in sand green in this building and a lot more in white in Gringotts. I can't seem to get enough of the nice dark blue slopes. As the kids say, they make roofs rock!. Borgin and Burkes has that great curved skylight, more dark green parts, and 25 1x2 Glow In The Dark tiles. Both buildings have lots of nice windows. As a parts pack for the minifig scale building builder it's a windfall. Neither of the shops has a lot of detail inside. Olivander's has a counter that does break apart when you flip a lever. There are some shelves with plates and tiles and stickers pretending to wand boxes. In the book there are thousands of boxes. There's not quite as many in the set, I think there's a half dozen. Borgin and Burkes has a fireplace that rotates. It's so you can pretend that it's on the Floo Network. There's a vanishing cabinet but it's slightly different from the one in the Hogwarts set. I don't know if that should matter. The trio of buildings look fine and it would make a nice display on a shelf or space to play.

There were other sets that featured all three of these places. Those sets weren't too bad but they aren't as nice as these new buildings. They had other good points. Better, and more, printed parts, for one.

4714 Gringotts Bank was the worst. It not even a building, just some random elements of it. It's got Harry, Hagrid and Griphook in a cart on a short tiny bit of track. I guess that's the action in the set, rolling them down the ramp over and over again. There's a vault, nothing special there other than the really nice printed sign, another Goblin pushing a cart full of treasure, and an arch with a bit of a teller area. These shows up on clearance for a while and I managed to get a couple or three. It was really for the parts. The set came out in 2002 and had 250 parts for 30 bucks. It was a better deal at $15.

  
4720 Knockturn Alley was much better than the bank. It's a nice little shop with Harry and Mr. Malfoy. Harry is dressed in casual clothes and I like that sandgreen sweater. Mr. M is dressed in a nice suit. There are several good accessories in the shop, including that great hand tile, a cash register, some goofy eyes, and that wonderful brain. It came out in 2003, there were 209 parts and it was $20 in the USA. 

4723 Diagon Alley Shops was kind of an odd set. Part of a trio of similar sets, each had a cardboard back drop and a die cut window in the box. It's the only set that has Hermione out of her Hogwarts uniform. It's an odd assortment of unusual pieces and accessories in an odd selection of colors. You'd think it was a Belville set. There's a purple and a dark pink witch's hat, pale green 8x8 plate, there's books, animals, and lots of tranparent parts. It had 80 pieces and cost 10 bucks back in 2001. I missed getting them when they were new but was able to pick a copy or two later. Now they are pushing 40 bucks with a box. When I started buying HP sets I went out and looked for the female minifigs and was able to get some at a reasonable price. Now Hermione starts at 8 dollars on Bricklink.

 

I thought it was a great bunch of minifigs. Good variey of costumes that can be used for many other things than building Harry Potter stuff. Across the top you've got Harry, Olivander and Hermione. Hermione seems to have borrowed Ginny's sweater from the new HP Burrow set. It is a really nice sweater. The second row has Ron, Mr Malfoy in his Death Eater garb, and Fenrir Greyback. Malfoy is kind of evil but Fenrir is really evil. He needs killin', no doubt about that. There's a couple of goblins and a couple of twins on the bottom row. It's the first time the Weasley brothers, Fred and George, appear in a set. Most of the figures have two faces on their heads. Not Hagrid though, or the Goblins.

All in all a nice set with some great parts. The buildings have certain flaws but were still pretty much fun to build and ok to look at. I plan to leave them out for a while and I rarely leave sets built for display. I'd certainly buy more than one except for the price being what it is. Typically I like buying the smaller sets from different themes for more variety in minifigs and parts. I'd almost have liked to see the 3 buildings as three separate sets. I'd wind up buying less Gringotts than the other two. Again as a parts pack it's pretty good for the right guy or gal.

LEGO Imagination Center Re-Imagined 12-6-10

 

I didn't actually go to the Grand Opening on December 4, 2010. I wasn't much interested in seeing the crowds of people that were there for the holiday shopping. There was a little robot set for the first 300 people, to spend $35, but so far I haven't seen anyone post one. I took the afternoon off today in order to get some pics and check out the place without so many people there.

  
It looks very modern doesn't it. I liked the old stores beams and columns that looked like LEGO parts. They kept the platforms but put different builds on them.

   

That's the giant Pick-A-Brick wall. Most of the bins are fakes, the bricks walled off, just for show. Sadly there wasn't anything that I needed when I looked at the new larger selection. I got some tan plates anyway. 

 

TwinLUG got asked to build the LEGO designed models that are in the ribbon that runs around the store. There are portholes to look through and the models sit inside on photo backgrounds. A huge pile or boxes arrived at Roy and Alice's house and a dozen people came by the Saturday after Thanksgiving to build the models from instructions and bricks supplied by LEGO. The instructions were sort of hard to read and the bags of bricks for the models were missing a lot of parts. Luckily Roy has some LEGO and could supply the needed parts.  I built the Fast Food meal, the ugly fish, a bunch of dogs and humans and those horses. The horses were a bitch to keep together. I was thinking glue that afternoon. I put more pics up on Flickr.

  

I really like that sabertooth a lot. The models really are nice additions to the store. I like the centaur quite a bit too.

  

The Man In The Moat

Here's the entrance to the Yoshiwara Quarter outside Edo. It's sometime in the 1800's. The guards of the quarter have found a dead man floating in the moat.
    

The quarter has high walls and a moat to keep the girls in and trouble out. That moat turns out to be a handy place to dump a body. That's why the guards keep a ladder handy. I built the thing on 6 32by32 baseplates. That way I can move it.

   

You can see more pictures at Flickr or MOCpages. The idea for this came from the movie Sakuran. Mike brought a copy to Friday Night Movies night. I honestly haven't captured that movies amazing colors but it inspired me to build this over the next 6 weeks. A lot of little things took a while to figure out. I wanted to use the printed wall pieces. I like them, they add a lot to a scene. Since they are 6 studs wide I needed to work out how many to use and where they go in relation to the edges of the 6 modules.

  
I really wanted to make the main brothel a red and black building. The balcony railing was the first think I figured out. I like the way the main bedroom turned out. I started thinking that was going to be the main oiran's room but it now I think it's the main room of the couple that own the place. They don't look too nice.