While Dwight jogged, I wandered around the Palm Springs “mini financial district” with its listed mid-century bank buildings. This monument to mammon is influenced by Le Corbusier’s UNESCO-World-Heritage-listed chapel at Ronchamp, France.
Category: Create
People in a Gallery
Complex Surfaces: Man and Disk; carbon fiber, automotive paint, Dwight; Palm Springs Art Museum. Elsewhere little kids interacted with art, giggling uncontrollably at breasts in a painting. Some adults walked, talked, oblivious to their surroundings.
Yabba-Dabba-Doo
Hiked the South Lykken Trail. Up high, snow was sticking around; on the trail, temperatures were in the 60’s. For some reason, The Flintstones Theme became an earworm. The topography surely provided inspiration for Desert Modernism and the fictional town of Bedrock.
An Inside Day
Walked in rain to a lecture about architect Walter Gropius. Back at our apartment, read by the (gas) fire and looked up at fresh snow on the mountains.
Outside In
Wandered inside and outside a Desert Modernist house, built 1946, designed, lived in, and extended by architect Robson Chambers. He was a business partner of architect Albert Frey who, in 1946, designed the building where we’re staying.
Desert Dreams
Walked through four units designed in 1947 as a prototype for a planned community that never transpired. The architect, John Lautner, who was an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, went on to bigger things.
Blues for an Alabama Sky
Looked out at our apartment (among many apartments) through a mirror-framed window at the Guthrie Theater while sipping a pre-show glass of wine. We then stepped into a world of Harlem apartments in the 1930’s: Blues for an Alabama Sky, finding family, fulfilling dreams.
Rising from Ruins
Towards the end of our Sunday walk, stopped to take in the hodgepodge of structures of Mill City Museum. A modern museum rises out of the carefully stabilized ruins of what was once the world’s largest flour mill.
LEGO Art
Followed building instructions while marveling how Hokusai created Great Wave off Kanagawa in 1831 before the Impressionism movement had started in Europe and while Japan was still closed off from the world. The quasi-pixelated style of the over-loved print lends itself to a LEGO interpretation. Note Mount Fuji and the three boats.
Makes You Think
Unintended triptych, left to right: Dwight at the Getty Center today (pack in front as required by museum guards); sculpture depicting 17th century femininity; “Joey at the Love Ball,” drag, 1991. A few provocative juxtapositions of contemporary and pre-1900 European art are scattered throughout the galleries.