HL fotoeins

Posts by HL fotoeins

Die Ruferin, The Caller, Othmar Schimkowitz, sculpture, Musenhaus, Muse House, Medaillonshaus, Otto Wagner, Wiener Moderne, Vienna Modernism, Vienna, Wien, Oesterreich, Austria, fotoeins.com

Global Architectonics

Above/featured: Ruferin (caller) sculpture by Othmar Schimkowitz, roof and corner of Otto Wagner’s Musenhaus – Vienna, 18 May 2018 with 6D1 (more here).

Architectonics is a noun which represents “the scientific study of the art and practice of design and construction of buildings.” And by analogy with (plate-) tectonics, key figures and their subsequent creations have shaped architectural ideas and trends around the world. In the following locations, I’ve chosen specific buildings or structures over generic cityscapes.

Austria: Innsbruck
Austria: Vienna
Canada: Burnaby
Czech Republic: Prague
Germany: Alfeld
Germany: Dessau
Germany: Hamburg
Germany: Magdeburg
Germany: Munich
Germany: Rothenburg ob der Tauber
New Zealand: Wellington
USA: Grand Canyon
USA: Seattle

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Grand Canyon National Park: The North & South Rim

Above/featured: West-northwest from Mohave Point – 15 October 2018.

The Grand Canyon National Park has very different timescales: over 100 years of human inscription as a national park, but almost 2 billion years of geologic history.

European colonizers and settlers recognized protection was required for the big dramatic landscape. On 26 February 1919, U.S. Congress passed legislation “An Act to Establish the Grand Canyon National Park in the State of Arizona” which was signed by President Woodrow Wilson. With its official designation, the country’s 15th National Park encompasses over 1-million acres (almost 405-thousand hectares) in surface area and several thousand years of history of human habitation by indigenous peoples, including the Havasupai, Hualapai, Hopi, Navajo, Paiute, and the Zuni, who consider the Grand Canyon as their ancestral birthplace. UNESCO inscribed the Grand Canyon National Park as World Heritage Site in 1979.

The park also includes over a billion years of geologic history. By geologic standards, the Grand Canyon itself is relatively “young” with the Colorado River carving into the rock about 5 to 6 million years ago. However, the Vishnu basement rock in the Grand Canyon is over 1.7 billion years old, even though that age is only 38 percent as old as the Earth’s oldest rocks at 4.5 billion years.

Over three days in October 2018, we explored parts inside Grand Canyon National Park. After our drive from Flagstaff to Vermilion Cliffs, we pushed forward to the North Rim and the winding scenic drive through the Kaibab National Forest took us to Point Imperial and Cape Royal in time for the day’s final illumination.

With a night spent at the beautifully serene Cliff Dwellers Lodge, we retraced our drive back to Cameron, then heading west to Desert View to the eastern section of the South Rim. After establishing our new ‘base’ in Flagstaff, we drove the following day to the main entrance of the Grand Canyon National Park (via Valle and Tusayan), and we spent the day in the western and central sections of the South Rim. The 1126 km (700 mi) we covered over the three days made up 22 percent of the entire 5049 km (3138 mi) driving distance accumulated in New Mexico and Arizona.

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The Nature of Living Things

Above/featured: A warm summer afternoon on Grouse Mountain: North Vancouver, BC – 1 August 2016 (450D).

It’s a play on the title of a long-running documentary series on science and technology: “The Nature of Things” airs on Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC. “Nature” can mean different things to different people, but I’ve three words in mind: flora, fauna, and mountains. Having begun photography as an active interest relatively late from 2005, it’s been a wondrous journey of non-stop discovery. Between 2007 and 2018, the following locations provided backdrops and venues to photographs about “nature.”

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Aotearoa Landscapes

Featured: Aotearoa: “land of the long white cloud.” Marlborough Region from Cook Strait: photo by Krzysztof Golik, Wiki CC.

Landscape (noun), definition: visible features of an area of land, often considered in terms of aesthetic appeal.
Māori: “mano whenua“, heartland or interior of the country
Chinese: 景色
German: die Landschaft
Spanish: el paisaje

As part of my year-long around-the-world journey in 2012, I spent most of July in New Zealand (Aotearoa). The following 12 landscape images provide another perspective about how I feel about non-urban settings. I’ve had some say about urban cityscapes, but I’ll be the person to stop every few kilometres for every possible vista. The following images from the North Island (Te Ika a Māui) and South Island (Te Waipounamu) are reminders of my desire to return to Aotearoa.

New Zealand’s national day, Waitangi Day, is observed annually on 6 February.

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Before Bauhaus: Alfeld Fagus Factory, UNESCO WHS

Before Bauhaus found its first footing in Weimar, there was in the town of Alfeld in central Germany the Fagus-Werk factory building.

The Fagus factory building is looked upon as the first building in the world for the modern architectural age, and is the predecessor to the elegant 1926 Bauhaus headquarters building in Dessau. Fagus company founder Karl Benscheidt commissioned architect and future Bauhaus founder, Walter Gropius, to create and build a shoe-making factory as an artistic project. Gropius and his collaborator Adolf Meyer stuck with working floor-plans by architect Eduard Werner, and set their sights on new exterior and interior designs. Completed in 1911, the factory’s office building set a new standard for 20th-century industrial architecture with steel and glass construction and tall unsupported windows at the corners of the building.

“Fagus” is Latin for “beech tree”, and shoemaking began with shoe lasts or moulds constructed from beech wood, which were sold and distributed around the world to other companies for the productions of shoes. In the 1920s, Benscheidt developed the turning precision-lathe speeding up production, prompting growth and expansion and elevating the company to world’s top producer of shoe lasts. Today, the building is still a working factory: Fagus creates plastic lasts milled by automated machinery to precise specifications for specific designs by shoe companies. Also on-site is GreCon which produces systems for fire-detection and fire-extinguishing in industrial settings. The Fagus factory building was recognized as “unique living monument” and inscribed by UNESCO as World Heritage Site (Welterbe) in 2011.

With a population of over 20-thousand people, Alfeld is located in the German federal state of Lower Saxony. The town’s reach by train is 30-minutes from Hannover or 40-minutes from Göttingen, after which is a short 5- to 10-minute walk from Alfeld(Leine)¹ train station to the entrance of the Fagus/GreCon complex. Visitors can walk around the working factory site, stop at the World Heritage Site Visitor Centre, sit in the neighbouring café for coffee or tea, and visit the museum dedicated to the building’s origins, the building’s century-long history of shoe-making, and a general history of footwear.

Walter Gropius and others would move to Weimar to establish a centre of art, design, thought, and attitude for Bauhaus in 1919, eight years after inauguration of the Fagus-Werk.