The WTC memorial is well done and very powerful. Michael Arad, a graduate of the Georgia Tech’s architecture program, along with Peer Talker, have done a great job designing the landscape, which is very supportive of the emptiness of the architecture.

The simple geometry of this space is by far the very best gesture.

The fountains are amazing as they disappear into the void below. The museum under construction above grade is, sadly, a non event. In fact, it’s kind of annoying with its dysfunctional geometry, appearing to have fallen into the ground. It reminds me of some of the spiky buildings originally planned by Liebeskind. It isn’t worthy of this space. A better choice would have been a Renzo Piano creation.

The new buildings appear non-descript, reflecting nothing but their neighbors. The message is surreal emptiness. The architectural presence in the area is going to be nil except for the drama of the upcoming Santiago Calatrava project–it will be the architectural hero of the space.

The names of the remembered are engraved through a three quarter piece of bronze cut with lasers throughout the entire plate of metal. The spray of raindrops is eerie but spirited. The names float on the plates like Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial.

The site is very very secure. One has to get an entry pass a few blocks away with a time stamp and then wait in another line near the construction site.

I assume the security will not be as rigorous once everything is finished. Now, however, I can see embedded cameras in the very lovely light poles.

The simplicity of the landscape surrounded by the non event buildings and the power of the memorial is unforgettable and very appropriate to honoring those who died in this tragic American event. I look forward to this space being open for all to enjoy in the future.

The town was founded in 1880 at mile high elevation. Its houses clutch the edge of the hillsides and run into the main town center in the base of the valley. One enters the town on a road that passes through western lore Tombsone, and through a tunnel that has made the journey easier then in the past.

Bisbee is filled with wonderful turn of the century and early 20th century buildings that allowed this town to survive. Another town wonderful place is Jerome, just north of Phoenix, but not in the same great shape. Because of the hippies, both towns have become places for art and beautiful scenery.

Today, Bisbee is coming back with galleries, restaurants, cafes, and bed and breakfasts. The mines are even purported to be opening once again.

Bisbee has thousands of stairs like the town of Italy called Cinca Terre (“five earths”). The journeys up and down are exhausting.

One of the locals, a man named Will, has lived there since the late 70s. He wanted to get away from it all. His son works for a Tucson company that reinvented the horse shoe: it clips onto the horse with Velcro and allows much easier wear of the horse hoof. Will walks down the hill to town and walks back up on a road. We walked up to his house that overlooks downtown. He has a battery-powered tricycle that he powers up when he needs to leave town. He does not have a care in such a remote place. Will;s house is full of his home spun sculptures of found objects, including his VW bus that is also a part of his home fence.

As we made our way back down the hill from Will’s house we saw many examples of what could be called houses and some places that had outdoor art experiences. I observed such a richness of texture even in the beautiful rust of a Ford truck and in the collaged elements on the houses. There was a theatre- like building filled with three dimensional collages, and another in a park-like setting that had art covering all of its surfaces.

Further into the valley one can see newer homes, including one that was bright yellow with a red roof and had wonderful (cast iron?) Caratid figures holding a shade structure. They appeared like the Acropolis Caratid columns on the ancient buildings but in a modern setting. The Graffiti tags were of Louis Armstrong and maybe Marlena Diedrich. Paint experiments are quite special here and could be wonderfully photographed in different stages of the sun.

Almost every building is filled with the artistic expression by its owner or occupant. A you walk into town, you get a sense of its history through its architecture. The old Bank of America is seen with the fluted marble columns. The bathroom sign depicts a woman and man miner beautifully on the doors. The new Mexican restaurant and hotel has a new sign but it fits into the town’s spirit in a great way. The details in the masonry are reminiscent of Aspen. I believe this will become another Aspen (aside from the heat).

The courthouse built in 1931 has a great Art Deco spirit and sits in front is a statue of a miner that is similar to the Soviet realism sculptures of the common man seen on the Palace of Culture in Warsaw. The miner is heroic with big hands. The bulling is a wonderful Art Deco expression, the door made of dark stone and the rest cast in place concrete with accents that come from the desert. The columns terminate beautifully in the base, and the entry has a great cast bronze door of the heroic miner. The fountain and the lanterns appear to have a Frank Lloyd Wright feeling reminiscent to the wheat patterns in his windows.

The ROCA restaurant doors are a la METROPOLIS figure from the movie. We could not get a table at this four star restaurant as they were booked all night. Instead, we went to a wonderful vegetarian place down the street. (I forgot the name but my stomach remembers the food and wonderful juice fondly.)

The entire town is rich in architectural heritage and artistic expression. It should should become a mecca of southwestern art. The windows are filled with unique antiques and folk art, some with typical McDonald’s toys but others unique expressions.

I am looking forward to spending a week here photographing in different light and staying at a bed and breakfast.

It is a wonderful place for modern sculpture, anchored by Hector Guimard’s Metro station entrance and the restaurant building. The main focus is a huge fountain that shoots water, creating sound that allows one to escape the D.C. mall noise and tourists.

It is a place for respite.

The spider alien figures are similar to what I saw in Korea at The Leeum. I also recall seeing some of these pieces in Chicago’s Millennium Park a couple years ago.

The proverbial Claus Oldenberg upsize element is its main piece.

The landscape is a wonderful foil to the space, allowing each sculpture to have its own “organic shaped” room. This is a contrast to the carefully designed spaces of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

Visit this place the next time that you are there–it is a national treasure.

The memorial appears to be one of those designed-by-committee memorials, full of text, typical military figures (not well done), and text all over (likely because they could not agree on a single copy set). The design of the three blades of grass is like a broken St. Louis Arch by Earo Saarinnen (which McDonald’s now owns). The flow is like the upward thrust of three Blue Angels, ascending together and splitting off. The underwritten award was sponsored by Boeing and the United Arab Emirates Airforce among others. I’m sure this was easy to fund, but, sadly, not so well crafted unlike the simplicity of the Vietnam Memorial. That said, it was certainly dramatic to stand in the middle of the three upward triangular forms.

From the entrance one sees the ground plane, the kimchee jars all over the front and the hidden wonderful restaurant beyond. The sign entering the space would be the only thing that I think cries out for new design since it’s just too commercial compared to the rest.

They make all of their food in house, including the pickled kimchee. The paving was made of mill stones and was a great contrast with the rather generic sidewalk on the street. One of the things I appreciate about the landscapes in Asia is the attention to the paving materials inside and out.

The lighting was great inside. The jars being all the same color brown is a good compliment. The limiting of colors in Korea and Japan allow you to appreciate the form of the jar and not concentrate on the graphics on it. The meal was amazingly presented and delicious.

Sited on the edge of downtown Dallas, the Nasher Sculpture Center combines innovative architecture, open spaces, and sculpture in a single urban oasis.

The building is Renzo Piano’s experiment in lighting. It has a modular ceiling supported by rough marble pylons, which filter and direct sunlight. The ceiling appears to float magically, and reminds me of Piano’s lighting design for the new Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago. The wonderful light quality, and excellent spacing of pieces contribute to an excellent interior presentation.

But the garden is also amazing. The rigor of the building pylons compliment the rigor of the landscaping. There is a wonderful Wolfgang Puck café at the far end of the building with an outdoor terrace where you can eat lunch overlooking Perter Walker’s enclosed sculpture garden. I come here whenever I visit Dallas and sit, looking at a Picasso concrete sculpture I’ve long admired. I used to think it was huge, but now I see what a wonderful human scale piece it really is. The perfect setting has a lot to do with my reassessment.

In the distance are Magdalena Abakanowicz‘s headless figures standing at attention. The back of the garden contains one of my favorite figurative pieces by Rodin, like the one used by Mies in the Barcelona Pavilion. The Richard Serra wall is like a walk through a canyon.

The parade of trees on the lawn is wonderful. Hedges span the length of the wall, providing some limited transparency into the city between the gaps. Fountains produce white noise, camouflaging the traffic, and  shallow ponds with lily pads line the back wall.

This is a beautiful and precious human-scale garden in the middle of a major city.

Every city needs a beautiful escape like this. Minneapolis has one–albeit much larger–where pieces by Klaus Oldenberg are in a park next to the art museum. I will try to feature this one later. You can enjoy the Nasher Sculpture Center all year round, while the wintertime experience in Minneapolis is sprinkled with snow. The garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park is comparable in ways as it’s also in the middle of the city, but the experience isn’t as individualized as at Nasher.

Every detail is important at Nasher: the roof, the vertical walls, the horizontal enclosing walls, the landscaping. It’s a beautiful confluence of art, architecture, and landscaping.

Don’t miss the Nasher Sculpture Center on your next visit to Dallas.

Cranbrook was founded in 1926 by George Gough Booth and his wife Ellen Scripps Booth. Booth was the Detroit-based publisher of several newspapers and radio stations at the beginning of the 20th century. The Booths desired two major elements for their project: a coed elementary and high school, and an academy of art. Mr. Booth invited Eliel Saarinen to design the campus and most of its buildings after learning about Sarrinen’s work through his entry in the Tribune Tower competition. The design of the campus is a meeting of old collegiate gothic and modern. Some of the housing units are more modern, and some of the studio buildings reference the European industrial style.

Booth later asked Saarinen to recruit the faculty for the school. Saarinen’s wife taught fabric design–her designs are highly respected to this day. He also hired his longtime friend and collaborator Carl Milles, who would create most of the beautiful sculptural elements placed across campus. Milles’s sculptures engage the spaces, making them rich, open public areas. The sculptures feature horses, mermaids and beasts of burden.

Cranbrook’s influence is seen around the world. New graduates continue to influence the field of industrial design, graphic design, architecture and sculpture. You can recognize Cranbrook’s legacy in American design through the work of former students and faculty such as Charles and Ray Eames–of furniture and exhibit design fame–and Eero Saarinen. Eero was Eliel’s son who went on to design the St. Louis Arch, the JFK terminal in New York, the GM Technical Center, and the “Tulip Chair” featured on the sets of the original Star Trek series. Eero’s firm expanded Ceasar Pelli’s international architectural practice, which thrives to this day.

Walking through campus, you can see the evolution of its design, from Sarrinen the Elder’s classical Beaux-Arts to the organic modernism of Sarrinen the Younger (different from Meisian modernism, which is much more rigorous and controlled) to Cesar Pelli’s take on modernism (elegant, and embracing classical proportions of base-middle-top). The campus’s style evolves; it is dynamic.

Starting with a vision by Mr. Booth, Cranbrook attracted talent from across Europe to the Detroit suburbs. Booth and Saarinen convinced them to stay and form a school of thought, allowing it to evolve, thrive and maintain significance. This is different than the story of Talliesin, formed by the genius Frank Lloyd Wright, and which was based on a single man. Because of its lack of pluralism, Talliesin has not evolved like Cranbrook.

I have loved this campus since I first visited for SEGD meetings in the 1980s. For the past 6 years, I have helped to evolve a program in exhibit design that occurs every August. The light quality of the Michigan summer is wonderful, and reminds me of Saarinen’s native Finland, where this light level is typical going late into the night.

The grounds of PepsiCo headquarters in Purchase, NY are an amazing marriage between art, architecture and the landscape. This particular cola company’s headquarters is very different from the one in my hometown of Atlanta, whose urban campus really doesn’t have much to offer in terms of environmental design. Pepsi’s campus is pastoral and accessible by the public who go there to see the extensive gardens and the scupture collection, which is one of the largest in the U.S.

The grounds were designed by a father and son team: Edward Durrell Stone and Edward Durrell Stone, Jr. The father was the architect, and you can immediately see he was inspired by modernism and Frank Lloyd Wright. I had the honor of meeting the son–who passed away last month–a couple of years ago while working on the Jumeirah Golf Estates in Dubai. Trained as a pilot in the Air Force, his design philosophy focused on natural beauty.

I’ve collaborated with his firm–EDSA–for over 21 years on projects in the U.S., Dubai, and Korea. As Edward Jr. got older, his disciples took over the firm and have carried on his fine legacy in desiging resorts around the world.

The Pepsi headquarters was the only project I’m aware of on which the father and son collaborated. The environment is amazing. The buildings are powerful yet unassuming amidst the landscape, where there’s some great experimental use of prairie grasses. They cluster around a center court with 3 different gardens, each of which has its own spacial personality. A road goes around the property, placing the buildings in the core and parking around the outside–no one sees cars, only see landscape. A French gardener comes in once a year to give the landscape a tune-up.

Most stunning is the internationally recognized Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens, filled with pieces by Moore, Brancusi, Calder, and even Eskimo totems–a great mix of classical, modern, and folk art. Former PepsiCo chairman Don Kendall worked with the design team to create the gardens that still bear his name. I think he may even still have an office on-site.

The variety of outdoor spaces on the site is amazing. There’s a rectangular lily pond recessed around a small yard with a Classical-type temple face at the far end. Some of the other areas contain more industrial-looking pieces, while still others appear more organic. Despite the large number of different pieces, none of the areas feels cluttered or cramped.

I highly recommend a visit.