Architecture – Page 12 – Willem's Planet

April 20, 2016March 2, 2018

Tuesday/ lunch at the Westin

I met my brother and nephew for lunch on Tuesday. We picked the swank Westin Hotel restaurant in the city’s Foreshore district. My nephew ordered a chocolate milkshake (not on the menu) to go with his lunch – and to their credit, they were up to it. ‘It will just take a little time’, said our server.

IMG_4026 sm — Here’s the view towards Table Mountain from the 19th floor of the Westin Hotel. To the right of Table Mountain is Lion’s Head, and on the far right is Signal Hill. I used to work (this was in 1994!) in the Metlife Centre building on the left. The bulge is really a 180° viewing bay on each floor, looking out over Cape Town harbor.

16040276 sm — The Westin is all glass and steel, with vanishing edges on this side. The Metlife Centre building is the one in the reflection. The Cape Town International Convention Centre is right across from the Westin.

16040263 sm — This statue of Bartolomeu Dias is close to the Convention Center. Dias was an explorer and a nobleman of the Portuguese royal household. He sailed around the southernmost tip of Africa (what is today known as Cape Town) in 1488, reaching the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic, the first European known to have done so. [Source : Wikipedia].

IMG_4035 sm — Some very African motifs from the lobby of the Cape Town International Convention Center. There are baobab trees (thick trunk with round fruit), gazelles and an elephant.

April 11, 2016March 2, 2018

Monday/ day trip to Düsseldorf

I took the Intercity Express (ICE) train to Düsseldorf today. The train is no slouch ! .. the electronic speed indicator in the cabin showed 297 km/h (185 mph), at times. It runs very quietly, and even with four stops, it took just an hour an a half one way. The train comes up all the way from Munich, Nuremburg, and then Frankfurt, on to Cologne and Düsseldorf, and its final stop is Essen. The one-way fare does not come cheap at €82, but hey : time is money, right?

IMG_3786 sm — Our train was ICE 820, and here it is, just arriving into Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof.

IMG_3793 sm — Here is the fleet of trains operated by Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) . I see the ICE4 is supposed to top out at 250 km/h .. but our train went faster than that !

16040185 sm — The modest brick facade of the entrance into the Dusseldorf Hauptbahnhof (main train station).

16040170 sm — The water is from the Rhine river (it is a canal connected to the river), the tower is the Rheinturm (Rhein Tower), and the weird white and brown buildings that look like they are about to tumble into the water, are apartments designed by architect Frank Gehry.

16040139 sm — The Rheinturm is a 240.5 meter (722 ft) high concrete telecommunications tower in Düsseldorf, capital of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Construction commenced in 1979 and finished in 1981.

16040146 sm — The view from the top of the Rhein Tower. The slanted windows enable views straight down : definitely not for sufferers of vertigo! You will pass out, looking down. The lines of colored light are reflections generated by the tower; maybe it helps the viewer align the view out there with the descriptions inside the tower, or they indicate a specific direction. The rectangular blocks piled on top of one another on the peninsula is a Hilton hotel.

16040180 sm — It really does not look as if there is ONE straight line in this apartment building. 1. I hope they paid the construction workers extra and 2. one has to wonder if the insides of the building, the rooms, follow the same kooky contours as the outside would suggest !

16040179 sm — Here’s the second of the three Frank Gehry designed buildings in the Neuer Zollhoff, as the area is called. Construction was completed in 1998.

16040166 sm — Check out the stainless steel used on the exterior of the shiny building, wedged in between the other two, so that it can reflect the colors in the steel. It looks (to me) like the exterior is holding up well, given that the building is now approaching 20 years of age.

16040168 sm — Is there one square or rectangular building in the entire Neuer Zollhof? Apparently not! These are offices of some kind, but I did not check the details.

16040123 sm — How about some very classic architecture from the Altstadt (old town)? I loved this clock tower on top of one of the buildings but did not make a note of the name of the building.

16040115 sm — And here is what the canal in Koningsallee (the king’s alley) looked like today. It is beautifully lit up at night, and full of color in fall. Check out the little stepping ledges on the sides of the canal. It is to enable ducks and waterfowl to get out of the water and onto dry land.

March 28, 2016March 2, 2018

Monday/ the new South Lake Union

I wanted to go check up on the latest construction in Seattle’s South Lake Union district, and went there with the light rail train and South Lake Union street car on Sunday afternoon. Soon after I got there, a persistent downpour started, and I had to curtail my picture-taking and call it quits.

IMG_5328 sm — One of the (relatively) new ‘Day One’ Amazon office buildings with a touch of artsy whimsy on the corner.

IMG_5331 sm — The building in the middle of the picture is an apartment block, with more under construction. Many of the new buildings are apartment blocks, so that people can live and work in South Lake Union (is that a good thing, to live so close to one’s work?. Good and bad, I suppose).

IMG_5330 sm — The open spaces are nicely done. Hopefully some greenery will appear to chase away the browns and grays, now that spring is here.

IMG_3589 sm — This is Amazon property, between two office buildings called Day One* North and Day One South, but a plaque says the public is welcome to use it. *Day One, since the technology revolution is in it ‘infancy’.

IMG_3599 sm — Here is an interactive display in one of the windows, with passers-by given the opportunity to take pictures of their mugs, which are then incorporated into the collages. (So of course I looked into the camera. I’m on the far right with black hair and .. part of an old bathysphere outfit?).

March 21, 2016March 2, 2018

Monday/ biosphere update

I went to the dentist early Monday morning, and had some time to walk around the block nearby to check up on the construction of the Amazon biospheres. There is still some way to go, but the frames are in place.

rufus_bw.png.CROP.article568-large — Here is what is on the drawing board (and nearing completion): the three biospheres in a park-like setting, and across the street Amazon’s new headquarters. (The slim building with the yellowish color on the far right).

IMG_3491 sm — The ‘Hello Kitty’ streetcar at its stop in downtown Seattle this morning. It is getting ready to head toward South Lake Union.

IMG_3496 sm — The unusual frameworks of the biospheres are up .. I hope working with the unusual shapes is not driving the construction workers crazy!

IMG_3499 sm — Here is the main entrance to the Amazon headquarters in the block right across from the biospheres.

February 28, 2016March 2, 2018

Sunday/ Broadway, San Francisco

I picked up my rental car again today and drove up on Highway 101 from the airport through the city and onto Broadway. Man! There are plenty of one-way streets, stop signs, bus only and bike only lanes, and pedestrians to watch out for. Once I reached Broadway, I told myself : park the car now; you cannot ogle at everything and drive at the same time. I was shocked to actually find a parking space, but I did, and I could walk around a bit to explore Broadway and a few blocks close by.

IMG_3159 sm — Here is San Francisco City Hall, on Van Ness avenue. (Van Ness is the Route 101 on the map with Broadway). It is here where Harvey Milk was assassinated in 1978. Milk was an American politician who became the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California. Sean Penn played his character in the 2008 biographical film about Milk’s life.

IMG_3175 sm — Beautiful detail from the San Francisco Public Schools Building across the street and a block or two down from City Hall.

IMG_3192 sm — Street art off Broadway in an alley.

IMG_3193 sm — It’s up and down around Broadway (it’s where the famous crooked Lombard Street is, as well), and I hope the little white truck’s handbrake is on t-i-g-h-t. Check out the steps on the sidewalks.

IMG_3198 sm — There is some eye-catching painted artwork on this building as well.

IMG_3203 sm — The City Lights Books store has creaky wood-board floors, rooms with wooden book-cases inside, and a basement filled that smells musty, of yellowed book pages. It brought back memories of my grandfather’s study with the walls of old books on them.

IMG_3211 sm — The iconic Transamerica Pyramid Center was completed in 1972. (It faced lots of criticism during its construction, though). Check out the interesting green building just to its right ..

IMG_3217 sm — .. it is the Sentinel Building, completed in 1907 in the distinctive copper-green Flatiron style structure. (New York City has some of these buildings as well, and there is also one or two in Seattle).

July 22, 2014March 2, 2018

Tuesday/ Denver buildings

It was warm here in Denver today : 94 °F (34 °C), the skies clear for most of the day.
I took a few more pictures during lunch time and after work of my favorite Denver buildings.

IMG_4318 sm — The blues of the sky and the browns of the Brown Palace come together nicely in this view. The Brown Palace Hotel was built in 1892 of sandstone and red granite and is Denver’s second oldest operating hotel. (Yes, old hotels are nice to look at but generally not very nice to stay in – even if they have been renovated!).

IMG_4323 sm — This is the entrance to the Colorado Dept of Education building on Colfax Avenue. The state seal shows that Colorado achieved statehood in 1876, a hundred years after Independence Day for the USA. Indeed, ‘Centennial State’ is one of the monikers of Colorado. And the motto ‘Nil sine numine’ means ‘Nothing without providence’.

IMG_4327 sm — Every bit of scaffolding has finally been removed from the Colorado State Capitol, bringing its $17 million renovation to completion.

May 28, 2014March 2, 2018

Wednesday/ the Granite Building

Here’s the beautiful Granite Building here in lower downtown Denver. We had wood-fired pizza just across the street from it tonight.

From the Denver Post : It’s the four-story presence that looms over the southwest corner of Larimer and 15th streets, boasting a history that is appropriately rich, given that it was constructed stone by multicolored stone in 1882, just 24 years after gold prospectors founded Denver.

IMG_2999 sm2 — The Granite Building is also known as the Graham-Clayton Building. Built in 1882, it is 132 years old.

April 13, 2014March 2, 2018

Sunday/ the University Temple church building

It was a gorgeous Sunday here in Seattle, but it was almost 4 o’clock before I chased myself out of the house to go for a walk. So where to go, I thought? I chose the University District; took the No 43 bus out there and walked around, and made a stop at the great bookstore that is run by the University of Washington.

IMG_1794 sm — The main tower of the University Temple building. The church is on 16th Ave across from the University of Washington campus. It belongs to the United Methodist Church. The building was designed in 1925 and constructed just a year later, in 1926.

IMG_1793 sm — .. and here is the beautiful artwork of the main entrance of the church.

August 6, 2013March 2, 2018

Monday/ building metamorphosis

On my walkabout Monday night I saw that the empty Chutney’s Grille on the Hill restaurant building here on 15th Ave is now clad in wood. The building is ultimately destined to make way for a new four-story, mixed-use apartment building.

IMG_7921 sm — The skeleton of the closed ‘Chutneys Grille on the Hill’ is clad with wooden pallet beams .. best I can tell, it’s meant as outdoor art until the demolition man comes.

September 12, 2012March 2, 2018

Tuesday/ the Steel Building and the Gulf Tower

It was a sombre day in the USA with the 11th anniversary of 9/11. Here are three pictures of the same downtown Pittsburgh scene from my hotel room window Monday night and Tuesday. The very tall building on the left that runs out of the picture is the headquarters of US Steel. It has 64 floors and was completed in 1970. Its outside is steel and it is called – quick, want to guess? – the Steel Building. The Gulf Tower next to it with the colorfully lit top at night has 44 floors and was completed in 1930.

June 28, 2012March 2, 2018

Wednesday/ Seattle’s new ultra-green building

This building is in Capitol Hill in Seattle not far from my house. (The picture is from TIME magazine). There used to be a neighborhood bar in its place where my friends and I would go to many times for a beer! Anyway .. the building is very, very green (energy efficient) and the target for it is to collect energy and use it so sparingly that it can be run ‘off the grid’. I cannot say that the flat roof flush with solar panels does a lot for me from an architectural point of view but hey .. it soaks up the sun rays. (Yes, we do have sun in Seattle!).

June 22, 2012March 2, 2018

Thursday/ Stellenbosch buildings

Thursday was overcast and cool which made for good picture-taking weather. All the buildings are from the central area of Stellenbosch.

IMG_5176 sm — The ‘old main building’ of the University of Stellenbosch was completed in 1886 and recently renovated. It is built in a style that could be called Cape classical.

IMG_5168 sm — This is the Sasol Art Museum is on Ryneveld Street in a beautiful red Dutch Neo-Classical building dating back to 1907. The building was previously home to the Bloemhof school.

IMG_5177 sm — This is Crozier House in Victoria street.

IMG_5183 sm — This is Van der Stel liquor store on Andringa street, a simple building but I love the roof arches and the Victorian style trim.

IMG_5190 sm — This church is called the ‘Mother Church’ and this building and tower were consecrated in 1863. The style is neo-gothic, built from plans from Carl Otto Hager, a German master builder and architect from Dresden.

April 30, 2011March 2, 2018

Saturday/ International Commerce Center building

Today we started out on Hollywood Rd on Hong Kong Island where all the antique shops are, stopped by the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch and then went to International Commerce Center which has opened its obsevarion deck just a few weeks ago.

Pictures – Man Mo temple on Hollywood Rd burns a lotof incense (spiral coils)! The International Commerce Center comes in at No 4 according to a chart on the observation deck. Notably Chicago boasts two skyscrapers in the top 10 : Willis Tower (Sears Tower’s new name) and Trump’s Tower. (Message to Mr Trump : stick to real estate and stay out of politics). The blue floor with a model of Hong Kong is at one’s feet when stepping out of the elevator on the 100th floor. The tower is in Kowloon, so that’s Hong Kong Island across Victoria Harbor. The observation deck has little mascots (to make it interesting for young visitors?) The picture shows a little of the side, and that’s me in the ‘take a photo’ cube.

We noticed that there’s a number of floors above the observation deck .. that is actually a Ritz-Carlton Hotel (!) occupying floors 102 through 118. It has the world’s highest swimming pool and bar within a building. The 30,000 sqf Presidential Suite which costs 100 000 HKD per night ($US 12,500) is on floor 117.

March 20, 2011March 2, 2018

Sunday/ more Shenzhen buildings

These pictures are from my outing to Shenzhen yesterday. It was foggy and drizzling, so not the best day to go skyscaper hunting in the city.

From the top down –

Entrance to the Grand Theatre metro station (this is by the mix-C shopping mall) where the cab driver from Dameisha dropped me off / .. and there it is, the King Key Finance Center disappearing into the fog. Not sure of the name of the building in front of it / This is an administrative building of some sort close by / The Shung Hing Square tower (tallest in Shenzhen but about to be overtaken by the King Key Finance Center) / tree with orange spring blossoms at the base of the Shung Hing Square tower/ this is a dorm building for University of Shenzhen students / in the background with the China Southern Power Grid building in the front / the pink step building might belong to Huatai United Securities (that’s what the billboard on it says)

The next few pictures are from inside the mix-C shopping mall .. a tea seller / a hovercraft demonstrated in Toys-R-Us / a 3D puzzle for the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai / Wonderwoman and Medusa (?) at the MAC cosmetics store .. Pow! take that!

Now outside again .. the World Finance Center is also close by the other two towers the first picture of the base and the next from farther away and finally an Art Deco-y apartment building nearby (with the tree in front of it sprouting little green leaves).

February 22, 2010December 27, 2020

Monday/ Outside China Town

It was a long Monday at work – Mondays always seem long! but at least I can post these pictures from yesterday’s visit to the Outside China Town (OCT) theme park. Disneyland or Six Flags it is not – but there is a spectacular and steep aerial tramway up the mountainside to provide panoramic views of Dameisha, the beach and the bay down below.

The parking lot for OCT theme park. We see the tower with the wrap-around screen every night from the Yanba Expressway when we came in from work with the shuttle bus.

The entrance: a nod to the Year of the Tiger, and the first of five or six escalators that takes one up the mountainside.

A misty pond on the way up to the space shuttle display on one of the levels.

Trinkets and refreshments are for sale everywhere, of course.

Here’s the Starbucks, with a food vendor in the foreground. If the Starbucks was a little easier to get to, and not inside OCT, I would have visited it every day.

The water spray is kicked up by a jet ski, and we did not stay long enough to see what other entertainment was offered in this show.

Here’s the aerial tramway, taking us to the top of the mountain ridge. Those pylons are really tall! That’s Dameisha beach on the right and Mirs Bay in the distance.

The arrival point at the top of the tramway. The little tramway cars take only 6 people, at most.

Posing for the obligatory photograph at the overlook. This is looking more or less west, with the coastline continuing on towards Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

Here’s the skywalk with its glass floor. Yikes. With these things, one has to trust that the civil engineers had double checked their design calculations, and that the builders had followed all the specifications without cutting corners.

Looking down at a new ride that is under construction, on the edge of the cliff. I’m too old for these kinds of heart-stopping experiences, so it’s a no for me, thank you very much.

Another Chinese only menu to decipher. The pictures are super helpful for the helpless (us), of course. The green section has the cold drinks (such as snow top coffee and iced tea) and hot drinks (black tea, green tea, milk tea, classic coffee).

Here is the view from the top, with some main areas and buildings of interest. Dameisha is really ‘big’ Meisha (‘da’ is big) and Xiaomeisha is ‘little’ Meisha (‘xiao’ means small or little).

February 14, 2010December 26, 2020

Sunday/ Valentine’s Day & Lunar New Year

They do celebrate Valentine’s Day in China, and this year it coincides with the Chinese New Year’s Day – very rare since the new year’s day is late on the calendar this year.

It turned out that my fears of masses of people trying to get into Hong Kong on Friday through the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border was unfounded; I sailed through with no trouble at all. I stayed at a Marriott Courtyard Hotel on Hong Kong Island, very reasonably priced at US$100 per night, a tall 30 story structure with only 6 rooms on every floor (picture below is from my hotel room). The room was very cozy, the bed had six perfectly firm pillows, the glass shower stall a large oversized ‘rain’ showerhead .. and the food in the restaurant was superb.

I was so tired on Friday night, and sat there enjoying a crisp Asahi beer and fried halibut with jasmine rice and Thai asparagus. Saturday I crisscrossed the city on several missions, to the bookstore, to the jewelry store, to the toy store, and they were all successful. I also learned that the New Year’s parade (another parade other than the January one) and fireworks was only going to be tonight, so I missed that. But I did go to the New Year’s Fair in Victoria Park; I will post more pictures later this week.