Category: Architecture

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Saturday/ at the Kaufhaus 🧸

You talk like Marlene Dietrich
And you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire
Your clothes are all made by Balmain
And there’s diamonds and pearls in your hair, yes, there are ..
– From ‘Where Do You Go To My Lovely’ by Peter Sarstedt (1969)

It was crowded on the streets and in the stores today.
As Easter weekend goes, Friday was a Sunday (and German stores close on Sundays), today is Saturday, with tomorrow Sunday— and Monday another Sunday.
The highlight of my day was to rub shoulders with Berlin’s upper crust at KaDeWe.
KaDeWe is Kaufhaus Des Westens, ‘Department Store of the West’, second in size only to Harrods in London.

The eateries on the top floor include an oyster bar— and I’m sure I would have found caviar if I looked for it.

Businessman Adolf Jandorf opened this store in 1907. The KaDeWe abbreviation was used from the start. With over 60,000 square meters (650,000 sq ft) of retail space and more than 380,000 articles available, KaDeWe is the second-largest department store in Europe, after Harrods in London. It attracts 40,000 to 50,000 visitors every day. [Information from Wikipedia]
The escalators in the middle of the store.
Balmain is French fashion designer Pierre Balmain: founder of leading post-war fashion house Balmain. (He died in Paris in 1982). Marie-Claire in Peter Sarstedt’s famous 1969 song wore clothes that were ‘all made by Balmain’.
These shirts and jackets go for oh, $900 or $1,000 apiece. Kind of safe to say that I will never wear these, but who’s to say? Maybe I will— after I had won the Powerball or Mega Millions lottery.
These beautiful long-eared rabbits are very plush and very, very soft to the touch. Maybe I should have gotten one.
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Friday/ a cold rain and coffee ☕️

Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the 1930s— a photo from a store window display across from the church on Kurfürstenstraße.
[Photo by Ewald Gnilka]
It was only 7°C  (45 °F) today, with light rain— not enough to stop me from going out, though.

I was checking out the beautiful Wittenbergplatz U-bahn station when I realized the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church* is down the street, and I walked down in the rain to it to take a closer look.
(When I was here eight years ago, I just caught a glimpse of it on the way out to the airport).

Then it was time for coffee and a slice of banana bread at Starbucks nearby. Starbucks might be a little passé for many Americans, but not so for South Africans and for Germans. There were no seats left inside, so I sat outside on the only dry chair I could find. A little sparrow came for my bread crumbs that had fallen on the ground.

*During World War II, on the night of 23 November 1943, the church was extensively damaged in an air raid.

 

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Thursday/ the U-bahn as art 🎨

Life is short, art is long.
— John Ringling

Maybe I should extend my stay in Berlin so that I can photograph every single U-bahn station.
Three new stations were added just in the last year or so to the U5: Unter den Linden, Rotes Rathaus  and Museuminsel.

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Wednesday/ arrival in Berlin 🚊

It was still dark when we landed at Frankfurt airport. I had plenty of time to find the platform for my train to Berlin, and spent some time in the airport terminal before walking to the platforms at the train station.

The train to Berlin took four hours, with four stops along the way.
A sign inside the car said the train ran at 200 km/h (124 mph), but it can actually go much faster—with a maximum speed of 330 km/h (205 mph).

Deutsche Bahn’s Intercity Express (ICE) train rolling into the station at Frankfurt Airport. The train stops for only 3 minutes! Get on board if you’re not at the right car — you can always find your car and seat once you’re on the train. I had a reserved seat at the window in first class, and chased a guy with a general ticket out of my seat. (The car was not full, but if I didn’t sit in my reserved seat, I risk getting chased out of my seat as well as more passengers board at stations along the way). The Deutsche Bahn app also lets you ‘Check In’ to your seat. The ticket inspector can see that, and then he does not have to nudge you while you sleep, or bother you, to ask for your ticket.

We passed by this impressive viaduct in the Werra-Meißner-Kreis district in the north of the state of Hessen.
Here’s the stop at the main train station in Halle, a city in central Germany. I think this is a stately old hotel.
We had just stepped off the train at Berlin Hauptbahnhof.
Outside of Berlin Hauptbahnhof.
The impressive modern structure— with multiple levels of shops and offices and train platforms— came into operation in 2006.
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Saturday/ a walk in the Gardens 🌺

It was quiet early on Saturday morning in the Gardens (also called ‘The Company’s Garden).
The garden was originally created in the 1650s by the region’s first European settlers and provided fertile ground to grow fresh produce to replenish ships rounding the Cape.

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Friday/ Long Street 🏫

My hotel is in the Tamboerskloof neighborhood in Cape Town.
Theses pictures from my self-directed architecture walk are all from Long Street or nearby.
That’s Table Mountain in the last picture, of course.

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Wednesday/ a geodesic dome 🗻

The New York Times posted pictures shared by their readers in California, of the snow there. I like this one.

A geodesic dome in the Santa Cruz mountains. The snowpack in the vast Sierra Nevada mountain range is the deepest it’s been in decades, exceeding 200% of the normal snowpack depth in some areas.
[Photo by Karrie Gaylord]
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Friday/ inside the Summit 🏬

The amigos toured the new $2 billion Seattle Convention Center extension today. (Construction had started in August 2018).
The existing Convention Center is now named Arch, and this extension is called Summit.

There is a large below-ground space, and five sprawling floors stacked on top of it, with a ballroom the size of a football field at the top. (The height of the Center is the equivalent of 14 regular floors).
The planks of wood suspended from the ceiling in the ballroom, and used for paneling at the ballroom entrance doors are called ‘wormwood’.
The wood comes from salvaged, decommissioned log-booms (floating barriers in waterways to collect logs that had been cut nearby).
After some time in the water, larvae of marine clams (sp. Bankia setacea) attach themselves to the logs, and start drilling into the log’s interior, creating a network of tunnels.

‘Seattle faces a moment of truth to save downtown’ wrote the Seattle Times today, pointing a report from Downtown Seattle Association that had estimated in October 2021 that 500 street-level businesses had closed since 2019. Only  300 new street-level businesses had opened. The hope is that the Convention Center extension can serve as a catalyst to bring people back and fill the empty spaces of commercial real estate.

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Monday/ at the library 📖

I checked into the central library in downtown for the first time since the start of the pandemic today, and did very well. 😁
I bought two books for $1 each (so: free) at the little store at the entrance, and
checked out two Der Spiegel magazines and The Case of The Shoplifter’s Shoe. (A Perry Mason detective mystery. He is a lawyer and his secretary’s name is Della, and his private detective is Paul Drake.  It’s easy reading and for old times’ sake. I had read them all a long time ago).

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Sunday/ International District ⛩

I took the light rail to Seattle’s International District station today, just as the gray sky was turning into black. (King Street Station for the inter-city Amtrak trains is nearby).
There will be dry weather and sun this week, but the highs will only reach 42°F (5°C).

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Sunday/ along First Avenue 🏢

We had sun and blue sky today, and I went down to Pioneer Square station to do a another little self-directed architecture tour.

I had the platform all to myself after hopping off the train at Pioneer Square station. 🤗
The Interurban Building on Yesler Way started out as the Seattle National Bank Building (1890–1899). It was built after the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889, in the Romanesque Revival architecture.
There was a tour guide and tourists at the Merchant’s Cafe and Saloon, Seattle’s oldest bar & restaurant. Just then a confused and angry woman walked by yelling expletives for all of two city blocks. ‘It’s going to be downhill from here’ said the tour guide to his group, and I don’t think he was referring to the terrain. (Pioneer Square is nearby and is notorious for the street people hanging out over there. It was deserted and quiet there today, though).
All the way across Alaskan Way to the waterfront, now. This is the newly-opened waiting lounge for the Bainbridge Island and Bremerton ferries, five years in the making. The large windows offer views of Elliott Bay (Puget Sound) and the Olympic Mountains. Crews are still working on a new entry building along Alaskan Way and the elevated pedestrian connector to this new terminal building.
The city’s skyline seen from the north side of the waiting lounge. That’s the Leschi fireboat in the foreground, commissioned in 2007. Missions for its crew include firefighting, search and rescue, and responses to chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive (CBRNE) emergencies.
Here’s the view looking north along Alaskan Way from the temporary pedestrian bridge at Columbia Street. The new pedestrian bridge is up ahead. Roughly three years after the completion of the demolition of the double-decker Alaskan Way Viaduct, there is still a ways to go to tidy up and complete all the construction. To be fair, the massive Colman Dock ferry terminal project (on the left) had started in 2017, and is still slated to be completed on time in 2023 despite the pandemic and a 140-day long concrete worker strike earlier this year.
The renovation project on the beautiful 1932 Federal Office Building on First Avenue is now complete. There is a plaque on the northeast corner of the building that reads ‘The Seattle Fire started here on June 6, 1889. This tablet was placed by survivors of the Seattle Volunteer Fire Department’.
The chic 1901 Alexis Hotel is to the north of the Federal Office Building.
Construction on the Holyoke Building across the street had actually started just before the Great Seattle fire of 1889. It was completed in 1890 in the Victorian Commercial style with a few Romanesque touches.
Now we’re jumping ahead almost a century in time, to the 22-story condominium building called the Watermark Tower. Constructed in 1983, it has lots of square and rectangular elements on the exterior. The canopy at the entrance, and the window pane above it is much more interesting to me.
I have made my way to the corner of Seneca Street and First Avenue. The Colonial Grand Pacific Condominium building of 1902 has 37 units (remodeled and converted to condominiums in 1983). It is considered to be one of Seattle’s finest examples of Richardsonian Romanesque commercial architecture.
I can now easily squeeze the Qualtrics Tower (formerly known as 2+U and 2&U), completed in 2020, into my picture frame with my phone’s wide-angle lens. (Confession: these are all iPhone pictures. I left my heavy DSLR camera at home).
Look! A beautiful piece of blue sky, and the waters of Puget Sound. The elevated Seneca Street off-ramp that used to occupy this space has disappeared along with the the Alaskan Way Viaduct.
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Monday/ arrival into Cairns 🏝

A 1990s tea towel depicting Cairns.  I had taken the picture a few days ago at an exhibit at Queensland State Library.
Here’s our Boeing 737-800 on the tarmac at Brisbane airport. A ground personnel person from Qantas came running up and said ‘No pictures, please!’, so I couldn’t take one from the top of the stairs at the tail. Aw.
As we approached Cairns, the turquoise and teal colors of the shallow waters and reefs on the seabed started to appear.
Here’s Cairns, population 150,000 or so. Latitude-wise we’re now 17° south of the equator, the closest I have ever been. (Flying over the equator doesn’t count, and some years ago I did spend 2 hours in the lounge at the airport in Lagos, Nigeria, 6° north of the equator).
It was 32 °C (90° F) here today and very humid. We couldn’t check into the hotel with our early morning arrival, so we walked to the downtown Cairns shopping mall for cool air and for a bite. (It was a slog). Here’s the 1926 Grand Hotel right across the mall.

 

We made it into Cairns, with a 6.05 am departure out of Brisbane.

We took a taxi into Cairns, which was just a few miles away from the airport.

 

 

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Friday/ Surfer’s Paradise Beach 🏄

My brother and sister-in-law and I made a trip to Gold Coast today to check in with my niece, and to check out the famous beaches there.

This is Surfers Paradise Beach, just south of Main Beach on the Gold Coast shoreline.
A dozen named beaches with swim areas line the coast here, with lifeguards and even helicopters overhead now and again. The beach looks empty, but there were several dozen people behind us on the beach at the swim area. It was 29°C (84 °F) today but it felt hotter. We just went in for a quick dip in the surf, and took a few pictures (that’s my brother and my sister-in-law).
Lots and lots of high-rises: private apartment (condominium) and holiday apartment buildings, as well as resort buildings and hotels, line the street called Surfers Paradise Esplanade.
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Monday/ the river ferry 🚤

I embarked at the West End and disembarked at South Bank.
Orleigh Park on the banks of the Brisbane River, with the ferry terminal just ahead on the right. Run, Forrest, run! I told myself. I was good that I did, because they closed the boarding gate just a minute after I had embarked.
The ferries are branded CityCat (Cat for catamaran?). There are 23 of these plying the waters of the Brisbane river, and 5 smaller vessels called KittyCats. 
This one arrived at the West End ferry terminal just as we were departing from there.
The CityCat ferries are constructed locally, in Brisbane.
This vessel was launched in August 2020. Length is 27.2 m (89 ft), beam 7.95 m (26 ft).
Here’s the Merivale Railway Bridge with a double track. It opened in Nov. 1978, 43 years ago.
This rail crossing is the only one across the Brisbane River, and a bottleneck for rail transport in the metro area.
The massive Cross River Rail project, underway since 2019, is a new 10.2 km (6.3 mi) rail line from Dutton Park to Bowen Hills, which includes 5.9 km (3.6 mi) of twin tunnels under the Brisbane River. The first services are expected to start operating by late 2025.
The William Jolly Bridge— named after William Jolly, the first Lord Mayor of the Greater Brisbane City Council during the construction of the bridge from 1928 to 1932. (So no,  not named after Willem/ William the Jolly Ferry Rider! ).
As bridges over the Brisbane River go, this one is new: the Kurilpa Bridge is a pedestrian and bicycle bridge that opened in 2009.
Here’s the end of my jolly ride, at the South Bank ferry terminal, with the Queens Wharf construction project across the river.

The sun was out in full force today, here in Brisbane in Australia’s Sunshine State
(30 °C/ 86 °F).

I was in the West End where I spotted the ferry at the terminal there. I made a run for it and hopped on.

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Wednesday/ Story Bridge 🌫

Story Bridge was constructed in 1940 and is the longest cantilever bridge in Australia. It is named after prominent public servant John Douglas Story.

The south end of Story Bridge rests on Kangaroo Point, the tip of a narrow strip of land just east of downtown Brisbane.
There is a promenade around Captain Burke Park, all around Kangaroo Point. I am approaching the Bridge from the southwest.
This is The Rock (1988) by artist Stephen Killick (epoxy paint on concrete). It featured in the World Expo ’88 in Brisbane and was later moved to this location in Captain Burke Park.
I made it down right to the river’s sandy edge, with steps down from the promenade path. Across the water under the bridge, is a microbrewery called Felons Brewing Co.
On the southeast side of the bridge, and looking towards the northwest.
There is a project underway to restore the below-deck steel on the bridge.
I was too tired of walking to walk towards the north over the bridge, so I took the bus! The bus is heading north towards downtown Brisbane.
And here’s the view from the spot where I had a bite to eat. This is the Riverside Ferry Terminal, looking northeast towards the bridge.
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Monday/ Central Station

I took the train to the city to check out Brisbane Central Station today.

Here comes my train: the northbound train on the Ferny Grove Line approaching the Park Road Station.
Four stops later gets one to Central Station. There are 6 platforms for the 6 lines that serve the city and its suburbs. I had just stepped off the train.
Inside the main hall of Central Station: a pretty standard train station hallway with information screens, ticket counters and a few places to get something to eat.
The Ann Street entrance and the original 1889 building for the Brisbane Central Station.
St Andrew’s Uniting Church, at the corner of Ann Street and Creek Street. Designed by George David Payne and built in 1905 by Alexander Lind & Son.
Anzac Square & Memorial Galleries is located just across the street from Central Station. This is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Dedicated Memorial Queensland, in honor of First Nations servicemen and women in Brisbane. The memorial is brand new, and was unveiled in May of 2022.
A little further on is Post Office Square with stores and a food hall below street level. The main Australia Post post office is across the street. I endeavored to buy some 2022 issue Australian postage stamps, one set with Australian dinosaurs on and another set of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but they were out of stock on both counts.
These interesting geometric window pane patterns are on the Brisbane Club Tower nearby.
There is coffee everywhere in the city, and a few Starbucks locations as well. I thought Starbucks had withdrawn entirely from Australia, but there are still 50 or so locations in the Brisbane, Melbourne, Gold Coast and Sydney areas.
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Sunday/ Queen Street Mall

I took the No 120 bus to the bus terminal under the Queen Street Mall in downtown Brisbane today.

The Queen Street bus terminal is reached by tunnels under the Queen Street Mall. It’s best to check with Google Maps to make sure you wait at the right place! (and Google’s Platform 1-E is the same as Platform 1e on the signs).
There was a flea market on Brisbane Square today. That’s the Treasury Casino and Hotel Brisbane in the distance.
The art deco façade of the 1929 York Hotel was preserved when the Myer Centre at the Queen Street Mall was constructed in 1982.
Another building, that of the Hotel Carlton (constructed 1891), was preserved, along with its beautiful wrought iron railings.
These kangaroos are at the corner of Queen Street and George Street.
Walking along George Street, and looking up at the W Hotel (front, opened in 2018) and The One condo tower (at the back, opened this year).
Looking out from the entrance at the Brisbane Magistrate offices off George Street.
The aluminum and concrete artwork was installed in 2009 and the artist is Daniel Templeman.
The McDonnell & East Ltd Building at 414 George Street is a former department store, and now a heritage-listed building. It was designed by Thomas Ramsay Hall and built from 1912 to 1928 by Andrew Gillespie.
Here’s the Albert Street Uniting Church, holding its own against its concrete and steel neighbors. It was designed by George Addison and built in  1888-89 by Thomas Pearson & Sons.
A pair of kangaroos on King George Square. Mama kangaroo has a joey in her pouch (a baby kangaroo is called a joey). 
Here’s Brisbane City Hall, inaugurated in 1930. The building design is based on a combination of the Roman Pantheon, and St Mark’s Campanile in Venice— and is considered one of Brisbane’s finest buildings.
I made my way back to the Queen Street Mall, standing under a large steel and glass canopy and contemplating if the two colors on the historic old building complement each other well enough.
Here’s a Tesla Model 3 slipping into a parking garage nearby.
I thought BUZINGA might be Australian for Yowza! or something like that. All that a Google search revealed is that Buzinga is a cutting-edge software company in Melbourne.
Here’s a classic Queen Victoria statue, this one keeping watch over the grounds of the Queens Gardens Park. Victoria’s reign of 63 yrs (1837 -1901) has been eclipsed only by the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
Taking a closer look at the Queens Wharf Tower construction project nearby, at 1 William Street. It is scheduled to open in 2023.