photography: March 2003 Archives

Today there was a series of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations on the Columbia campus. The chants of "U.S.A." and "No More War" drifted up to the 5th floor of Hamilton and made it difficult for our German teacher to expain the finer points of extended-adjective constructions.

Later on, while walking through the crowd on my way to lunch, I snapped a few quick pictures. They're mostly out-of-focus and skewed - I wish I had the camera when I was up in the Hamilton classroom, as it had a terrific view over the quad.

Apparently the rain we had last night was too much for the retaining wall on the 110th side of St. John the Divine. A huge portion of the stonework has collapsed, spewing boulders and dirt over the sidewalk.

Check out the pictures here.

The chainlink fence you see in the pictures has actually been up for about six months - they must have known the wall was structurally unsound for a while. Looking at the amount of material that hit the sidewalk, it's amazing nobody was hurt - the fence was barely able to contain everything that fell.

Boy, not a good day for masonry here in Morningside Heights. On my way to photograph the collapse of the wall along St. John the Divine's 110th Street side, I noticed that the Citibank on 112th and Broadway had apparently shed its exterior plaster in sympathy. Pictures here and here.

UC Berkeley just put up a neat slideshow of architectural renderings, drawings and photographs of their campus, focusing on the legacy of John Galen Howard. Howard was a Beaux Arts-trained designer who helped spawn the regional "Bay Area Eclectic" style in the Berkeley hills.

I grew up hanging out in an office in a building designed by Howard, the old Architecture School. Most of his work for the campus was neoclassical and of stone, but North Gate Hall was a graceful shingled building which followed the grade up the slope of Hearst Avenue. The old drafting rooms, now newsrooms, were lit by fantastic expanses of skylights and walls of windows - a reminder of when natural light was a neccesity for drawing and not the glare-inducing impediment to CRT legibility it is now.