jaipur

6 August 2009

Jaipur, in Rajasthan, is a pretty awesome city. Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh moved his kingdom’s capitol from Amber to it due to a serious scarcity of water. It’s a rigorously planned city (based on the Shilpa Shastra), with large boulevards and arcades lining the street. Based on these large boulevards and the arcades, Jaipur is in someways more similar to Paris or Bologna than it is other Indian cities. However, the bright pink-colored stone definitely helps place it in India. It was painted pink for the Prince of Wales visit in 1876.

Buildings like the Hawa Mahal, the Jai Mahal, and the Jantar Mantar, are all major landmarks in Jaipour, however, I wanted to capture a street since that’s the structure in which all these awesome landmarks reside in (well, the Jai Mahal is surrounded by water, but I digress).  Again, I really should’ve colored this to really show you how pink it is, but the pictures should give you a good idea of Jaipur (and taken by a buddy of mine, who’s much better at photography than I am. I’ll stick to drawing.)

buildings, public space, streets, travel sketches

buildings, India, public, rajasthan, sketch, travel, urban

8 April 2012

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madras high court

High Court of Judicature Madras: 21 July 2009

It has been an vast amount of time since I last posted anything onto this blog, but I do have a few pieces that never made it on here and a few new ones I’m working on now. This one is decidedly old, and a remnant from my post-master of architecture trip to India when I backpacked around India. 

The High Court of Madras is one of the three high courts in india, formed by an issue of the British Parliament in 1861, under the reign of Queen Victoria. Many cases are tried here, and there are plenty of lawyers running around working feverishly, some that are running around hounding for a job feverishly, some who are just feverish since it’s so hot. I drew this from a photograph since it was July in Madras, which makes it largely unbearable.

The building complex, possibly one of the largest law complexes in the world, was designed by J.W. Brassington under the architect Henry Irwin‘s guidance. This architect is well-known in British India for major work in south India such as the Mysore Palace and Chennai Central Railway Terminus. The stained glass doors are beautiful, and the dome, drawn here is exquisite. Just like the Cargills Ceylon building I drew in Columbo, this building is also a clear example of Indo-Saracenic architecture. The red stone dominates throughout the complex, and the covered walkways provide some respite from the searing heat.

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28 March 2012

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kostel matky boží před týnem

Church of Our Lady before Týn: 11 March 2011

Old Town Square or (Staroměstské náměstí) is a main feature of historic Prague, as is the Church of Our Lady before Týn or more fantastically in Czech, Kostel Matky Boží před Týnem. If a tourist is only passing through Prague, this is their one “must see” part. Even though I saw this in late winter, it was bustling with locals, tourists, and Katy Perry on the stereo.

The statue in the center of the square is in memory of Jan Hus, a Church reformer à la Martin Luther and John Calvin. In fact, it is thought that Hus was the original reformer of the Church, and he was burned at the stake in Konstanz. This memorial was grander than a similar one to Giordano Bruno, which is in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori.

Another main feature of the square is the astronomical clock, which is on the side of the church and is a main draw for tourists. A lot of Prague’s street painters had astronomical clock paintings and it was a struggle to find anything original. Luckily, I managed on a pastel crayon image of Prague from above that was far more unique than anything I could grab on the street.

Kostel Matky Boží před Týnem - a "frozen hand" sketch

The church itself was built in the 14th century, on top of an older Romanesque and Gothic Church. Since cathedrals and churches took lifetimes to build in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, the church had two architects Matthias of Arras and Peter Parler (not to be confused with Peter Parker or Tobey Maguire.) Parler was responsible for an especially killer cathedral across the Vltava River – the St. Vitus Cathedral, or Katedrála svatého Víta. 

Katedrála svatého Víta - peeking behind

What’s most noticeable in the Týn Church are the two spires, which rise more than two hundred fifty feet. They were completed sometime in the 15th century, but the church has gone a number of renovations and interior renovations persist. The square and the church is a good meeting point for locals and tourists alike – especially if you liked to wander around you could somehow find yourself back to there. After dinner with a hostel-mate and Argentinian economist Guido – who looked a lot like Gonzalo Higuaín - we ended up wandering there. Dude said he’d hit me up on Facebook and never did. [wipes away tears.]

Prague is dope and it three days you can see a lot, provided things are open. Winter’s not the best time for all the attractions to be open, but the Alphonse Mucha and Communism Museums are fantastic. I’d love to go again.

buildings, public space, travel sketches

buildings, church, czech republic, europe, favorite, locals, memorial, piazza, prague, public, tourists

3 August 2011

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congress hotel

Congress Plaza Hotel Chicago: 20 September 2010

It seems I’ve got a theme of hotels running through my posts – I assure you this is only a coincidence as these the Taj Hotel and this particular hotel were visited more than a year apart. A good friend of mine from graduate school at Oregon moved to Chicago after completing his master of architecture and I visited him for a few days this past September. It’s a fantastic city.

A central part of downtown Chicago is Millenium Park, which is bookended by Renzo Piano‘s modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago and Frank O. Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion. Millenium Park is where Barack Obama gave his election night rally – and the Pritzker Pavilion was where he stood in front of his exuberant supporters when he won. Bounding the park to the east is Lake Michigan and to the west is Michigan Avenue, with the Congress Hotel taking a prominent portion of the skyline.

Congress Hotel - North Tower

It was first built as the “Auditorium Annex” to Louis Sullivan‘s Auditorium Building across the street, with the north tower the first building built in 1893 by Clinton Warner. Renowned Chicago firm Holabird and Roche completed the larger south tower in 1907. The north tower is what I’ve drawn here, sitting in Millenium Park looking back towards the city. The facade has a good mix of repetitive elements and variation. The south tower has eight bays leading up to a arched window, and then two smaller sets of paired windows above it. Although it does have 8 bays, I goofed up and only drew 7!

buildings, public space

buildings, chicago, louis sullivan, sketch, travel, united states, urban, water

1 February 2011

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taj hotel

Taj Hotel Mumbai: 11 August 2009

The iconic Taj Hotel sits in a trendy neighborhood called Colaba, at the southern tip of Mumbai. Especially prominent after the 2008 terrorist attacks, this building also prominently forms the square along with the Gateway of India, the ferry dock, and the hotel’s hideous 1973 tower wing.

The building itself was commissioned by Jamshedji Tata, the major Indian industrialist. The building opened in 1903 shortly before Tata’s death the following year and boasted a number of innovations unseen in India at the time such as steel and operated a steam elevator. It was designed in the Indo-Saracenic style, similar to a building I drew in Colombo, the Cargills Ceylon Building. The dark red dome was framed with the same steel as used in the Eiffel Tower. Originally the entrance faced the city proper, but since the main access changed towards the harbor-side.

main facade

The design of this facade’s pretty straightforward. The ends are capped by smaller onion domes while the center dome towers above. Between the domes are projecting bay windows, possibly harking back to jharokas, or common projecting balconies in Indian architecture.

My friend Stephen and I came here for a few days and checked out Mumbai (which I loved thoroughly) and went to the Elephanta Caves embarking from the ferry at the Gateway of India. As you can see from the image there were lots of people including Mumbaikars and tourists alike, all entertained by hawkers and street performers. Unlike other drawings, I drew this from Stephen’s photograph because it was not tenable to draw at the time. While walking past we met a worker from the building who described the terrorist attack scene. He kept on his story about pillows flying out of windows and eventually asked us for some money for his storytelling! Not sure if he was really telling the truth…

buildings, public space, travel sketches

asia, buildings, domes, harbor, India, locals, sketch, tourists, urban, water

18 January 2011

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marienplatz

Neues Rathaus am Marienplatz: 11 September 2009

In the most central part of Munich lies the Marienplatz, a Middle-Age square home to the Rathaus-Glockenspiel.  It’s a major tourist attraction, but was undergoing repairs when I was there. The Rathaus, or town hall, currently  houses the city government including Munich’s city council and mayor’s office while also he arched bays in front has shops, tourist information, and a restaurant. It’s not far from the Altes Rathaus, which forms the east portion of the Marienplatz.

The Neues Rathaus itself has a large balcony where concerts or large screens are placed for viewing while in the Marienplatz itself.  As this is a major tourist zone, there are many shops and restaurants that surround the plaza, including the Munich soccer store, where I whiled away some good time looking at Bayern Munich (and some TSV Munich 1860) goods. I wanted the TSV Munich jersey, but settled (and compromised heavily) with a Bayern Munich pin.

der turm des neuen rathauses

Georg von Hauberrisser built the town hall between 1867 and 1908 as a Gothic Revival building. This gives the building a much older look – I was very surprised to find it only a 100 years old at the time. My drawing’s a bit wrong as the top piece got chopped off due to poor proportioning. However, this didn’t stop an elderly German man striking up a conversation with me or strangers talking into the phone mentioning they’re looking at someone making a “great drawing”.

buildings, public space

europe, germany, gothic revival, munich, public, sketch, tourists, travel, urban

27 September 2010

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the ateneum

The Ateneum Art Museum: 7 September 2009

Opposite the Helsinki Railway Station, is the premier classical art museum in Helsinki called The Ateneum. The building was designed by architect Theodor Höijer, who completed major Helsinki buildings in the Neo-Renaissance style. It was completed in 1887, and as an urban design gesture, hemmed in the Rautatientori square. This square currently serves as a secondary bus terminus and where renegade doodlers sit to draw.

Originally housing the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and the Aalto University of Art and Design, it now showcases a wide variety of painting, drawings, photography, and sculpture. While the Ateneum rounds off the southern half of the Rautatientori, cultural facilities round off the northern edge, which bleeds into a riverfront park. The Ateneum itself has relief-busts of the major classicist and Renaissance artists, namely Donato Bramante, Raphael, and Phidias. These sit over the main entrance to the museum, which is capped off by a gabled porch.

ateneum entry

The Helsinki Central Railway Station is the prime landmark, and judging by the similar color of the stone of both buildings, I surmise the Ateneum is also faced with Finnish granite. It was a drizzly late-summer day and after a day-long jaunt with an English hostel-mate, I drew the Ateneum’s main bay in elevation. The intermittent rain caused me to run into the adjacent terminal and grab a coffee to write some postcards, but it was great to see the traffic of people hurrying to and out of the train station. Helsinki’s a great city – super-easy to get around and a joy to walk around.

buildings, public space, streets

buildings, europe, finland, granite, helsinki, piazza, public, sketch, streets, travel, urban, water

22 August 2010

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colombo

Cargills Ceylon Building: 16 July 2009

Colombo has a great selection of colonial-era buidings in downtown including this one in the ‘Fort’ area. This area was first populated by the Portuguese, who established a small fort, which became the largest colonial fort on the island. Fort is adjacent to Colombo’s Harbor and when the area was taken over by the Dutch and subsequently the British, this area became the seat of British colonial power populated with mostly institutional and governmental buildings. One of the several commercial buildings is the Cargills Ceylon Building, built by the British in (what looks like) the ‘Indo-Saracenic‘ building tradition.

cargills and millers complex

To be frank, I don’t know much else about the building and I hesitate to speculate about it. In fact, for all I know, the Abell Building in Baltimore, with similar red-and-white features could also be Indo-Saracenic.

the abell building in baltimore could also be indo-saracenic, yeah?

That being said, this area of Colombo has some nice three-to-four story British-era buildings and is the city’s financial heart. It was encouraging to see such a bustling Colombo keeping these smaller buildings running as my uncle, whom I accompanied on this trip, mentioned that it looked like Chennai’s Mount Road twenty years ago. Unfortunately, Chennai has razed many of these buildings and have put up high-rise concrete blocks in their stead.

I was left to my devices while my uncle attended business meetings so I walked around the city after being maliciously conned by a tuk-tuk driver. I had met an old man, an ex-British Navy officer, who watched over me drawing and convinced the ubiquitous military police to let me continue drawing. Only recently out of civil war, Sri Lanka is still antsy about the movement of people, especially in Colombo. A mid/late-20′s Indian male drawing a building would look suspicious to the military police. They’re all baby-faced and polite, despite the AK-47′s around their neck. This one was drawn pretty quickly as the heat was searing.

bay elevation of cargills ceylon

buildings, streets, travel sketches

british, buildings, colombo, colonial, indo-saracenic, locals, sri lanka, urban, water

10 August 2010

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saint paul’s cathedral

Saint Paul’s Cathedral: 7 September 2008

Saint Paul's Cathedral

This cathedral has a long and storied history too long to get into in any detail. Three cathedrals stood on this site prior to Old Saint Paul’s, which took the Normans more than two hundred years to build. Its wood roof repeatedly had to deal with fire problems during its construction and after. Although Old Saint Paul’s lasted about five hundred years, it succumbed to fire again in London’s Great Fire of 1666.

After the Commonwealth, the Charles II was restored to the throne and was ultimately responsible for the reconstruction of many churches, including Saint Paul’s. Inigo Jones had laid plans for the cathedral’s west front, so originally Sir Christopher Wren, charged with the post-1666 fire design, wanted to incorporate it and the building’s ruins. However, the ruins were not considered structurally fit enough to hold up a new building, so the entire building was demolished. The public process in the cathedral’s design affected Wren’s renaissance aesthetic, and he acquiesced to the traditional Gothic English cathedral sensibilities, although the dome itself is much like Rome’s Saint Peter’s Basilica and among the highest in the world. It cost £736,750 in all and finished in 1710.

from the south-east

I had a day after Vienna to briefly hang out in London. I have been there several times before, but had not had a chance to draw in the city until then. I sat on the grounds to the south-east in the drizzle and drew, unfortunately cutting off the top part of the dome! In a great urban design move, Foster and Partners and others took a plaza south from Saint Paul’s to a pedestrian foot-bridge towards the Tate Modern. It’s pretty phenomenal.

buildings, public space

bridge, buildings, church, domes, england, favorite, gothic, london, public, renaissance, sketch, travel, urban

29 July 2010

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das naturhistorisches museum

The Natural History Museum: 6 September 2008

Vienna’s museum district has a series of museums originally housing the House of Habsburg’s collections and specifically under the auspices of Emperior Franz Joseph I. The Natural History Museum fronts the Kunsthistoriches Museum (the Art History Museum) on the Maria-Theresien Platz off the main Ringstraße. Both identical buildings were designed by Gottfried Semper and Karl Freiherr von Heisenaur and opened in 1891, towards the end of Franz Joseph’s reign. The sandstone facades have a series of glazed arched openings and have a number of impressive bas-reliefs and statues.

das naturhistorisches museum

The Marien-Theresien Platz has a large statue of its namesake Empress Maria-Theresa, the wife of the Emperor. I sat behind the statue in the well-manicured garden and in a clearing and drew the museum, interested in its 180′- tall dome and grand entry. There were a lot of Chinese tourists walking about the museum area and I had a conversation with one of them, who was interested in my drawings. All in all, Vienna is great – easy to move around, lots of stuff to see, and killer coffee – a great way to sit, people-watch, and take stock of the pulse of Vienna.

buildings, public space

austria, baroque, buildings, domes, europe, public, sketch, tourists, travel, urban, vienna

17 July 2010

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