Adolph Sutro – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

The temples of Angkor

The Temple of Bakong (2001).

The temples and ruins of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom are effortlessly photogenic, so much so it seems impossible to take a bad picture of them. John McDermott’s photographs are especially fine, not least because he’s used infra-red film which always gives foliage a peculiar luminous appearance. Simon Marsden is the big populariser of this technique with his many photographs of ruins in Britain and Ireland.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Adolph Sutro’s Gingerbread Palace
• The Jantar Mantar
• Hungarian water towers
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Atget’s Paris

St Pancras in Spheroview

The deteriorated Gothic splendour of George Gilbert Scott’s railway hotel at St Pancras station, London, in a series of 360 degree views. The empty building looks distinctly creepy in many of these panoramas, like unused maps for a computer game.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Adolph Sutro’s Gingerbread Palace

Adolph Sutro’s Gingerbread Palace

The Cliff House in a storm by Tsunekichi Imai (c. 1900).

The Cliff House Project has a wealth of information and ephemera about the late Victorian incarnation of the Cliff House restaurant in San Francisco. There were several Cliff Houses but the one built by Adolph Sutro in 1896 was the most spectacular, partly for the lack of other buildings around it but mostly for its typically Victorian take on a Gothic style which gave it the nickname “the Gingerbread Palace.”

I’d never seen this building before until comics writer Tom Veitch sent me a picture postcard of it in the early Nineties. Given its age I’d always assumed it must have been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake but it turns out that the building survived that disaster only to perish in a fire the year after. The Cliff House site has many wonderful photographs, nearly all of which convey the impression that the building was about to slide into the sea at any moment—or maybe set sail if the tide was up. There’s also a short piece of film from 1903 showing a slow pan around a throng of beach revellers which eventually comes to light on the house. Long-vanished buildings often possess an air of unreality in photographs; this one seems more unreal than most due to its unlikely appearance.

Update: Nephilim2038 reminds us that Blue Öyster Cult used Imai’s photograph of the Cliff House on the cover of their Imaginos album in 1988. This seems to have eluded my attention despite my having a CD-single from that album (although in truth I bought it for Don’t Fear The Reaper which was included as a bonus track).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Passages 2
• Hungarian water towers
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Atget’s Paris