Henri Rivière’s Eiffel Tower

riviere1.jpg

Des Jardins du Trocadéro l’Automne.

Paris again and a suitably autumnal scene from Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower (1902) by Henri Rivière (1864–1951). Inspired by the celebrated Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, these do for the City of Light what Hokusai and Hiroshige did for Japan.

riviere2.jpg

De la rue Beethoven.

riviere3.jpg

Du Pont d’Austerlitz.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Peter Eudenbach’s Eiffel Ferris wheel
City of Light

Return to the Exposition Universelle

exposition1.jpg

Main entrance gate by René Binet.

I can’t leave the 1900 Paris exposition alone, and with good reason. If further proof were required that this event brought Winsor McCay’s Slumberland to earth for a few weeks, this stunning Brooklyn Museum Flickr set has the evidence. Not only five pages of high-resolution views but they’re all hand-tinted which adds to the splendour and highlights the ladies’ parasols.

For earlier posts on the Exposition Universelle, see the links below. Via Things Magazine.

exposition2.jpg

Esplanade des Invalides.

exposition3.jpg

Palace of Electricity.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Palais Lumineux
Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
Exposition Universelle, 1900
The Palais du Trocadéro
The Evanescent City
Winsor McCay’s Hippodrome souvenirs

Return to Las Pozas

las_pozas.jpg

Las Pozas is the unique fantasy/folly/Surrealist paradise which Edward James spent years building (and never quite finished) in the Mexican jungle of Xilitla. When I wrote about the place a couple of years ago decent photos were hard to find. Flickr has now filled the gap with this extensive set of views by Lucy Nieto. Lots of great details and some remarkable shots which show the scale of the structures, as does the picture above (note the people).

Previously on { feuilleton }
The magic kingdom
Las Pozas and Edward James

Carlo Scarpa’s Brion-Vega Cemetery

scarpa.jpg

“I would like to explain the Tomba Brion…I consider this work, if you permit me, to be rather good and which will get better over time. I have tried to put some poetic imagination into it, though not in order to create poetic architecture but to make a certain kind of architecture that could emanate a sense of formal poetry….The place for the dead is a garden….I wanted to show some ways in which you could approach death in a social and civic way; and further what meaning there was in death, in the ephemerality of life—other than these shoe-boxes.” Carlo Scarpa

Dan Hill at City of Sound reminds us (okay, reminds me…) of Carlo Scarpa’s incredible private cemetery via a link to a Wallpaper* photo feature about the place. Scarpa’s final work (he’s buried in the grounds) was built for the Brion family at San Vito d’Altivole, Italy, and completed in 1978.

This construction and other Scarpa buildings often come to mind after encountering some disastrous use of concrete in architecture. Scarpa, like Frank Lloyd Wright, shows how well that meanest of building materials could be used with the application of care and imagination. And Scarpa, like Wright, also favoured attention to detail, with the cemetery providing copious examples of this, notably the motif of a pair of interlaced circles which feature as a prominent window design and recur in tiny elements elsewhere. Those paired circles and the garden itself remind me of the Jantar Mantar at Jaipur. I’m sure I read that one of Scarpa’s influences for the cemetery was Arnold Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead but I’m unable to find any online reference. For more about that painting, there’s my earlier post on the subject.

• Flickr has a wealth of photographs of the cemetery
A black & white photo set by Gerald Zugmann

Previously on { feuilleton }
Hugh Ferriss and The Metropolis of Tomorrow
The Jantar Mantar
Arnold Böcklin and The Isle of the Dead
Frank Lloyd Wright’s future city