Natural History Museum

Waterhouse's Hintze Hall is heavy with joy, playful pleasure runs up every column. I cannot go to the Natural History Museum without absorbing some measure of the child-like delight taken by the terracotta designers in layering creatures on textures on geometries. In imitation of a vital ecosystem, thronging and humming, this Victorian cathedral rings with a chorus of harmonic variety. To my taste the balance between structural adventure and ornamental loading is found exactly, the figurative work is never ponderous, the effect of terracotta cladding never an excuse for fakery. The light filled canopy of steel rafters is an array of nimble fronds, while equally the launch of stairs feels contemporary in its acrobatics. Building like this begins with wonder, I pray I never lose it.

nhm.ac.uk

The Rolling Bridge

Heatherwick is the mad professor of contemporary British steam punk, and the rolling bridge is a little essay in piston powered urbanism, a manifesto in the potential to mechanise and make-magic the otherwise pedestrian experience of all cities everywhere. Health and safety has taught us to relegate our more eccentric dreams to virtual realities where no one can get hurt. Here (yellow jackets in attendance mind) a spring loaded imagination is let loose, like a venus fly trap animating what ought to be static,  Aladdin's carpets floats an inch off the cobbles and the bridge yawns into life, quivering a gang plank of mischief, into a scorpion's tail, and finally the clam closes a clenched fist around a motorcycle's circus cage. And then all again in reverse, slow as a prayer that we might see such graces abound on every street corner. Tragically, it is a bridge over water untroubled by any maritime activity, festering in Paddington's backwater of over-developed cynicism and aluminium cladding, the bridge is cruelly gratuitous and safely out-of-sight, a folly dormant all other hours but 12pm on a Friday.
heatherwick.com/rolling-bridge

200words: kings cross

"...Jesus answered him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.”" John 1v48

if you ever knew the claustrophobic concourse of the old Kings Cross, you will find here its opposite.

of the structure.
a departure terminal made like a tree to leave, left here is the warp and weft of a woven weave, engineers quilting against the age of steam, organically. here their steel braiding mechanically still finds the joy to bring light to fall on a thousand tiny people staring up from the plughole as time's spiral tendrils trickle down to the concourse.

of the gap between.
in crystallised tension as Riley's Kiss grazing, like a buxom body bodying forth in brickish lust yearning: in it's a new generation's turn to wait in line. and the Brits below busying, in fusty soppy-stern muddling, preppy tweed dot dash darting. there's mother and son scolding. whither the ticket he lost in? careless youth.

of the shadows.
all lonely wraiths lost in the largesse largeness of our digital glade, a breathing room with room to inhale, Potter-heads oblivious to the honeycomb sky casting a spiderman's web netting of king's criss cross hatching of fibonacci shadows spiralling, of tropical fronds yawning, within this baroquing growth grown as a generatively generated shelter and shade.

http://www.mcaslan.co.uk/projects/king-s-cross-station