bougainvillea tunnel in Antalya

With its trunk and branches concealed behind a fence, a flowering bougainvillea plant appears to hover weightlessly above a narrow street in the Kaleiçi district of Antalya, Turkey. The result is a living ceiling over this urban space that provides shelter and fragrance to those passing underneath.

another set of horseshoe arches, in Lisbon

Here's a photo I found while going through some old photos of Lisbon that I think fits in well with yesterday's post on horseshoe arches. These two interlocking arches on the front facade of the old Rossio train station in Lisbon are quite literally horseshoe-shaped. Placa Rossio, Lisbon, Portugal.

horseshoe arches in Montreal, Fes, and Cordoba

These horseshoe arches (a type of arch that curves inward at the bottom) are a curious decorative detail on the balconies of two side-by-side townhouses in Montreal, given the typical association of horseshoe arches with Islamic architecture. Rue Sainte-Famille, Montreal, Quebec.

Less of a surprise, horseshoe arches decorate the entrance to a mosque and an adjacent fountain in the medieval medina of Fes al Bali, Morocco.

In Cordoba, Spain, a sea of striped horseshoe arches fills the worship space of the Great Mosque.

yarn bombing in Prague and Boston

Here are two knit cozies I spotted wrapped around a street lamp in Prague and a tree in Boston. "Yarn bombing," as this form of graffiti is called, is apparently quite a big thing now in the world of street art. There's even a wikipedia page. Proponents of yarn bombing claim to be softening and feminizing urban space with their work. At the very least, they're helping some street furniture stay warm. Top: Cechuv Bridge, Prague, Czech Republic. Bottom: Davis Square, Boston area, Massachusetts.

map of the city on a wall in Zurich

I spotted this bird's-eye map of Zurich wedged in between six windows on the front facade of a house in Zurich's medieval center. The map may be outdated - an inscription just below the crest with the bird in it dates the map to 1568 - but certain landmark features of the city visible in the map still remain to this day, including the twin-spired Grossmünster cathedral and the tall clock tower of St. Peter's Church right at the center of the map (click the image to make it larger). I like the way the orange and blue paint colors on the house appear to have been chosen to coordinate with the map. Near the Münstergasse thoroughfare, Zurich, Switzerland.

granite and river rocks in Boston

Granite pavers define the path for car tires in this river-rock cobblestone driveway on Mount Vernon Street in Boston, Massachusetts. 

patterned facades in Prague and Budapest

An old woman monitors the street from an upper-story window in the geometric painted facade of a house on Loretánská in Prague, Czech Republic.

Painters restoring the patterned facade of a building on Tárnok utca in Budapest, Hungary.

sewer music

There's a feature in the Boston Globe today about a group of phonographers from the New England Phonographers Union (who knew there was such a thing?) recording background noises from the Deer Island sewage treatment plan in order to make music from the ambient sounds. Their aim they say, was to bring these background sounds to the foreground, allowing people to hear these rhythmic processes that are otherwise ignored. "That's exactly why you would go out there to find beauty, because you would never expect to find it there."

Below, a video from the Boston Globe explaining the project:

colorful shadows in Montreal

Late-afternoon sunlight streams through tinted panes of glass in Montreal's Palais de Congrés casting colorful, elongated shadows on the gray stone floor of the building's lobby.

For a short time each afternoon, sunlight hits the building at the just right angle to pass through the colored-glass facade and back out through a transparent glass wall on another side of the building, creating a momentary spectacle of tinted shadows on an adjacent street.

Alternating facades of transparent and tinted glass envelope the Palais de Congrés. Rue de Bleury, Montreal, Quebec.

round, exposed-masonry columns around Boston

This squat column supports the corner of a building on Boston Avenue in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Three-story brick columns guard the front of the Old Courthouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Round, two-story mortar-stacked stone columns blur into the facade of a building on Vernon Street in Framingham, Massachusetts.

X marks the spot in Bratislava

This wooden door blocks entry into the courtyard at the Old Town Hall in Bratislava, Slovakia. Notice how the pattern culminates in a four-pointed star right at the point where the three sections of the door come together in this door-within-a-double-door arrangement.

Here are two more patterned doors spotted side-by-side on Országház utca in Budapest, Hungary.

another sign in Montreal

Rather than putting a giant sign across the front facade of this slick building, the architect placed the sign for the Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Research Center behind glass, high up on the back wall of a tall conference room at the front of the building, where it won't distract from the clean lines of the building's design. Avenue des Pins, Montreal, Quebec.

trace of the past in Montreal

I'd like to restart this blog with a new feature. From now on I'll be posting photographs that I've taken of details and curiosities, some intended and others unintended, that I find interesting on buildings or in urban environments. My hope is to encourage others to notice the details that give character to the built environments around us. Here's something that caught my eye recently in Montreal:

Green stains from long-gone oxidized copper lettering are ghostly evidence of this building's former function as a school, "Ecole Cherrier." Rue Cherrier, corner Saint-Hubert, Montreal, Quebec.

A+Pool

A group of architects and designers have put together a plan to set up a series of floating swimming pools in the rivers around Manhattan. Each of these “plus pools” is envisioned as a cruciform body of water the size of two Olympic swimming pools that would float a hundred feet or so off shore at locations like Battery Park City, the Chelsea Piers, and Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Architect's rendering of a +Pool in the East River

Rendering of a +Pool floating in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Connected to these urban parks by meandering, floating walkways and surrounded on all sides by a wide deck well stocked with lounge chairs, these pools would offer New Yorkers a unique respite with panoramic views of the city’s skyline and bridges. Moreover, the location of the pools in the vast space of New York’s waterways not only affords city residents an unusual opportunity to swim in the city’s urban rivers without risking their health but also allows visitors to immerse themselves in a kind of wide-open space that is exceptionally rare in New York’s concrete jungle. And, in addition to lending itself to catchy marketing strategies, the iconic shape of the +Pool is designed to create distinct spaces that cater to the different groups of people who might use the pool – one section for sports and games, one for swimming laps, one for little kids, and another section just for lounging – all of which are joined at the center of the pool to enable reconfigurations for alternate types of recreation.

A +Pool swimmer on the East River

The flexible spatial configuration of the +Pool

Another more symbolic significance of the pools’ “plus” shape is described on the project’s website: “An offshore reflection of the city intersection, +Pool both exemplifies the dense, busy character of New York City and offers an island retreat from it.”

Urban street intersection as the inspiration for the +Pool's cruciform shape

Anticipating that the plus pools would likely strike some New Yorkers as a crazy, perhaps impossible endeavor, the project’s organizers have been careful to cite the substantial historical precedence for this kind of floating recreation facility. On the +Pool website, they describe the floating spas that once crowded Manhattan’s shores beginning in the early 1800s when the city’s elite started to use lower Manhattan as a resort. In later decades of the same century, newly arrived immigrants used Manhattan’s riverside bathhouses as their regular bathing facilities. The project’s coordinators also make mention of a similar floating pool that was built in 2007, though on a much smaller scale, from an old barge in the Bronx, a project that they credit as having “brought back the first semblance of New York’s floating pool culture in almost a century.”