VDL Research House
VDL Research House
VDL Research House
I should confess i am not a great Neutra fan. I suspect it might be because I compare him too much with Rudolph Schindler, whose best work I admire immensely and the ideas that you read in Neutra’s work you experience more directly in Schindler’s. Neutra’s VDL Research House in Silverlake, Los Angeles, is full of effects and while these might not individually be satisfying, the slightly awkward assembly of the parts is very charming.
Sun Dial
Sun Dials
Orrery
Planetary Model
Some of the wonderful didactic models in the science museum in Oxford. The Orrery is very similar to one that used to be in the Science Museum in London and was displaced by an exhibit called something like the Sainsbury’s Food Experience that exhibited a 1980’s domestic kitchen and worse. One of my interests in didactic instruments is that the care in their construction seduces one to believe them. Despite their intention to explain they are often just slightly too complicated to immediately understand but it is clear there is something there to understand, and so we imagine into them, often into worlds independent of the intended content. The dioramas have a similar possibility.
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
A couple more dioramas from Los Angeles
Stereo Skeletons
Aquatic skeletons and the skeletal iron structure at the University Museum in Oxford. The 3D really pops if you can resolve it (especially if you can relax and let it form for a few moments), so worth a go.
I am still waiting for my new work computer, and when it comes I will be able to access a bunch of recent material. Until then I will keep posting things from my old computer, so bear with me!
Charles Darwin
A statue of Charles Darwin, posing as Captain Nonchalant, at the University Museum in Oxford
Eames House
Eames House
Eames House
Three stereo views of the Eames House. My first visit was when Ray Eames was still alive and she graciously gave us a a tour and talked with us about it for a while. These are more recent views, from January three years ago.
Some more stereo views of the dioramas at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. The Walrus group is a popular subject for dioramas. There is a beautiful one at the American Museum of Natural History with a background painting by Francis Lee Jaques. When a taxidermist took me round the dioramas at the Zoological Museum in Copenhagen the thing he was most proud of was the representation of excrement on the show and ice. The natural history museum in Stockholm has a similar fascination with faeces. Such polution clearly made much less of an impression on the American surveys, for in both examples the snow is a pure white.
Villa Savoye
I was looking through some old stereo photos I had taken and came across this view of the parental bathroom at Villa Savoye. If you can resolve the 3D view the sense of depth and space is worth going cross-eyed for. As usual, go cross eyed until the same feature from each photograph resolves with its identical twin (the foreground cupboard in this view is a good item to work with). You will see three images so concentrate on the middle one. When you have resolved the image, relax as much as you can so that the full depth appears.
In the middle of this radar trailer (above) is a section that holds the people who operate it. Either side are the active pieces – the radar dish and the pieces that control its position etc. on the right and on the left are the viewing screens and controls, which just stick out of the front of the cabin, each piece of program shrink wrapped individually. Some details below. This example is at Duxford.
Booth Museum
Museum of Comparative Anatomy
Nat Chard 