House for An Art Lover Picture Heavy

House for An Art Lover

Some of you who know me might recall that I am a big fan of Charles Rennie Mackintosh work. To the extent that when I got a scholarship in Paris (in a very prestigeous ESAG design school) instead of Glasgow School of Art, I was very disappointed (well, untill I went to Paris that is, where I had the most inspiring time of my life). However my sentiments to Charles Rennie's work remain the same.

Last weekend we have managed to visit a reconstructed Mackintosh project (the house was originally designed by Mackintosh and his wife, just on paper for a competition and never been executed in real life) - a House for Art Lover in Glasgow. One can get there by a 10 minutes ride on a train from the Glasgow Central which lands one in a very affluent neighbourhood. It looks like a perfect location for a property for an art enthousiast.

House was built with community funds overs several years in the 1990s and seems to be pretty accurate reconstruction of Mackintosh architectural utopian idea though I could not help but notice that sometimes the particular for Mackintosh work proportions were lost (understandably though as the idealised drawings had to be translated into real building with all its ingeneering and construction demands) and council put some weird art works (not at all connected with architect's work style and quite frankly ugly) in the garden. The groundfloor cafe had some peculiar objects for sale (like a comic about the architect's life and lots of silver jewellery better or worse inspired by his work) but it was full of people willing to spend an afternoon in this still very eye pleasing place with good vibes of a coherent concept. It is a clever combination of old architectural forms (the main hall remaining a medieval castle) with some naval forms and 17th century houses windows proportions (Simon remarked that one of the facades really looks like his old family house which was a building from mid 17th century), all incorporated in an unique form of a very modern looking building.

I wonder if Charles Rennie and Margaret would like how their idea was translated into real life (maybe minus weird, starck white, health-and-safety railings protecting one from falling off some 5 cm high steps in the garden...) or being perfectionists, they would be slightly dissapointed by financial and aesthetical compromises that had to be made in the final execution of the project. I rather think that they woud be jolly glad that finally someone in Scotland realised that they were unique artists. And now Glasgow can cash on the architects whose work was considered too sophisticated and he was not able to make a living out of it.

London part 3

^ A semi sharp selfportrait in a semi darkness.

I was on a lookout for various historical bits and pieces - this one ^ is tucked in just accross the river from Tate Modern.

This time we deliberately took an easy approach to visitng museums, though I hope one day to be able to come and just browse through a vast collection of artefacts at V&A (a History of the World in more than a Thousand Objects hihi). This picture I have managed to quickly snap while we went into the V&A in search of a cafe with sockets (Simon needed to plug in to finish off his presentation for the opening evening of his exhibition). The vast V&A cafe does not have sockets in the walls, so now you know - maybe they try to dicourage visitors from a virtual tour of the museum. They also use a discouraging beam of their torches which they apply to the interior of one's handbag at the entrance. I presume it must disarm a potential bomb carried in as I do not think that they were able to distinguish anything in the black hole of my ginormous handbag!

So instead we ended up across the road in Le Pain Cotidien - a Belgium chain that tempts one with delicious breakfast and fresh carrot juice and has an abundance of sockets for your hungry laptop too:

^ I did not buy that top in COS in the end - I do not know why when I look at that picture now. I bought that green one instead that lies crumpled in the left side of the image. I especially like my beaming nose in that picture!

^ My lovely Krakow friend Ewa who I have managed to meet briefly during her lunch break. I called her while walking down Regent Street and she happened to work nearby. It was so funny when she asked on the phone instead 'Where are you?' - ' Near which shop are you?'! Ah girls...

Obligatory meal in Wagamama. Since our friend Roger introduced us to this nonfuss restaurant (?) with Asian style meals (apparently you are not suppose to worry about your eating style - just place your bowl near your face and showel your rice into your hungry mouth Japanese style). This is Teriyaki Chicken Donburi - yes, I have jotted the name down it was so tasty (well, give me anything in teryiaki sauce anyday). I think I saw a Wagamama sign somewhere in central Glasgow? Another London friend Damian confirmed that Wagamama is one of the not so numerous places to eat in London which managed to keep up the same high standards since they opened.

Obligatory London shot ^^

To sum up - I think I like that trip much more than two previous ones. I got myself Peter Ackroyd's 'London, The Biography' and I am voraciously reading it chapter by chapter. I have especialy liked a little tour of the City at night that Simon took me on - I wanted to see where he worked. It was a feeling from a heavy nightmare (no pun intended) to walk among all these little deserted lanes tucked by the huge, semilit office blocks - and then you relise why it is so densely packed - each square inch actually belongs to someone and costs a fortune. We came back to our coffinlike hotel room at 2.30 am completely exhausted (we walked on foot from the City to Victoria stopping now an then to take a picture) but it was a beautiful adventure.

A postcard from Stirling

From a train to Dunblane:

Another day, another castle

Ahhh...

Sir Walter does not live here anymore

Last week we took our kids to the Sir Walter Scott's residence of the Abbotsford. It was a gloomy, rainy day and to get there we had to take a long ride on an X95 bus throught the Borders and then walk for quite a while to get to the house from the bus stop.

However when we finally got there we were really surprised at the welcoming atmosphere of the whole venue - it is run by an independent trust and has really devoted guides almost ready to summarize all Sir Walter's novels just for you. It must have been a spectacular residence to live in (and so did Sir Walter, though he finally went into serious financial trouble because of the lavishness with which he built and decorated the house.) My favourite bits were a Chinese motive wall paper and a little stone crucifix on display in the library. Little grey item, apparently belonging to Mary Queen of Scots (which she was said to be carrying to her execution) with its spacious rooms, library stuffed with 9000 volumes and cozy armchairs.

My favourite parts were the little walled garden and a dog's sculpture at the entrance. Sir Walter looks in all the portraits like a nice, firendly guy, though a little bit grumpy - oh, I can imagine how grumpy it would make me to know that I have to write all these long novels about rainy Scotland in the Middle Ages! I came accross some of his novels in a posh house library and sadly some of the pages were not even cut open..

How is the Castle today?

Firenze - design

The main train station area in any city is usually the most awful one around and this problem is only slightly better solved in Florence, where Santa Maria Novella train station is situated on an empty hill, next to a busy roundabout and just couple of steps from the SMN church itself. So that on arrival one does not have to stay there too long (though Simon's mum had to spend a whole night there when she visited Italy on holidays just after WW2 and she still remembers it as the most unpleasant experience) and can escape to the charming squares of the citycenter which is just a short walk away.

I actually like only one station which is surprisingly Glasgow's Queen Street station but Italian one had an advantage of a beautifully designed lettering which brought back a designer in me. I came back especially to take several photos to share these unusual 1930s fonts with Monica. The set of numbers in the first photograph is actually a clock, it is quarter to four o'clock:

There are more things...

The famous Shakespearean quote was put to practice yesterday when I went with Simon to visit infamous Edinburgh's vaults under The South Bridge. One of Simon's aquaintances is a medium and we were invited to take part in an open Paranormal Investigation. He stated beforehand that we were both sceptical but we were invited nevertheless. The group was full of young women in their mid thirties with spiritual expressions on their faces, armed with measuring equipment and the whole experience was meticulously documented with video and temperature and electrical meters readings. The group was accompanied by a Merkat Tours guide, Liz (who won a title of the best Edinburgh guide of all times) who was filling in with the history of the place and the Old Town.

The vaults used to be a shopping and trading area after the Bridge was built but after a while they became too damp for the bussinesses which moved somewhere else and some other type of clientele moved in. Apparently it was a chief place for Edinburgh's Hell Fire Club meetings but also for the poorest of the poor place to work, live and die in an overcrowded slum. Authorities left these people to sort their things for themselves and simply later sealed up some of the vaults, which consequently laid undisturbed for last 170 years.

There were many unexplained occurences happening to guides and visitors but I would say (well, I am sceptical, non?) that majority of them could be blaimed on drafts (vaults have the same temperature of +8 all the year around) and ladies reacitng way too emotionally in the darkness. However at some point of the visit I SMELLED a very strong smell of port in one of the chambers - the waft dissapeared immediately when I got slightly scared at this sudden experience. It might have been one of the lady visitors passing by (wearing a strong perfume) but I am pretty much sure that by that time everybody moved on to another vault. Later Liz mentioned that some of the vaults were used to store wine and port by Edinburgh wine merchants.

So Hamlet speaking to Horatio was after all right?
I must admit I felt more scared when my driving instructor told me today to drive in an afternoon Edinburgh traffic...

Some more vaults and special 'trigger objects' - a dog biscuit for a ghost of a dog which can be sometimes felt  by mediums in the vaults: