Linkage

[rejectomorph]

It's the cow rescue at Bob Golbrech's farm.

If a brief bovine drama in an obscure corner of Pennsylvania provides insufficient entertainment, perhaps you'll be diverted by a large web site about Italian Art Nouveau (in Italian. Click on the Union Jack for an intermittently English version of the site.)

Comments

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

ooh, what a nice link! tante grazie! now to read about the cow.

[rejectomorph]

The cow didn't get much text, mostly pictures. She probably had nothing to say.

I found the Art Nouveau site after seeing a particular photo in an old architecture journal at Google Books. It had a couple of photos of buildings designed by Raimondo D'Aronco, and this page about the Turin design exposition of 1902 came up when I searched his name.

This photo of the automobile pavilion at the exposition was the one in Architectural Review that had led me to search for more about D'Aronco, and I was very pleased to find this larger version of it on the web. It's an absolutely astonishing building for 1902.

Aside from its Art Nouveau decoration around the entrance, and a few other bits of detail, it could have been built fifty or sixty years later and fit right into a modern townscape. The basic lines anticipated the Bauhaus by more some two decades, and that butterfly roof is even more modern. The decoration in the two big trapezoidal screens on the facade looks as much Art Deco as it does Art Nouveau, and Art Deco didn't fully emerge until the 1920s.

D'Aronco totally exploded architecture with that one building, but I've been unable to find any other buildings he designed that were like it. It's as though he discovered modernism ahead of its time, but didn't realize what he had done, and so failed to follow through.

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

what an interesting reply! i know little about architecture but am glad to learn in a setting like this -- it's a pleasure. :)

italians have (and i say this without chauvinism, since i'm not a bit italian except by desire) an innate sense of style. when i was there in the early '70s, i was impressed by the beautiful home furnishings in the windows of the shops in bologna. there was lots of gleaming steel in graceful shapes, nothing like what i had ever seen back home.

it was in rome, that year, that i saw for the first time a tall building with those metallic-looking reflective windows. it stopped me in my tracks, the gorgeousness of the color in the sunlight.

and now i'll spend more time with the art nouveau link and google for more d'aronco. thanks again. :)

[wow, the manifesti! the lamp fixtures! i'm in love.
i'll have Campari, please]

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

sorry to be so wordy, but this is where i want to live when i grow up: Villino!