Today in History: July 10

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Today is the semi-official anniversary of the founding of the city of Dublin, Ireland, which is said to have happened on this date in 988.

Of course, there had been a large settlement on the River Liffey for centuries by 988, and some historians think that the mention of a place called “Eblana polis” in the Geographia by Ptolemy, the Greek astronomer and cartographer, written around the year 140 AD, is a mention of a settlement with a similar name to the modern name on what is now the land that Dublin occupies. Other historians argue that this theory is incorrect.
Read More

Little Glass Houses

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The architect Philip Johnson would have been 110 yesterday. He died in January 2005 at the age of 98, at his residence for the previous five decades: his famous Glass House (above), which he built in 1949.

The idea behind the house is intricately simple: walls are an interference (obviously) between us and the world. What if the views on your property provided your home’s natural walls? Of course, my cynical brain brings me to memories of neighborhoods in which I would have happily lived without any windows, where “the view” (not the TV show) was exactly what I did not want to see. Heck, my cynical brain brings me back to apartments in which there were not enough walls between me and … me.
Read More

Today in History: July 9

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

David Hockney is 79 today.

As a painter, he is famous for his vibrant color scheme (blues and yellows) and honest portraits. I am fond of his paintings, and the fact that he is still a vital and active artist (in recent years he attracted notice for his “iPad paintings“), but I have long been fond of a project he called his “joiners.”

The “joiners” were a photo-collage idea that he explored in the 1970s and ’80s. The one at top, called “Sun on the Pool,” was made in 1982. It is made of seventy-seven Polaroid photos of a swimming pool taken as the sunlight shifted through the day, photos taken over the period of time that it would take to make seventy-seven Polaroid photos with one camera and one artist. Pretty as a sunset but with time added as a design element as important as color in the image. It is a Cubist sunset. It is a beautiful attempt at one.
Read More