Thursday, July 15th - New York City

So this was like Philly's famous sign. . . and it was right around the corner from our hotel, so we took a picture. . . actually a couple of pictures and photoshopped ourselves together.

We were walking down toward the museum of Natural History when Norman Foster's building caught my eye. . . so we closed in for a closer look.

This is a project where they gutted a historic building and put the skyscraper inside the historic building, only saving the facade.

The building had its LEED certification by the door. . . I think it was Gold. So that is pretty good for a skyscraper.

The next building on the way to the museum of Natural History was the Time Warner Center by SOM. We didn't go inside yet.

Another fun building across the circle from the Time Warner Center. Part of it was a museum.

So the Natural History Museum was. . . not so interesting. . . but they had a really big canoe. . .

The Whale reminded me of Hello Dolly . . . I can see why Barneby wanted to see it.

Had to take a picture of the dinosaurs. . . they were probably the coolest part of the museum.

After that, we walked back through Central Park. We stopped at the Bethesda Fountain. It was pretty cool.

We took a ride of the carousel.

Then we went back and walked through the Time Warner Center (mostly to cool off).

The lobby was pretty cool.

And it had a great view.

Later we went to the Museum of Modern Art. . . It wasn't quite as disturbing and wierd as the Guggenheim. There were some fun things to see such as Van Gough's Starry Starry Night.

Mondrian . . . very cool.

The building itself was pretty impressive. (Our hotel was across the street to the north.) It wasn't much to look at from the street side on the north side, but inside was what I would call a fun Julio project (Julio, being one of our architecture instructors).

Marthe wanted me to take this picture because it is in one of our favorite Olivia books we read to the kids. . . "I could do that in about Five Minutes!"

In reality his paintings are pretty impressive. . . and he was the first to really do it.

If anything, you got to hand it to the guy for waisting so much paint. . . paint is not cheap, and you can see that some of the blobs of paint are pretty much an entire tube's worth of paint.

Soup cans anyone?

This was an interesting study of solid and void.

This exhibit reminded me of the 80s. . . why?. . . You'll see.

This is what I saw in my head.

This room was an exhibit. . the art was the dimensions painted on the wall. I told Marthe that is what I look at on my screen every day. Big dimensions on interior elevations of walls.

Ok. . . so this one was wierd enough to comment about. It was a series of flat speakers suspended across from each other. As you walked between them, there were different voices saying the days of the week back and forth from one speaker to the other and in mostly the right order, but enough of the wrong order that it was more odd than it would have been otherwise. Aparently that one was worth a whole room to somebody.

We ate dinner in time's square again. This was a pizza place. It used to be a church and had some great stained glass above where we sat.

We stopped in to St. Pattrick's Cathedral later to take a looksy. These buildings are always impressive.

Oh. . and this building reminded me of a cheese grater.

That was pretty much it for the day.

But we had a lot of fun. The next day we'd be getting ready to go home and going home. . .