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Washington, DC
It's not a jag in the arm, it's a nail in the beam
I was in Washington DC (actually Arlington, Virginia) to attend an all day seminar about USGBC LEED Certification, something I’m thinking of getting despite the fact that after competing the hellish nine part Architecture Registration Exams last year, I swore to never take another test again. Luckily even the statue of Jefferson probably knew that was a lie.
I took Amtrak both ways to DC (I absolutely love Amtrak, although maybe not so much outside the Northeast Corridor), and stayed overnight in Arlington. Between the trains and the LEED seminar and actually heading back north to work, I managed to squeeze in a blitz tour of DC’s core, and (as you can already tell) managed to take some pictures along the way like these at the National Museum of the American Indian, with its stone curvy walls sometimes aglow in the low late afternoon light.
We’re finishing up the DC pictures before we even got started, as a late day June sunset starts to envelop the city. See you next time, DC.
Rem Koolhaas's CCTV/TVCC exhibit is now open at the Museum of Modern Art. The CCTV tower is (against all imaginable odds) actually under construction and somehow even on schedule to open in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Starting last week and continuing into February, half of MoMA's third floor architecture and design galleries have been given over to a large (though surprisingly not comprehensive) exhibit all about the structurally brave (CCTV) tower and its already envious (TVCC) tower next door. There are models (see photos), tiny little vignette renderings and lots to read, but surprisingly no exhibit catalog, at least not yet. Worth the time.
A quick note about MoMA. It's normally $20 to get in, although free (and understandably much, much busier) Fridays from 4pm to 8pm. Meanwhile the entry level, individual membership (which I have) is an actual value at $75 a year. Your individual membership not only gets you into MoMA but also you (and a friend) into PS1 in Queens, or just you for PS1 Warmup events. It also lets you bring up to four people a day in with you at a reduced price of $5 a person. Seems like a solid deal to me.
MoMA is all brand new but the Continental Airlines Arena certainly is not. The prime tenant there is the New Jersey Devils (sorry, Nets) and they’re building a new arena in downtown Newark. I have a lot of good memories from the Continental Airlines Arena, but am not sad at all to see it go. The building is awful, the food (with the lone exception of two popcorn vendors) is awful, the concourses are super tiny and awful and the parking situation is painfully, painfully awful. Still the seats are ok, the sightlines are good and the hockey team is great.
And speaking of that hockey team, here are some pictures from the night they retired Scott Stevens’ number. Even though Scotiabank Place won’t let me take my camera into their arena, luckily the security at the Continental Airlines Arena could care less.
If these pictures look similar, it’s because after retiring #4, the New Jersey Devils quickly retired #3. Ken Daneyko has always been more of a fan favorite than a sure Hockey Hall of Fame candidate, but luckily for him being a fan favorite is good enough to get your jersey hung from the rafters.
We’re making one more hockey stop, this time in Long Island at the Nassau Coliseum, a terrible building to watch hockey even though the food and the parking beats the Continental Airlines Arena. The problem is that some of the seats (the bad seats in the last row) actually have a blocked out the scoreboard, which you kind of need to see sometimes in a hockey game. What they lack in sightlines they make up for in mascots, or at least they do tonight. The period breaks featured an all mascot game that quickly devolved into a free for all, which in all honesty seemed likely right from the start.
