[Waste My Time, Kölsch]
198 published. This post of Rio will mark me at 200. Its probably time that I 1) thought of some more clever thematic ways to organize these posts than by city and time and 2) perhaps I will figure out how to feed it to an LLM and see what happens. Is there a future where photos plus some random thoughts and a model trained on my style of writing makes the output of this project the product of a new way of working? I digress but this series of 24 posts from Brazil will be littered with random thoughts on AI – who knows what is good or bad.
I love the opening and closing shot on this post of the Museu do Amanhã – respectively from around Mosteiro de São Bento (a surprise stop and real gem) and from Ponte Rio Niterói (you cannot miss visiting the Neimeyer in Niterói). Attempting to walk the perimeter of the building, it is actually really long compared to walking the length of the exhibition floor. Surrounded by water on the long sides, I was grateful to get the perspective from a distance to appreciate its shape.
Calatrava is an architect with no diversity- one could say unique, but I prefer no diversity- there’s no one whose form is like his. From the Oculus to the Lyon Rail station to the Lisbon Oriente Station – the biomimicry style of his skeletal structures is constant and true.
How can you be so organic and so structural at the same time? This building has a particular balance almost feeling inverted upside down. So many shapes and floating planes. I don’t know the narrative of this building but I like an uneducated guess and for this one, I believe any child would say we were inside a kind of giant prehistoric whale. The interior almost resonates of a minimal futuristic Gaudí – what a conversation if those two had met.
The above is a clean view of the cantilever which creates a beautiful framing of the Guanabara Bay and Ponte Rio Niterói. Everyone wanted to get in a photo with this, but the building is better left on its own.
Of which a side note here: I could image gen and clean up most of the people out of these photos even with today’s technology. And in a rare case I do (not in these)- but I mostly pride myself on waiting for the moment, or really being in the moment to get the right shot. What if we just started erasing people from photos all the time and then we fed them back to the models – would we start to believe that places are crowdless?
For such a grey day, the colors in these photos have a comforting pastel ambience across all the layers and forms. I would love to go back at night- it must be a sight to behold properly lit right on the water. Rio 2027 is it.
As I kicked off this marathon of posts this weekend, serendipity reigned again. Kölsch was playing at Museu do Amanhã just as the thoughts were being considered for this exact post. His track “Waste My Time” was just released as part of his new album when I saw him at Tomorrowland in Brazil on this trip and was so well loved and admired. Why these moments come together is hard to rationalize but how wonderful the threading across the universe truly is to weave the fabric of time.
P.S. For each of these 24 posts, I’ll feed at least one photo and have a conversation with Gemini- here is what I learned. That the word “Stella” translates to “star” in Latin and the artist of this sculpture is Frank Stella – though no connection between the shape and the last name. There is actually so little formal artwork on display here I asked about why it was chosen and after querying museum acquisition, Gemini told me its placement was tied to a massive urban renewal project called Porto Maravilha (Marvelous Port), which was launched in 2009- the building and donation of Puffed Star II both participants.
Address: Praça Mauá, 1 – Centro, Rio de Janeiro – RJ, 20081-240, Brazil
Address: ArchDaily write up
ofallthespaces 