New Name for the blog

 I've adopted a new name for the blog.

The name I had been using was too similar to others', and I don't think they're going to change.

There's some self-deprecating humor in the name.

Overthinking is, indeed, what I do. So it's on-brand, as the kids say.

 

 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Thompson_plat_of_Chicago_1830.png

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapin Gore Building

Image
The Chapin and Gore Building was built in 1904 for a distiller and distributor of liquor. The building is now the Education and Administration Center for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when between 1995 and 1997 the CSO renovated and expanded their performance space in Orchestra Hall which is right around the corner. 1904 must have been a busy year on that block: Orchestra Hall was also built in 1904 as was the Railway Exchange Building. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra plays a substantial role in this building's current state. (Here's the façade elevation from HABS.) Stories behind the Chapin and Gore firm are colorful; many can be found on the web. Apparently Messrs. Chapin and Gore started out before the 1871 fire as grocers, but evolved as first distillers of whiskeys and then integrating retailing with the manufacturing, sales and distribution of whiskies and other alcoholic beverages. The building's façade suggests the diversity of the activities of the Chapin and Gore...
Read more

Corners

Image
Introduction: A bad idea  When I started research for this essay, I came across an essay  by the architect Peter Eisenman entitled "There are No corners after Derrida". Eisenman's a pretty smart guy; alas, I read his essay with more enthusiasm than comprehension.  The Derrida  that he invokes is Jacques Derrida, a famous French  philosopher who was among the first to talk about “post-modernism” and lived between 1930 and 2004. But then I remembered what my college philosophy professor once said:   A bad idea is not improved by attaching a famous name to it .   So I decided to read Eisenman's essay with some caution: maybe its idea wasn’t all that good.  Derrida wrote about architecture, as have other philosophers, such as Plato, Augustine, and Kant. The idea that humans not only are shaped by the world, but shape a part of their world, is very rich in philosophical implications. Architecture may provide an challenging class of objects fo...
Read more

Arches

Image
Arches National Park, in north of Moab, Utah, was was an important feature of my earlier life. I first visited it in 1962 (when it was only a National Monument), it was the goal of a road trip in the mid '70s (during which I confused Joseph Wood Krutch and Edward Abbey), in the early '80s I camped there one New Year's Eve, and in the early '90s I took my then girlfriend there. I probably haven't been there in thirty years, but what my memories lack in detail is offset by their vividness. As Ed Abbey said, "This is the most beautiful place in the world. There are many such places."  As beautiful as these natural arches are, those are not the arches I want to talk about here. I mean architectural arches. Any solid structure that encloses space and prevents things like rain falling from the sky, or heat rising up into the sky requires something special: history investigates when and where these innovations appeared. Lean-tos are prehistoric. Ancient Egyptians...
Read more