Scotland

Scotland is so beautiful it hurts
Beautiful in spite of constant drizzle and intermittent showers

Justitie Palais

I have already mentioned the new court house in Antwerp, the one that has resemblance with nostalgic newspaper cones. This package was used by french fries sellers, was made of newspapers and became a symbol of good old days in Flanders. I don't know if I like Justitie Palais or not, in any case I always feel a slight discrepancy between design and function. In our post-modernistic times 100 hundred year old rules about design that should follow function are not meticulously observed anymore. It looks more like an airport or an exhibition center to me. A friend of mine who saw photos taken yesterday night thought that it is a train station. Some photos are here (not mine). I haven't done anything with my photos yet, not good at it)so I place them as they are.


on the opposite side of the square

The last stop of the tram is under the staircase of the building. It is quite windy on the stairs leading to the palace. Funny thought : it's good that the judges don't wear wigs in Belgium.




Femida
Antwerp at night


My tripod wouldn't turn the camera for making a vertical shot but I couldn't pass these
beautiful Art-Nouveau facades without taking some photos

Industrial sites

There never will be an architecture in iron, every improvement in machinery being uglier and uglier, until they reach the supremest specimen of all ugliness – the Forth Bridge.
William Morris

Under-the-bridge Pressionism

"Curator and collector Alain-Dominique Gallizia presented his personal collection of 500 works by mostly French graffiti artists on canvas to the public at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco. This exhibition is an anthology of 40 years of “Pressionism,” divided into eight sections. The work on display featured US-style tag graffiti transposed to uniformly sized canvases that glow like DayGlo stained-glass windows. Gallizia coined the term “Pressionism” from the pressure exerted on the spray-can nozzle."
His Majesty Prince Albert honored the exhibition with his presence, something totally unthought of some decades ago. While modern cities struggle to cleanse and rinse vandalized walls and remove this pariah of art, graphic designers creatively borrow the fonts, styles and images of incognito artists. There is a little square in Antwerp where the blank walls are the permanently changing exposition of graffiti artists, where masterpieces do not last long, but the artists seem to be indifferent to the fact that their creations are over-painted by newcomers. French graffiti artists were lucky to have an admirer like Alain-Dominique Gallizia to safeguard the future of their paintings.
Even if (like in Antwerp) they have specially assigned "graffiti allowed"places, graffiti artists migrate from one concrete debris to another,"Blank walls are criminal!". I found these fine examples of Pressionism under one of the bridges in Antwerp.