It's another scorcher of a summer day in North Texas. I feel sorry for the buildings getting baked in the August heat. I feel especially sorry for those cookie cutter homes and if God likes cookies he can pick any cookie he likes from the face of this flat and sexless suburbia.
I count only 3 triangles in the picture and when it comes to triangles three's-a-charm. The caption for the Smirnoff campaign ? "Driest of the dry". The caption is larger than life because it was actually shot in the great dry Sahara desert whose proximity to the Equator makes it the driest of the dry deserts. Humans refuse to desert the Sahara because the clues to human evolution are still buried over there and they are always looking for ways to tear to pieces the last great theory of our evolution written on paper. Here is a jawbone they found over there the other day that provided some clues on how humans happened...
Enterprising human beings in the 21st century have founded companies called JAWBONE that makes this new thing called "wearables" which is anything but jaw dropping. Here is poor Bert Stein putting his jawbones to the Sahara sand while making his signature shot that stays firmly etched in the sands of time ( & the Sahara ) no matter how strong the desert storms of digital change in the ad world are.
Stein's Smirnoff image from the Sahara is largely credited for sparking off the Creative Revolution in advertising which in turn gave pop culture a certain Don Draper. In an amazing twist of fate for Bert Stein, a dash of Smirnoff vodka played a crucial role in getting Marilyn Monroe to drop it all for that famous Last Sitting shoot Stein did six weeks before Marilyn's untimely death. "How's this for 36?" is what she asked as Stein shot her between those sheets.
JFK got what he deserved and what he didn't deserve and thats' worth thinking about. Dallas Killed JFK they liked to say but I couldn't disagree more because I loathe popular desire for a juicy headline that twists facts. Dallas didn't kill JFK but a Communist nut job from New Orleans did and today we have a Democratic President who has restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and hoisted Old Glory in Havana just in time for Fidel Castro's 89th birthday. Time oh Time...
A heavy Texas downpour may wash away the X marked on Elm street or the City can scratch it off time and again like it has done over the years, but it won't wash away the memory of what happened at that spot on 11/22/63. Here's that famous X I shot in 2013 a few months before the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination.
I find myself driving into the city of Dallas a lot. Seeing the skyline from afar gives me a rush of blood to the head but sometimes the traffic slows down this rush of blood because everyone seems to be in a rush to get somewhere. Ain't that funny how everyone being in a rush can slow the whole damn traffic down and here on paper it looks like this elevated state of the senses should move things faster. But the Dallas skyline is eye candy to me as I sit there waiting for traffic to move slowly and being in stuck in traffic gives me a chance to think about what I'll do with my time today once I am inside one of those buildings.
The Dallas skyline represents money more than anything else and there is plenty of it being made ( & lost ) in those buildings thanks to the many great companies housed in them. This is not a bad thing because you need to create opportunities to put people to work so they can feed their families, send their kids to school and have a reasonably happy retirement. If you don't put people to work you will have people protesting on the street. It's that simple.
We live in a world where the sun has set on might empires. There are big differences between the former British Empire and the American Capitalist Empire. The British Empire just looted wealth and it didn't create any opportunity for the conquered to create wealth and in the end Britain lost all she conquered even the last bastion of Hong Kong with the Kohinoor Diamond still holding fort in the UK with a stubbornness as hard as the diamond itself.
The American Capitalist Empire often criticized around the world as a 'bully' created this framework where the creation of wealth is the perennial attraction and those who are ambitious, hard working & play by the rules create a lot of wealth for themselves with the Supreme Commander of the Free World earning a salary that is peanuts compared to what execs make on Wall Street. The creation of wealth is a key reason why I have as much faith in the Dallas skyline as Warren Buffett has in the American system. The Dallas skyline represents capitalism and it's beauty of promise for those willing to do something with the best waking moments of the best years of their lives. Alan Jackson sang these eternal lines to the twang of a Fender Telecaster a few years ago....
There is no Hall of Fame for the working class hero,
No statue carved out of stone,
His greatest reward is the love of a woman.
When bringing together capitalism and city skylines one must also keep in mind the Enron story and how it can all go wrong right here in Texas! Post-Enron, the 40-story Cesar Pelli designed Enron Center South on 1500 Louisiana St. was the largest unused corporate ghost ship in the country and the building in 2002 boasted the most cutting edge office technology of it's time. Morale & occupancy tend to be very low after such corporate disasters.
The saddest part of course is that the company who wanted the building never got a chance to move in, because by 2002, the Enron bull(shit) run had come to an end and the bullshit had really hit the ceiling as they like to say. Can you believe that a company gets this amazing looking skyscraper built and never moves into it ?
Now a building shouldn't have to suffer that sort of fate but the risk of corporate disaster is very much in the air and Enron-like disasters could happen when that gas pedal of ambition is pushed a little too hard by the 2-3 smartest guys in the room. It's thanks to Enron that we now have things like Internal Controls Over Financial Reporting but what chance does a business have when even the auditors only promise "reasonable assurance" that wrong doing and fraud won't happen ?
Speaking of auditors, the Big 4 auditing firm KPMG recently moved into 2323 Ross Ave in downtown Dallas and their new home with it's curved glass brings to mind the Enron buildings which went on to house energy giant Chevron ( rhymes with Enron of all things! ).
This move-in by KPMG into a curved glass building does in no way promise the next great American Public Accounting Scandal but it is a very well known public fact that many former Arthur Andersen ( they audited Enron ) partners & employees became a part of KPMG post-Enron. The Andersen name was recently revived by a group of former Andersen employees when they launched a company called Andersen Tax because keep in mind only the Audit group screwed up!
A tenet on the Fountain Place. Of all the buildings in the Dallas skyline, it is the IM Pei designed Fountain Place ( let's call it F.Place for short ) home to Tenet Healthcare that really turns me on. The F.Place is a different spin on the obelisk the way I see it. A fatter, reimagined, functional obelisk. It's triangular taper breaks with the rest of the largely flat Dallas skyline. It's a huge difference - or Delta - that I would give the building a pet name like Pluto or Phoebe. There are times when I've thought that the idea for this building's exterior was conjured up by someone fiddling with origami ideas at their desk.
There is a danger and drama at every apex much akin to how a F1 race car driver might describe one of his favorite racing tracks. Imagine Batman perched up at the top apex of the F.Place but Dallas isn't Gotham yet although someone did try to blow up the F.Place once upon a time but the FBI intervened in the nick of time which makes me wonder why we couldn't stop the Twin Towers from going down on 9/11. Below is a shot of the F.Place from the dark side of the afternoon and you can see this big striking right angled glass section on which the Museum Tower and the Fairmont Hotel indulge in their narcissism.
It almost looks like this right angled section of the building can be twisted and wrapped around the rest of the building with just the pyramid top sticking out. It's like a giant glassy Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress that could go around the perfect 36 thirty six year old woman.
A checkered past. The D magazine used the F.Place and it's checkered exterior to good effect on an illustration for a 2012 story titled "The Mad Men Of Dallas". To the left is the Reunion Tower and to the right is the checkered exterior of the F.Place.
The F.Place never disappoints no matter what the weather and the building shines best when it looks like there is going to be a Texas Flood. When it gets all grey and gloomy, the F.Place always cheers me up when I see it because it gives you a million shades of grey if you give the building the old eye at the right time. Here's a shot of the F.Place piercing the grey skies back in May of this year when we had record rain fall in Texas.
Perhaps it's fitting that the Angel Perselidas monument at the foot of the D building right across the street from the F.Place has a beak that appears like it was chopped off the top of the F.Place.
I love seeing the F.Place so much that it was only recently as I was cleaning my Persols that I noticed that the signature "Supreme Arrow" pointing away from the front of the frame looks like a silver silhouette of the F.Place.
Living in a terrain where a man can see straight 50 miles out, I am always looking for interesting architecture to photograph and to write about. I am like a madman when I see a good building and my mind goes into a creative frenzy like a Mad Man. On the wall behind my desk are these two 20 by 30 portraits of the Burj Khalifa ( left ) and Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower ( right ) that I had the privilege of photographing on my diverse travels.
These 2 buildings couldn't be in places more disparate. While the Burj sits in a flourishing desert city, the Price Tower sits in the middle of nowhere in the Oklahoma prairie. The Price tower is that Prairie flower that a poet might like to surmise and write about. I like to stare at these building portraits for creative inspiration and the composition of both pictures are such that the 221m Price Tower looks about the same height as the 828m Burj Khalifa.
But to the right of my desk is this giant Old Glory mug which houses my go-to Sharpies, Wite-Outs, Parker pens, Bic pencils and a towering gold plated envelope opener whose imposing elevation above the rim of the mug reminds me of how the Burj Khalifa dwarfs out everything else in the Dubai skyline.
But to the right of my desk is this giant Old Glory mug which houses my go-to Sharpies, Wite-Outs, Parker pens, Bic pencils and a towering gold plated envelope opener whose imposing elevation above the rim of the mug reminds me of how the Burj Khalifa dwarfs out everything else in the Dubai skyline.
What a storm in a mug! But the sight of the golden envelope opener in the Old Glory mug reminds me of another landmark that is well within our borders and that is none other than the Washington Monument whose focused and clean presence on the horizon is a sight to behold.
The sight of the golden envelope opener by my desk had been growing on me and had been opening up new avenues of thought through the folds of my grey matter. These obelisk designs of architecture and office stationary are things of beauty that serve completely different purposes with their existence. To a child, the Washington Monument may look like this big block of sand and stone just grew from underneath a pyramid much like how an tree grows from it's seedling. Isn't it amazing how much of living effort goes into erecting larger than life non-living objects on the face of our pristine earth ?
There is something about how a triangle looks in the skyline or on paper isn't there ? The triangle is first object of geometry where straight lines intersect and produce a closed space inside it's periphery. The first letter of the English alphabet and the first letter of the world ALPHABET is shaped like a triangle, at least the top half of it. My favorite Greek alphabet Delta is shaped like a triangle. As a teenager, I have given the Delta alphabet in my physics textbooks the same look I gave a PYT ( Pretty Young Thing ) in my class. The Delta alphabet was such a thriller in my life and I have always liked things that show a difference beyond equations.
The other day a picture came my way from a friend who shares the same initials as a recently deceased former President of India ( APJ ). I couldn't help but notice the obtuse triangle on top of the DRINKING COCONUT that this enigmatic human living across the Pond had found in his local Asian store.
These coconuts could be Earth's most famous export when we build colonies on Moon and Mars as Elon Musk wishes it. Honey, they'll be driving Tesla's to the moon to paraphrase an Alan Jackson song that had mentioned Buick's instead. Last but not the least, every time one wants to draw a house on paper we are naturally inclined to draw up a triangle before anything else but it's a sign of sure progress that we decided to make houses with all the functional possibilities that geometry offered humanity.
Legendary art director Hershel Bramson had this credo "art is made up of triangles" which inspired the Original Mad Man, Bert Stein, to produce one of advertising's most iconic images which is that of a glass of Smirnoff vodka with an actual Egyptian pyramid melting away in the creamy bokeh...
These coconuts could be Earth's most famous export when we build colonies on Moon and Mars as Elon Musk wishes it. Honey, they'll be driving Tesla's to the moon to paraphrase an Alan Jackson song that had mentioned Buick's instead. Last but not the least, every time one wants to draw a house on paper we are naturally inclined to draw up a triangle before anything else but it's a sign of sure progress that we decided to make houses with all the functional possibilities that geometry offered humanity.
Legendary art director Hershel Bramson had this credo "art is made up of triangles" which inspired the Original Mad Man, Bert Stein, to produce one of advertising's most iconic images which is that of a glass of Smirnoff vodka with an actual Egyptian pyramid melting away in the creamy bokeh...
I count only 3 triangles in the picture and when it comes to triangles three's-a-charm. The caption for the Smirnoff campaign ? "Driest of the dry". The caption is larger than life because it was actually shot in the great dry Sahara desert whose proximity to the Equator makes it the driest of the dry deserts. Humans refuse to desert the Sahara because the clues to human evolution are still buried over there and they are always looking for ways to tear to pieces the last great theory of our evolution written on paper. Here is a jawbone they found over there the other day that provided some clues on how humans happened...
Enterprising human beings in the 21st century have founded companies called JAWBONE that makes this new thing called "wearables" which is anything but jaw dropping. Here is poor Bert Stein putting his jawbones to the Sahara sand while making his signature shot that stays firmly etched in the sands of time ( & the Sahara ) no matter how strong the desert storms of digital change in the ad world are.
Stein's Smirnoff image from the Sahara is largely credited for sparking off the Creative Revolution in advertising which in turn gave pop culture a certain Don Draper. In an amazing twist of fate for Bert Stein, a dash of Smirnoff vodka played a crucial role in getting Marilyn Monroe to drop it all for that famous Last Sitting shoot Stein did six weeks before Marilyn's untimely death. "How's this for 36?" is what she asked as Stein shot her between those sheets.
JFK got what he deserved and what he didn't deserve and thats' worth thinking about. Dallas Killed JFK they liked to say but I couldn't disagree more because I loathe popular desire for a juicy headline that twists facts. Dallas didn't kill JFK but a Communist nut job from New Orleans did and today we have a Democratic President who has restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and hoisted Old Glory in Havana just in time for Fidel Castro's 89th birthday. Time oh Time...
A heavy Texas downpour may wash away the X marked on Elm street or the City can scratch it off time and again like it has done over the years, but it won't wash away the memory of what happened at that spot on 11/22/63. Here's that famous X I shot in 2013 a few months before the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination.
I find myself driving into the city of Dallas a lot. Seeing the skyline from afar gives me a rush of blood to the head but sometimes the traffic slows down this rush of blood because everyone seems to be in a rush to get somewhere. Ain't that funny how everyone being in a rush can slow the whole damn traffic down and here on paper it looks like this elevated state of the senses should move things faster. But the Dallas skyline is eye candy to me as I sit there waiting for traffic to move slowly and being in stuck in traffic gives me a chance to think about what I'll do with my time today once I am inside one of those buildings.
The Dallas skyline represents money more than anything else and there is plenty of it being made ( & lost ) in those buildings thanks to the many great companies housed in them. This is not a bad thing because you need to create opportunities to put people to work so they can feed their families, send their kids to school and have a reasonably happy retirement. If you don't put people to work you will have people protesting on the street. It's that simple.
We live in a world where the sun has set on might empires. There are big differences between the former British Empire and the American Capitalist Empire. The British Empire just looted wealth and it didn't create any opportunity for the conquered to create wealth and in the end Britain lost all she conquered even the last bastion of Hong Kong with the Kohinoor Diamond still holding fort in the UK with a stubbornness as hard as the diamond itself.
The American Capitalist Empire often criticized around the world as a 'bully' created this framework where the creation of wealth is the perennial attraction and those who are ambitious, hard working & play by the rules create a lot of wealth for themselves with the Supreme Commander of the Free World earning a salary that is peanuts compared to what execs make on Wall Street. The creation of wealth is a key reason why I have as much faith in the Dallas skyline as Warren Buffett has in the American system. The Dallas skyline represents capitalism and it's beauty of promise for those willing to do something with the best waking moments of the best years of their lives. Alan Jackson sang these eternal lines to the twang of a Fender Telecaster a few years ago....
There is no Hall of Fame for the working class hero,
No statue carved out of stone,
His greatest reward is the love of a woman.
When bringing together capitalism and city skylines one must also keep in mind the Enron story and how it can all go wrong right here in Texas! Post-Enron, the 40-story Cesar Pelli designed Enron Center South on 1500 Louisiana St. was the largest unused corporate ghost ship in the country and the building in 2002 boasted the most cutting edge office technology of it's time. Morale & occupancy tend to be very low after such corporate disasters.
The saddest part of course is that the company who wanted the building never got a chance to move in, because by 2002, the Enron bull(shit) run had come to an end and the bullshit had really hit the ceiling as they like to say. Can you believe that a company gets this amazing looking skyscraper built and never moves into it ?
Now a building shouldn't have to suffer that sort of fate but the risk of corporate disaster is very much in the air and Enron-like disasters could happen when that gas pedal of ambition is pushed a little too hard by the 2-3 smartest guys in the room. It's thanks to Enron that we now have things like Internal Controls Over Financial Reporting but what chance does a business have when even the auditors only promise "reasonable assurance" that wrong doing and fraud won't happen ?
Speaking of auditors, the Big 4 auditing firm KPMG recently moved into 2323 Ross Ave in downtown Dallas and their new home with it's curved glass brings to mind the Enron buildings which went on to house energy giant Chevron ( rhymes with Enron of all things! ).
A tenet on the Fountain Place. Of all the buildings in the Dallas skyline, it is the IM Pei designed Fountain Place ( let's call it F.Place for short ) home to Tenet Healthcare that really turns me on. The F.Place is a different spin on the obelisk the way I see it. A fatter, reimagined, functional obelisk. It's triangular taper breaks with the rest of the largely flat Dallas skyline. It's a huge difference - or Delta - that I would give the building a pet name like Pluto or Phoebe. There are times when I've thought that the idea for this building's exterior was conjured up by someone fiddling with origami ideas at their desk.
There is a danger and drama at every apex much akin to how a F1 race car driver might describe one of his favorite racing tracks. Imagine Batman perched up at the top apex of the F.Place but Dallas isn't Gotham yet although someone did try to blow up the F.Place once upon a time but the FBI intervened in the nick of time which makes me wonder why we couldn't stop the Twin Towers from going down on 9/11. Below is a shot of the F.Place from the dark side of the afternoon and you can see this big striking right angled glass section on which the Museum Tower and the Fairmont Hotel indulge in their narcissism.
It almost looks like this right angled section of the building can be twisted and wrapped around the rest of the building with just the pyramid top sticking out. It's like a giant glassy Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress that could go around the perfect 36 thirty six year old woman.
A checkered past. The D magazine used the F.Place and it's checkered exterior to good effect on an illustration for a 2012 story titled "The Mad Men Of Dallas". To the left is the Reunion Tower and to the right is the checkered exterior of the F.Place.
The F.Place never disappoints no matter what the weather and the building shines best when it looks like there is going to be a Texas Flood. When it gets all grey and gloomy, the F.Place always cheers me up when I see it because it gives you a million shades of grey if you give the building the old eye at the right time. Here's a shot of the F.Place piercing the grey skies back in May of this year when we had record rain fall in Texas.
I love seeing the F.Place so much that it was only recently as I was cleaning my Persols that I noticed that the signature "Supreme Arrow" pointing away from the front of the frame looks like a silver silhouette of the F.Place.
Polarizing thought, pulverizing icebergs. No matter where in the world I go with my polarized Persols, even if it is to the Polar Ice caps, there will always be a visible piece of Dallas on my body even though it won't be very evident that I am from Dallas by just looking at me and talking to me. The F.Place has cast quite a spell on my imagination as you have gathered by now.
The triangles and the obelisks - thin or fat - has it's place in design in both form and function by it's application on frames as decoration and the need for it's geometry in office stationary & architecture. What will you do if you had the Washington Monument to open an envelope with ? What will you do if you had the Fountain Place to pick polar ice with or chisel some wood with ? Don't push paper but push the envelope instead.
The triangles and the obelisks - thin or fat - has it's place in design in both form and function by it's application on frames as decoration and the need for it's geometry in office stationary & architecture. What will you do if you had the Washington Monument to open an envelope with ? What will you do if you had the Fountain Place to pick polar ice with or chisel some wood with ? Don't push paper but push the envelope instead.
