Brooding

It's easy to ignore what little there is left of the natural world when in NYC. Sometimes. But we still have weather and like everywhere else, weather sets the mood. Here we have a storm threatening as seen from Columbus Circle, looking South - it really felt like Batman's Gotham City. The building with the triangular windows is our friend, the Hearst Tower (click here). The tall thin tower is Central Park Place, a residential condominium built in 1988 by Davis Brody & Associates. The hulking shrouded building barely visible in the center is the controversial 2 Columbus Circle by Edward Durell Stone from 1964, sometimes referred to as the Lollipop building (Ada Louise Huxtable, then architecture critic of The New York Times, said it resembled "a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops."). The building is to be occupied by the Museum of Arts and Design in 2008. Click here for this story. New York is a city of stark contrasts and the relatively unpredictable nature of the climate in the Northeast (as opposed to the Southwest, e.g.) just adds one more variable to the mix. There's nothing like a brooding NYC day to remind us that in spite of our abilities to create technologies and shape the world, we are still fundamentally powerless in the hands of mother nature ...