Ice Falls | James Carpenter Design Associates | Photographs: Andreas Keller
The waterfall consists of cast glass blocks whose special profiles create an even and controlled flow of water. The large volume of the lobby is dissolved in the luminous plane of water and glass. The rays of light from the clerestories at the elevator floor are captured inside the facetted cast glass accentuating the beauty and brightness of the water’s energy. The crystalline beauty of the glass and the flowing water is the result a series of internal reflections and refractive turbulences, creating the phenomenon of luminosity.
Villa V | Paul de Ruiter Architects
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William Sharp, one of the first chromolithographic printers in the U.S., created these extraordinary illustrations for the large folio Victoria Regia (1854) by John Fisk Allen. Allen, a well-known horticulturalist, cultivated a specimen of the rare, huge (up to 8 feet in diameter), fast-growing (up to an inch an hour!) water lily, native to the Amazon. After months of careful tending, the plant—named in honor of the recently-crowned Queen Victoria—blossomed on the evening of July 21, 1853. Sharp’s depictions of this exotic wonder—in various stages of bloom—were masterpieces and elevated the then-nascent art of chromolithography to spectacular new heights.
image captions: All images are from a copy of Victoria Regia in our collections. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
rad…I wanna see one
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