Category: architecture

I was thinking about earlier this year when the weather was magnificent. First thought: when I was one of the lucky people at a conference (I think there were about a dozen of us) who got to go up the clock tower at Samford Hall at Auburn. It sounds as though they don’t let many people do it, and those who do must be led by a University architect. We were warned about wasps, though they weren’t bad at all, and by exertion, because it’s several stories up and some of it is by shipladder. Easy-easy though.

Loved seeing the bell and setup on our way up, because a couple of years ago, I got to be friends with Patty Allen, the widow of Robert Allen z”l who co-wrote the Auburn fight song with Al Stillman z”l (they’re the same pair who wrote ‘Home for the Holidays’). She is fabulous! I sent her a pic of this after my visit, and she said she wants to come see it in person sometime. It plays ‘War Eagle’ at noon each day.

At the top, we made our way to the clock. If you make it, you’re allowed to sign your name to the backside, and every Aubie mascot has done it, too:

The architect pulled the clockface back:

Here’s me in front of it, for scale:

And that view! Yessss

This old store in Demopolis, Alabama is perfection.
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The 2017 Alabama Historical Association (AHA) fall pilgrimage will be later this month, centering on Abbeville, Alabama, which is just ripe to be the setting for a mid-century period film. Jimmy Rane, the ‘Yella Fella’ (if you’ve ever been to a lumber yard or just watched an Auburn game on tv, you likely know his Great Southern Wood Co) is responsible for so much of the preservation here: what would be vacant storefronts become throwback shop windows to when kids wore Buster Brown or Red Goose shoes and one bought Philco radios.

I’m going to miss meeting Jimmy (it’s during my birthday weekend and we have other plans) and getting to tour more of the town, but we were there this summer and got to walk around with the boys, including a lunch at Huggin’ Molly’s, a restaurant and soda fountain that is now the home to the fixtures from a 1926 drugstore shop in Pittsburgh. Also: the place is named after a town legend:
…a giant of a woman, maybe 7 feet tall and as big around as a bale of cotton.

Some say her ghost still walks the streets of Abbeville late in the night, sweeping her black skirt as she goes. If she happens upon you, she chases you down, gives you a huge hug and screams in your ear.

While the food is what it is: easy lunch food, the people are friendly. The manager came around and was explaining that the Coca-Cola sign hanging here is worth as much or more than everything else in the building put together, as it’s one of only a very few still extant:

As cute as the downtown area is during the day, it’s even more impressive at night when the signs are lit and the neon is going.

Johnny’s Wild Game Processing in Eufaula, Alabama

(took this pic earlier this year, processed it with Hipstamatic)

:::theceiling:::

Just as in St Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, visitors in Savannah flock each day to the Cathedral of St John the Baptist

Gorgeous. A history of the congregation is here.

The Spaces has a post this week: Sci-fi tiny homes land in Marseille for the new Utopie Plastic exhibit in the city’s sculpture park. There’s Hexacube, Bulle Six Coques, a collection of furnishings (including Starck) that fit the theme, and:

The last piece included in the exhibition is Finnish architect Matti Suuronen’s Futuro House – fewer than 60 of which still exist today. Constructed in 1968, this flying saucer-style cabin sits on landing struts, and is ringed with porthole windows. A rare find – an original Futuro House went on the market for €130,000 last year – the sculpture park’s model was rescued from Majorca, where it had been dumped in a wood.

Soooo of course I thought of the Futuro home in Pensacola Beach

I took this picture about ten years ago, but checked on the home again last summer and it was still doing okay. I’ll get an updated pic of it next month.

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Pensacola actually has three especially interesting homes — the Futuro at the beach, the Dome of a Home also on the beach:

and this monolithic dome in the city — this is another older pic but I’ll get an updated one next month. The home, the ‘Floridome,’ has three bedrooms and 2-1/2 baths and was sold in 2015:

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It’s unclear as to whether one may still month-to-month rent the “UFO House” in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, but when Architect Magazine wrote about it in 2013, they included some pics of the interior. As they put it, Rent this house shaped like a spaceship, because it is a house shaped like a spaceship.

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Sweet Dome Alabama