The floor of Westminster Abbey was the surprise of the Royal Wedding for me.
Floors and Pavements
, originally uploaded by ReefRaff.
San Francisco, USA
“One of the most spectacular of the more than 350 public stairs of SF that connect streets to each other. This is a form of vernacular architecture that harks back to the instant city that is SF. From a sleepy outpost with inclement weather and inhospitable topography, Yerba Buena became the hot-spot city of San Francisco thanks to gold and silver mines nearby and people found ways to make this harsh place navigable!
Sailors, miners, businessmen, prostitutes, thieves, bankers, cowboys, and the government, all made it home in the mid-19th century. SF as a destination was an incentive for transport companies to make ships that could sail faster from the East coast, pre-Panama Canal. And for railway development beyond the “frontier” of Chicago. Ornate Victorian style homes – the marker of social status at the time – and Italianate mansions showed up everywhere to reflect the rich times. The government commissioned grand buildings to match the grand amounts of money flowing through. An Italian immigrant with a bit of money who had been rejected for bank loans and kept his money sewed into a mattress across the Bay decided to lend money to poor immigrants and became Bank of America.
Everything including buildings here has a story – my office building used to be a brothel!!! Now it is a mixed-use building next to a public stair that is owned neither by the city nor by a private entity. Near the house of the Brown Twins (octogenarian mid-Western-now-local twin sisters who were voted as “Second Best Local Character”)!
There was a group of citizens in San Francisco who were the moral police during the Gold Rush. They had the authority (and the gall) to hang people they considered hindrances to the city. Unconventional is San Francisco…”
This mosaic is at the local sushi place in Casuarina Mall, Darwin.
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Taufa’ahau Rd in Nuku’alofa
Dunedin Railway, originally uploaded by GeoWombats.
We’ve been travelling around and this is one of the fantastic mosaics at the Dunedin Railway Station. Never appreciatd this as a teenager waiting for the bus way back when but now I look at these and go WOW!.
twin dolphin mosaics, originally uploaded by ari kokomosaico.
Hannon Library, Southern Oregon University, Ashland, Oregon, USA
Mosaic pavement 2005
Winner 2006 Spectrum Award : First prize Commercial
A 28 ft diameter circular pavement mosaic for the entryway of a library. It is made of ceramic porcelain tile, with handset glass smalti lines and highlights. The design is made up of three overlapping images: the looping curves that rotate around the perimeter are from a diagram of wind patterns on the earth’s surface; the central spiral motif is from an astrophysics computer model of spiral arm galaxy formation; the closely spaced lines that fan out around the circumference is a pattern from fluid mechanics (physics). The border is an ancient mosaic motif from the Middle East.
Now if you are interested in learning more about mosaics with ceramic tile, consider doing a course with Stephanie Jurs and Robert Stout of Twin Dolphin Mosaics in Ravenna, Italy in July. Now that’s a great vacation!
Altar in St. Peter, originally uploaded by Jörg Dickmann.
Dusseldorf, Germany
Catafalque Party, originally uploaded by Wandering Ro.
The ANZAC War Memorial, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Historically, a catafalque was a support for a coffin, but it has come to represent a remembrance stone or a tomb. A catafalque party was originally appointed to guard a coffin from theft or desecration. Now it performs a ceremonial role, honouring the dead.
