My kitchen table this evening

Take me in a carousel, I would like to go somewhere. Architecture as an attraction.
Sketch By Emelie Nielson

Esparon, the house on a mountain

I just got back from helping architect friends to build their house in South of France. One hour from Nîmes, the town with the beautiful light there is a small village on top of a mountain. They bought an old ruin, and preserving the old walls and the layout, they are now building on to it.

There was a full moon, and you could see the moonlit valley and the unfinished roof.
So quiet, you could hear the owl sounds and see the mountains 280 degrees around you.
Everything about this place is just magical.

Accidentely on purpose / comme par hasard by Kate McBride

Not long ago one of our friends had an exhibition at La Chambre Claire in Paris, her name is Kate McBride and she is based in Florence. She has since the early 1980's taken polaroids and written short poetic narratives as a travel journal. The polaroid being an instant medium, it catches exactly that moment and feeling of the place and the landscape.

It became a collection book with over 200 polaroids and eighty-four poems, called 'I journey with you here'. I just love polaroids, and I love the milky dreaminess of this journal, it makes you want to travel, travel, travel...

We were there - Porto

Three years ago we visited Leça Swimming Pools by Alvaro Siza, north of Porto, Portugal.
Porto is a fantastic place to go for architectural visits (go if you haven't been!)
The pools were finished in 1966, but they have aged gracefully and do not feel decayed, despite the Atlantic oceans tough treatment.
The area is completely sunken down, out of view of the cityscape on the side and disconnected from the city, melting into the ocean as apart of it.
You are lead as in procession through the changing rooms, via a ramp down towards the ocean.
The pools are molded into the the cliffs with concrete of the same color as the stone, mixed with the natural water gatherings of the ocean side, it is sensational place.
I would love to revisit in the summer, it was early spring when we were there.

Photo credits: Camilla Levin

Photo credits: Camilla Levin

Photo credits: Camilla Levin

Petra, Jordan / a rose-red city half as old as time

It seems no work of man’s creative hand,
by labour wrought as wavering fancy planned;
But from the rock as if by magic grown,
eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!

Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine,
where erst Athena held her rites divine;
Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane,
that crowns the hill and consecrates the plain;


But rose-red as if the blush of dawn,
that first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;
The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,
which man deemed old two thousand years ago,
match me such marvel save in Eastern clime,
a rose-red city half as old as time.

—John Burgon, 1845

Al Khazneh or The treasury at Petra, 1st century AD
Photo credits: http://www.ereduvoyage.ch

Photo credits: http://www.unp.me

Photo credits: http://www.unp.me

Photo credits: http://www.unp.me

The eucalypt forest

This winter we went to Australia for a month. It was hot, but up in the Blue mountains the air was cool.

The Blue mountains north-west of Sydney is a national park (of 267,954-hectare) with mountains, rivers, waterfalls, an abundance of magical scenery and natural beauty.

The Blue mountains name derives from the sheer blue haze over the mountains, said to be produced by the dense forest of oil bearing eucalyptus trees.

This summer after a walk, the rain came down heavy and as I walked by the eucalyptus trees I could breathe in the fresh eucalyptus fragrance that the big eucalypt forest was giving away. Like a big, blue healing lung. That's sublime.

Photo by Emelie Nielson 2014

Left to it's destiny

Photo by Emelie Nielson, Norway 2009

The pale beauty

When I was younger, my mind often drifted away to exotic destinations with turquoise waters and big colorful flowers. I found the long swedish winter months dull and unmoving. But as I grew up I started to look at the landscapes around me in a different way. I learned to see the magic and poetry in the shy and barren beauty that is so special to the north. The pale light, the bare landscapes and the very slow spring, who even after the long winter still manages to materialize.

Instead of the bold flowers, small forget-me-nots peek up at you. The different shades of steel grey of the water, cliffs and sky seam together like a masterfully brushed painting. The Swedish nature now moves me deeply, and I can't think of a beauty now.

I discussed this with a friend who studies literature, who considers the sublime from a more classical point of view within the field. She did not agree with my opinion that the sublime could be something very subtle. The sublime is to her, by definition, always overwhelming.
I believe that the sublime can be found in the subtle and can move you in a special way within that experience without being overwhelming.
We can agree that nature has the power to move us in that way, obvious like the overwhelming sensation of standing in front of a roaring ocean. Although I believe that the subtleness that the northern landscape represents is sublime as another, not so in your face experience that is one of the greatest treasures when you find it.

Photo, Emelie Nielson, winter, 2012

Traveling through stations

This past week I have come across some photos of old stations. I guess there is often something very magic with old photos. They have captured something that you could never, as much as you would want to, be a part of. A moment that can never be relived but is forever captured so that we can get a glimpse of it.
Stations Especially fascinates me. There are so many people passing every day, all the emotional or still rendrez-vous, both joyful and sad.

I really like the time during traveling, you find yourself in a non-place, a vacuum in time, to just be. Maybe there is something sublime in that feeling in itself for me, although that feeling is also associated to the grand spaces that often house our traveling situations.
The sounds, the atmosphere of excitement, the fluidity.
Big stations provides us with the safety of direction, it herds us in the way to go.
You are surrounded by many people, more than you are probably used to. Stations have directions and destinations, with your eyes you can follow the (track / train / boat / airplane) until they disappear out of your sight.
Of corse there are awful stations, but then there are some amazing ones that have the ability to stun.

I think these photos of The old Grand central station in New York are stunning. Not only because the exposure makes the light almost surreal, as if it is coming down in cascades from the walls, but they tell me something about the richness of being there. The atmosphere, once again, the grandeur.
The continuity of the space, the little island in the middle, the feeling of almost being in a big bunker, people moving around you.
Is there something that we do there, that we don't do anywhere else (besides traveling)? Reading a newspaper to pass the time, trying to remember just how a person looks in that moment, looking at strangers, getting lost in thoughts. The transit is a very exciting instance and so a station is what takes you there an leads the first little part-, or last.
I am not going to define what I think makes a good station, what I am thinking is, that the sublime is probably there if the station just is and with all diligence lifts all of these things.
People are on their way on these photos, but the Grand central is place very hard to forget. It gets to be the beginning and the end.

The Grand Central station, c.1930 photographed by Hal Morey

People on the move

The rail yard