Daniel Libeskind's home. A film by Matthew Donaldson

The city

When I was a kid, there was this intro to a television show with a miniature village that captured me every time. The intro was a model of a city on a hill, lit up in the night and it had a train running around it (I believe that the show was called 'skymningssagor').

I think that this one, and other shows with model cities like ('Skrotnisse') completely captivated a child's imagination and I think that looking back, it was one of the things that made me start thinking about architecture and becoming an architect.

There was definitely something about the atmosphere, about seeing the city from afar.
The same fascination led me to night-walks and evening drawings of the city once I moved to Paris.

The city is like this living organism, and during the day you can't see into peoples homes that much even though you are surrounded by other people (around you, moving above you and under you).
But in the night the city lights up and the windows create a mosaic of peoples' lives, many small ones, like looking into a doll house. Everything becomes accessible and the contrasts particularly strong.

I love the way the city transforms in the evenings and the ambiance that being surrounded by hundreds of peepholes of warm lit-up homes creates.
The dynamics of the city captivates me very much.

Night by the Seine, photo by Emelie Nielson 2010

Morning on the facade

The sun goes up on our facade an autumn day in Paris
Photo: Emelie Nielson

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