The New New Look

As you may should have noticed, the good old PragId has a new masthead. I think that this is the last part of my crazy plan to "redo" the image of this here blog.

The photo is taken by Adrian Kinloch. Adrian is an amazing photographer and designer (he is what I wished I could have been in architecture school). And, beyond that, he has a really cool blog, Brit in Brooklyn, which has photographs that capture the essence of living in Brooklyn. In order to do Adrian full credit, I have pasted a larger scale image; but it is well worth viewing the full size image. Adrian was kind enough to let me use the image here.

For those of you who may ask, the photo is of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower in Brooklyn. The restaurant no longer stands as it was an inconvenience on the way to Bruce Ratner's Brooklyn land grab. Beyond the formal qualities of the photograph (the use of the figurative foreground against the strong negative space and the "pop" of the color in the bell tower against the background of the blue sky - yeah, that's right, I studied art history and architecture), I also love this image for what it stands for. You will notice that the top of the tower (specifically, the part that actually contains the clock of said "clock tower") is still shrouded behind construction fencing. I say "still" because the developer told people that it would be completed by July 4th -- but now that date is "until the fall sometime". The photograph preserves the image of the JRG restaurant which was sadly demolished in the pursuit of profits for Ratner & Co. (see Adrian's picture of the site now) . I think that, more than any single photograph I have seen (or any piece of art, for that matter), it tells the narrative of the worst kind of urban development.