Prayer Stone/ Gravity Restored

[abknight@zzzzzz]

Hi George,

Them lions is by the Piccirilli Bros.  I'm sorry but I'm
altogether Google obsessed.  I will stop tomorrow.  Please
let it stop.

http://www.nypl.org/pr/lions.cfm

Christo is a very impressive enity.  Speaking of awful
sadistic conceptualists, he seems rather the opposite.
Christo sits at his drawing desk 14 hours a day to make
the money to pay for every expense inccurred by his
20+million dollar project.  I will share a weird opion.
The World Trade Center collapse was just so awful, that I
am sorry to bring it up, all those poor poor people.  But
in all that damage there was a ray of sunshine.  Included
in the list of the demolished one huge towering white
concrete articulated and indented and painted  with
"faces" in red blue and black, by Jean Debuffet's concrete
sculpture works.  I hope people somewhere aren't
re-creating it.  The city is full of oppressive works of
metallic art.  I was always dimayed by Noguchi's red steel
cube near Wall Steet.  Chicago is full of prominently
displayed steel works, many of them painted.  When last
there I thought, if only I could bring the texture and
swelling curves of one of my stone works it would do so
much better.  Poor miserable skinny steel.
Cities are exciting stages for sculpture.  There is
scarcely any room for new sculpture in New York.  I was
interested to see a new Maya Lin granite water piece down
by the Civil Courts several years ago, but never did, not
that I am wild for Maya Lin.  The scoop on Maya Lin is
that she throws things at assistants.  My wife had a
student who in now working for her.  She says the
assistants try to ignore the screaming.

The winner design for the WTC memorial is very exciting,
though difficult to picture spatially as one imagines
looking though the falling water and then behind to the
names on the wall.  Is the water falling over one's head?
http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/sig_view_winner.html
Wonderful the way the water dissappears in the center.  If
you have time you can inspect all the submissions in the
competition.  I looked at a few.  Quite eye opening to
ways one might go awry.

Glad you sounded like you enjoyed your trip,

Bill