John FitzGerald's photos

The oldest of the three flint houses I uploaded photos of today. This is a half-timber building in the original sense -- that is, it has a stone ground floor with timber construction above. The beams may well have been plastered over for much of its life. Again the raised gable ends are common features of older East Anglian houses and cottages. All three houses are in/on Bishopgate in Norwich. The other two are posted to the left..

The building is the TD Bank Tower (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Bregman + Hamann Architects, 1967) in Toronto. It is one of seven building that constitute the Toronto-Dominion Centre; three of them are by Mies and three more are in this style. The three buildings by Mies are the last of his North American period. This is the world HQ of TD Bank (aka Toronto-Dominion Bank and TD Canada Trust).

I recommend clicking on the photo for the big view.

A gate is part of a fence, right? Right?

The Hockey Hall of Fame was originally a branch of the Bank of Montreal (Frank Darling and S. G. Curry, 1886).

Tombland is an Old Norse word meaning open space. It was the marketplace until the Normans moved the market to its current spot in the late eleventh century. The memorial is to Edith Cavell, and is the work of S. C. Clark. It stands outside the wall along the west side of the cathedral close. If you're ever in Norwich, by the way, Tombland is pronounced as two equally stressed syllables.

I'm going to be posting several more photos on this theme, so I would like to make it clear that, sketchy as some of these efforts to bring the look of the country into the city may appear. I love them all. In a city whose buildings are as blandly coloured as Toronto's, any display of colour I regard as a friendly gesture intended to make my life more enjoyable. I also find this display more enjoyable than those leafy squares in London surrounded by fences with locked gates and with barbed wire on top. That ain't nice. I also like how the shadow looks like the front end of a streetcar. There's a streetcar line about a block away, so it's as if the cars were casting their shadows a block north.

This is an old one, but I don't think I've posted it before. It's better than any of today's efforts, anyway.

A re-edit of a photo I posted on Flickr a few weeks ago. I tried to remove a blue cast from that one by adding red and green and went a bit overboard.

Toronto ====== Another shot that seems to me to have been inspired by Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-woogie , even though there's little resemblance. rdhinmn's suggestion that it was inspired by Escher appeals to me, too, though.

Looking south from the Women's College Hospital parking lot down Dr. Emily Stowe Way and Elizabeth St.