Though St. Petersburg is extravagantly picturesque, offering the pedestrian winding canals, candy-colored buildings, and fancy-capped churches each way she turns, I’ll remember the city for the decoration of its interiors, particularly the stonework in its churches.

Inside Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral on the island fortress, there are monolithic tombs for Alexander II and Empress Maria carved from deep green jasper and mottled pink rhodonite whose otherworldly hues and markings befit a tsar and his wife. The chunks of stone are very literally magnetic, drawing one forward. The inside of the Cathedral of Our Lady of St. Kazan is crowded with religious paintings, gilded trim, brass chandeliers, wreaths of lit candles, bearded priests, and praying babushkas. And the walls and floors are lined with stones the likes of which I have never seen before. The floor is a mosaic of different dark, tumultuously-patterned varieties, the tiles of each worn to different depth because of its unique hardnesses. There are pilasters flanking the altar carved from lapis lazuli and malachite, their blue and green the strongest, purist colors I’ve ever seen. It’s suddenly obvious why the stones are precious, and why they’re employed here in the service of the divine. There’s something in the way strongly colored and patterned stones are used so liberally in (many are mined in the Urals) that’s particularly revealing. The stone isn’t subservient to the architecture or ornament; it remains a substance with marvelous properties.

July 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses

The splash image of the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, by Snøhetta, on the architect’s website is a powerful one. In that photo, taken after a snowfall, the building looks like: mountain, iceberg, fortress and ocean liner. When the building is approached on foot from the city center, on a temporary steel footbridge, over a road that will be eventually channeled underground, the building is actually lower, broader and less imposing. It looks like: spaceship, folly, and something-still-under-construction. It has no center and no front, no strong image at all. It just barely looks like a building.

While the artfully sloping structure (this sloping is Snøhetta’s signature) feels as if it’s going to tumble into the water, it actually directs one back to the city. Its roof, clad in blindingly-white travertine tiles, can be occupied like a landform. As one steps up and walks the perimeter Oslo emerges all around as a modern commercial city, thick with with towers and cranes. And as one turns back to the building itself, its peaks emerge and recede cinematically in a way that’s pleasingly disorienting. The roof is public park, promenade and theater. The evening I visited people sat facing a floating stage listening to a soundcheck for the following evening’s Justin Bieber concert. To get back to our hotel, where The Biebs was in residence, we had to navigate a crowd of swooning, screaming and stampeding pre-teen girls. It’s impressive that such a cerebral, elegant building could host, comfortably, this kind of pop-cultural happening.

June 29, 2012 by Nalina Moses