I have all the typical preconceptions about other parts of our country that a northener has.  Moving south by car, through Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Arkansas, I tried to pinpoint the moment when I knew I had entered The South.  Was it when I saw a recliner sitting in a family’s front yard?  A horse farm bound by a split rail fence?  A roadside stand selling boiled peanuts?

Somewhere in Delaware a new, more open landscape emerged.  And in every field there was a crop sprinkler, one of the long, low irrigation contraptions that roll and pivot to cover the ground.  When seen in motion, in action and up close these devices look like, well, sprinklers.  But when seen from a distance, at rest, spanning the width of a field, they have a delicate, spectral presence.  They’re terribly pragmatic things, but the gentle curve in their arms gives them the grace of flying machines.

My journey south is, in one sense, a pilgrimage to the Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas built by architect E. Fay Jones in 1980.  Thorncrown is one of those buildings that both architects and real people adore, like the Guggenheim in New York.  It’s unlike a lot of canonical contemporary buildings in that it’s small, religious, and in an out-of-the-way (for the architectural establishment, at least) place.  And that’s a lot of what intrigued me.  After working in architecture offices in New York, where I administered projects in places as far away as the Middle East and Asia, I’m eager to find a way to build that’s more attuned to place and culture, and also more pragmatic.

In published photographs Thorncrown is all glorious geometries, symmetries and connections, an architect’s technical drawings sprung to life and set, for maximum drama, on a stone bed in the woods.  Seeing the chapel in person for the first time left a different impression.  The structure seemed less like a building, less architectural in spirit, than like an apparatus, instrumental in spirit.  And there is a spirit there, a dazzling transparency that collapses layers of space (the space within the building, the space between the trees, the space of the sky) on one another.  The building is materially overstructured, with redundant framing, braces and trusses.  And yet as one steps inside the figure of the building vanishes, leaving a visitor standing up against, and yet also carefully distanced from, the elements.  I want to know how this building does all that it does.

That’s India!  Preservationists, architecture lovers, and those with common sense around the world are growing concerned that Chandigarh, the capitol city of Punjab designed by Le Corbusier and Matthew Nowicki, is being sold off and hauled off bit by bit.  Unlike New York City, where it’s impossible to replace a stretch of sidewalk in a landmark neighborhood without layers of administrative approval, the architecture of Chandigarh is under no legal protection.  So original furniture, archival drawings, and custom-designed fixtures, are being sold off by by unscrupulous individuals without the government’s consent.

There’s a campaign to have the city designated, correctly and belatedly, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  True to form, “The campaigners believe that strong statements of international concern may succeed where local outcry has not."  Buildings and cities change over time, and part of living in them and loving them is understanding that they’ll be weathered, broken, renovated, and, yes, vandalized.  Rather than chastising Indians for not guarding their treasures, we might take down the American dealers and buyers who are profiting from the sale and resale of objects that don’t really belong to them at all.

I thought I had seen everything that could be seen in a New York subway car (a blind violinist, hip-hop dancing, a woman clipping her toenails, a man trying to cut the ear off another man, an old lady peeling an apple in one long twisted strip and then dropping it triumphantly on the floor), but then I saw this, during the morning rush hour on a crowded 6 train: two high school students sitting side by side playing poker.  Even the curmudgeon beside me, a business guy with a helmet of silver hair and a striped blue suit, had to look up from his Wall Street Journal and smile.

Although I was several feet from the game I could read one player’s hand clearly.  The cards, worn, and with that typical all-over, red-and-white pattern on the back, projected a sense of drama.  Where did those symbols, which seem so elemental, come from?  It turns out that playing cards have a long, illlustrious history; they originated in ninth century China, were brought Europe, and their design was further developed over centuries.  The older decks are highly pictorial, like Tarot cards, and have cultish overtones.  I prefer the modern deck, which has an astounding graphic clarity but still harbors a sense of mystery.