366 Days of Architecture
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Thursday 20th October 2016
What might have been?
If things had turned out differently, this is the somewhat more rectilinear Sydney Opera House her Majesty the Queen could have opened today in 1973, had this competition entry from the HES archive by Leslie Graham Thomson MacDougall won instead of the famous multi curved building by the Danish duo with design by architect Jorn Utzon and engineered by Ove Arup. The international competition for a new large scale arts venue was launched in September 1955 and over 200 entries were submitted from 32 countries with Utzon declared the winner in 1957, after legend has it his design was picked out of the waste bin of rejected designs. The Opera House was one of the buildings laser scanned by HES in 2013 as part of the Scottish Ten Project.
Wednesday 19th October 2016
A little bit of flickering light.
Light as in Lumiere, Auguste and Louis, two of most important pioneers of early cinema. Auguste, whose birthday is today and his brother were born into a family who ran a photographic studio in Besancon, France. The brothers perfected new photographic techniques and experimented with moving pictures, patenting their version of the cinematograph in 1895, publicly showing their film of workers leaving their Lyon factory in Paris that year. Moving pictures grew hugely in popularity and the British Cinema Act of 1909 came in to enforce the safe showing of highly flammable nitrate films in purpose built buildings, one of the oldest surviving cinemas in Scotland is here, the 1913 Picture House, Campbeltown now undergoing a major restoration.
Tuesday 18th October 2016
Call me Ishmael . . .
So begins one of the most famous and revered novels of all time, Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’, published today in 1851. Ishmael is the only survivor of the whaling ship the Pequod, engaged in a quest to find and kill the great white whale Moby Dick, led by the obsessive Captain Ahab who had already lost a leg to the whale. Whales, particularly sperm whales, were much sought after even in to the twentieth century for their blubber which could be used to create whale oil for lamps, but also to make soap and foodstuffs like margarine, until other less odorous oils like kerosene became more popular. Scotland had a few industrial whaling stations, including this early twentieth century example at Bunaveneadar, Harris.
