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Sep 24

Gettysburg

Today, I visited the Gettysburg National Military Park and Gettysburg National Cemetery, the site of a bloody American Civil War battle in July of 1863.  As with most of the Civil War battlefields, the park is filled with hundreds of monuments memorializing the dead and wounded soldiers.

Here’s an infrared photograph of the State of North Carolina Monument, sculpted by Gutzon Borglum (who also sculpted the heads on Mt. Rushmore and the carving on Stone Mountain).

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Sep 23

Fallingwater

I’ve spent the past week in Pittsburgh, at a conference and visiting some professors at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.  Today, I escaped the city—Pittsburgh’s a great city, by the way—and did a little sightseeing in southwestern Pennsylvania.

I visited the Flight 93 National Memorial and the Johnstown Flood Museum.  But most of my time was spent at Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, Fallingwater. There’s a hint of fall color just beginning to appear—this part of the country is beautiful.

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A year or so ago, I visited Taliesin West.  Both it and Fallingwater have an enormous sense of fitting exactly into their surrounding environments.  Taliesin West sitting perfectly in the desert of Arizona, and Fallingwater belonging no other place than along the stream called Bear Run in Pennsylvania.