[ Lost in the Landscape ]

the quilt’s progress

I wrote ear­lier about Linda offer­ing to make a wed­ding gift of a quilt for John and me. I got word last week that all the squares were com­pleted, and Sun­day I stopped by to con­sult on their arrangement.

Here’s how the quilt looked in its near-final ver­sion as it was all laid out on her liv­ing room floor. Come on every­one, tell Linda how gor­geous her quilt looks!

Linda likes to live with these arrange­ment deci­sions before stitch­ing things together, and we had fun mov­ing a few blocks around, fine-tuning the arrange­ment. On the table in front of the quilt you can see the rough mockup I did of the quilt after scan­ning the fab­rics and play­ing a morn­ing with Pho­to­shop. It ended up being a great way to pre-imagine how things would look. The blocks are in dif­fer­ent places, but the over­all quilt looks a lot like the early sketch.

The design is based on a quilt by Liz Axford that was exhib­ited in the Quilt Visions quilt show in 2002. Enti­tled “Bam­boo Boogie-Woogie,” that quilt was an abstracted take on bam­boo stems.

Speak­ing of bam­boo, it was an inter­est­ing bit of coin­ci­dence that the night before I’d attended a con­cert by the Hill­crest Wind Ensem­ble, a band that John some­times plays in. The venue was the Neu­ro­sciences Insti­tute in La Jolla, a nice piece of archi­tec­ture by Billy Tsien and Tod WIlliams, with strik­ing land­scap­ing done by the San Diego County firm of Bur­ton Asso­ciates. The grounds fea­ture this amaz­ing long rec­tan­gle filled with golden bam­boo that must be my favorite sin­gle plant­ing of bam­boo any­where. (The plant­ing is even more impres­sive by day, but that’s not when I was there…)

The bam­boo con­nec­tion goes even fur­ther. The archi­tects of the Neu­ro­sciences Insti­tute designed an exhi­bi­tion at the National Build­ing Museum devoted to con­crete as a build­ing mate­r­ial. Part of the space included these forests of steel rein­forc­ing rods, rebar, that are used to strengthen con­crete. At least to my eyes the instal­la­tion bears more than a pass­ing resem­blance to the bam­boo plant­ing at the Neu­ro­sciences Insti­tute. Or am I just delu­sional? (This photo by Frank Oude­man [ source ] )

But back to quilts…

Linda’s house, like the home of many quil­ters, is a one-person quilt show, with lots of great exam­ples of her work. I’m a pretty visual per­son and I can always look at more cool things. It so hap­pened that the Quilt Visions quilt bien­nial was hap­pen­ing up the coast at the Ocean­side Museum of Art. That was an obvi­ous exten­sion to the after­noon if I ever heard of one.

Some museum exhi­bi­tions allow pho­tog­ra­phy in the gal­leries, oth­ers don’t. Unfor­tu­nately this was one of those no pho­tog­ra­phy ones. You’ll have to take my word that the show had a few drop-dead spec­tac­u­lar art quilts, as well as sev­eral that spoke qui­etly and revealed their secrets slowly as you looked ever closer at them.

It’s the sort of show that will either inspire you to take up quilt­ing or to intim­i­date you into giv­ing up all hope of ever mak­ing any­thing beau­ti­ful out of fab­ric and thread. Even though I have a Y chro­mo­some and quilt­ing isn’t typ­i­cally a guy thing, I think I ended up being inspired. Now, some­one please give me a few months of free time so that I can start up yet another obsession…

And here’s one final pic­ture. The museum was part of a civic cen­ter com­plex designed by the archi­tect Charles Moore. The very com­fort­able, human-scaled build­ings take their design clues from Irv­ing Gill, San Diego’s most dar­ing archi­tect of the early 20th cen­tury. Gill used the Spanish-inspired arches of this region and stripped them down to their essen­tial geom­e­try: tra­di­tion and his­tory meets modernism.

Part of the com­plex is the Ocean­side Pub­lic Library, and here’s the pond in front of it. Sorry, no more bam­boo, but what a ter­rific way to plant palm trees, each on its own lit­tle geo­met­ric island…

November 20 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design | Tags: bamboo • Billie Tsien • Burton Associates • concrete • National Building Museum • Quilt Visions • quilts • Tod Williams | 1 Comment »