T photo of the day

i was about to say the station is nothing compared to the parking garage he was standing on to take the picture... ugly poorly painted green steel.

but damn do i miss it.

Oh. and that bridge in the last picture is going to have a permanant art instalation put on it soon. look up "Water Street Bridge Fitchburg"
 
Not much architecture here, but I'll post it anyway...

120144264.jpg
 
The T looks so nice when all the problems are blurred away.
 
Oak Grove (edit) station looked so nice when it was new (sunny day probably helps, too)


for comparison:
Oak_Grove_Station.jpg
 
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ahh, shoot- it's Oak Grove. Nearly identical to North Quincy, as well. Both are Sert's work.
 
Those two picture illustrate why I will probably never agree with Beton's love of his namesake and how 'well' it chronicles its age.

It looked great in that first picture, now it just looks tired and depressing.
 
Those two picture illustrate why I will probably never agree with Beton's love of his namesake and how 'well' it ages.
They really don't present an accurate comparison considering one is sunny and shot on film, and the other is cloudy and digitally shot...
 
Well, maybe the first shot is a bit overly glamorous, but I've walked through that station twice a day/five days a week for the past five years in all sorts of weather. Trust me when I tell you it is tired and depressing.
 
Also how much of it can really be attributed to the material, and how much is just the MBTAs complete inability to maintain their stations?
 
Beton will probably correct me on this, but I believe on of the hallmarks of this style is to allow the concrete to show its age. I forget the exact turn of phrase that he used but it was something to the effect of the material being its own record of its history.
 
As much as I do love the Brutalist T stations, they age so poorly that I don't think there is really much hope for them. But then the way the T treats its infrastructure perhaps do design would age gracefully.
 
Just needs to be power-washed, statler.

And for the record, not really a fan of these stations. They're a little too Logan's Run for me, and the design ignores the quirks of the New England climate.

Here's my T photo of the day:
HAMMOCK18244.jpg

This was taken in the stockroom of the MBCR Somerville repair facility.
 
^^ :)
Doesn't power washing erase it's history though? What about a nice coat of bright whit paint?
 
I forget the exact turn of phrase that he used but it was something to the effect of the material being its own record of its history.

These were justin's wise words (where the hell did he go, BTW?), not my own. I simply co-opted them. By "recording its own history," the idea is that poured-in-place concrete takes on the character of its forms -- including the grain and knots of planks or plywood. Paint would obscure this to some degree. Power-washing would just clean off the filth, something that Modernists did not like at all.
 
Wait - Modernists didn't like the filth, or didn't like cleaning off the filth?
 
The ones who like to see their worth get all grimy and gritty, I guess. That's why I was confused-I wasn't sure if Beton meant power-washing would get rid of the filth that the Modernists had hoped would accumulate, that sounds kind of silly now that I think about it.

I rescind my previous question-my bad.
 

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