Fin

As a famous pig once said, "That's all, folks!"

Musée Moreau #2

I wrote a while back about exploring and falling in love with the Musée Gustave Moreau, the house-museum devoted to the 19th-century painter. I went back during my last week in Paris, this time with a camera. 

Just a modest little reading room...

The Cabinet des Dessins at the Louvre, where scholars study documents from the Louvre's archived drawings.

I can assure you that the preceding lobbies do nothing to anticipate this space. Imagine my surprise when I walked through the door!

Woodland Cemetery

While in Stockholm, I made a pilgrimage in the southern suburbs to the Woodland Cemetery or Skogskyrkogården. This cemetery was built over three decades and completed in the 1940s by Erik Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, two of Sweden's leading twentieth-century architects. Architecturally, it represents these architects' shift from National Romaticism to a more modernist approach. It's also, of course, an extraordinary cemetery, the graves amongst pine forests that are criss-crossed by cleverly-laid out paths connecting  funerary chapels. The spatial themes of the stand of trees forming an enclosure, or of a forest clearing---always open to the sky---recur in various guises; from what little I know, this has a special Nordic resonance. And for all the design's thoughtful control and indebtedness to historical forms, it offers a typically Swedish accessible simplicity.