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Sally Lloyd-Jones
Beauty is for Everyone
by Sally Lloyd-Jones 30
When you walk through Central Park you feel like you’ve escaped out of the city into the countryside—you’re surrounded by natural beauty.
Except that it’s not. Natural, I mean.
The space where Central Park was built was originally a “pestilential, rocky swamp.” The natural beauty of Central Park is completely designed to seem as if it wasn’t designed at all. When the park was built, back in the 1850s, only wealthy New Yorkers could afford to go the Adirondaks. The designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, wanted to give the experience of being in the Adirondacks, the same experience of beauty, to those who couldn’t afford it.
Central Park is a park designed for everyone.
Joshua Cohen wrote of two examples of the designer’s obsessive attention to detail.
First, the park is 2 ½ miles long. The Central Park Commission said that there had to be four cross-streets connecting the east and west sides of Manhattan. To do that and still feel as if you’re in the Adirondacks, Olmsted and Vaux put the cross-streets eight feet below ground level—an innovation in park design.
Second, in the Bethesda Terrace there’s a fantastic ceiling made with more than 15,000 tiles. They’re encaustic tiles which means that the color and geometric design on the surface goes all they way through: it is not a glaze but multi-coloured clay. The ceiling was designed by British architect Jacob Wrey Mould, based on his two-year-long study of the Alhambra. So this public park in New York City includes a structure with a ceiling based on one of the most beautiful works of architecture in the world.”
Featured
Facing the Truth
I went to the doctor yesterday for the first time in years. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been sick; it means I’m the kind of stubborn fool who doesn’t like to take an ibuprofen for a headache, the kind of crank who would rather walk around squinting and snappy than to take the blasted aspirin. I just don’t like medicine. I prefer sweating it out, however inconvenient that is for the people around me. So after ten days of coughing and sniffling and whining I finally decided it must be a sinus infection. I have a show in a few days, and I can’t afford to be sick. So I bravely did what any man in my shoes would do: I asked my wife what to do. She told me which doctor to visit and I drove to the offices with a steely resolve. The nurse behind the sliding glass window handed me the clipboard with the dreaded New Patient Paperwork, and then the thing happened that made me want to write this.
The questions began. “Do you have any allergies?” “Do you drink caffeine?” “Do you use tobacco?” “If so, how often?” “Do you exercise regularly?” “Is there a history of heart disease in your family?” “Have you had any surgeries?
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