#48

#48, near Széchenyi Bridge, Budapest

Stencils are about as straightforward as can be, but the logic of this wall escaped me when I took the photograph and continues to puzzle me to this day.  A simple white wall stretching alongside the River Danube, it is covered with the numbers "48", "56", and "89".  The sizes vary and the placement of the numbers is jaunty and random, but everywhere you look are these three numbers repeated again and again.  Now maybe I've just been watching too many episodes of The Prisoner, but I couldn't help but feel someone was trying to send me a secret message.  But if there is a code hidden in this image, it remains, as of yet, uncracked.

#47

#47, Verona, Italy

Being suckered into seeing the Casa di Giulietta in Verona felt a little bit like standing outside of the bright green general store in Wall Drug, South Dakota.  A clever marketing campaign combined with idle curiosity and the fact that, whatever your skeptical brain may tell you, your coordinates are simply too close to allow you to not see the attraction everyone says is a must-see, all conspire to lead you to this tourist trap.  You are underwhelmed, to say the least, when you learn that "Juliet's balcony" was in fact attached to an entirely random courtyard window in 1929, though you didn't expect to be overwhelmed or even whelmed in the slightest.  You dislike wearing your moment of jadedness like a badge of honor -- it's just too easy -- so instead of complaining about how banal it is that ignorant pilgrims from all over the world come to the Via Cappello to declare their undying love for someone-or-other by sticking Post-it notes to the stone wall with bits of chewing gum, you take a minute and read these declarations of love.  You think about IGOR + DIANE.  You think for a moment about Shakespeare penning poor Igor's lovestruck monologue.  And then you move on.

Once more, the beauty of decay acts as a backdrop to this number, offset here by the crispness and dignity of the 47.  I found this one underneath a balcony (no, not Juliet's) and loved the smoky, earthy colors and textures of the wall.  The muted shades of rust and stone and the tactile peeling layers remind me of an Anselm Kiefer painting.  It's the unexpected beauty that catches the eye, though you wouldn't have thought to look this way if you weren't trying desperately to not look that way.  You know, where everyone else is looking.

#46

#46, Lynch & Sons, Dublin

The hand-painted pub sign in Ireland is a vanishing art. The more I've watched Dublin succumb over the last ten years to the bumper crop of ghastly cheap shop fronts of convenience stores like Spar and Centra (sobering evidence here), the more old hand-painted signs like this feel like an endangered species. These derelict buildings linger sometimes for years between demolition and preservation, and that's when people like me sweep in with the cameras or wander the grounds with simple curiosity, admiring what remains and wondering what will become of the old buildings we admire.

A few years ago, a friend of mine and fellow lover of dereliction printed up for me an article by architecture critic Hugh Pearman article (from the excellent Gabion site) that has since become a kind of private manifesto. The piece is called "Not building: the lure of desolation". It describes a very personal way of reacting to changes in the built environment. For me, it's right up there with Pessoa and Borges for meditative bedside reading. A brief excerpt:

Like an ending love affair or the maturing of a loved child, dereliction contains both loss and hope. What has happened - known, and perhaps lamented - is offset by what is to happen, which may be worse but which might just possibly be good. The frozen moment between two states of activity is, for me, supremely poignant. Because - anywhere that land has a value - it will not be allowed to remain in this state. It is inevitable, even desirable, that a new use should be found for it, whether it is an abandoned brownstone, a derelict railhead where the birches shoulder through the ballast, or a wharfside where ships no longer dock and weeds sprout among the cranes. Except in extreme cases, these are assets with investment potential or civic value. So be it - but I wish it were not always so.

You can read the rest here.

And yes, after weeks of accumulated numbers (many of which contain seven), here it is at long last: the first official ampersand of the collection. Lovely ligatures, aren't they?

#45

#45, Mala Strana, Prague

The re-numbering of buildings is something you see a lot of in places like Prague and Venice. As the city's streets and layouts continue to shift over time, many of the buildings still retain signs of both the old and the new addresses, often with both in plain sight. Even though the bright red 389 claims to be the proper address over this doorway, here it shares aesthetic duties with its old neighbor. I love the faded, framed 45 and the ghost of a text still lingering on the window over the door in gold letters. Look closely at the middle of it all and you'll see an anchor.

#44

#44, Memphis

The jukebox was playing "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" as the sun slowly set outside Earnestine & Hazel's.  Through the window you could watch a single lonely blue trolley that went up and down the main drag of Memphis, empty of passengers.  Down the street and around the corner was the Lorraine Hotel where Martin Luther King was assassinated, a wreath on the balcony and a baby blue fishtail car parked eternally in the lot.  Inside the bar, the red-headed bartender was frying onions under the sign for Famous Soul Burgers as the dim light filtered into the room.  As she faced the grill, you could see on her shoulder blade  the tattoo of a young man's face and letters spelling out Angel Baby. Empty bottles of Coors Light littered the bar while black and white pictures of Patsy Cline and Ray Charles and B.B. King smiled down from behind glass.  Record albums were nailed to the walls.

Through the back door labeled No Dope Smokin' and up the narrow steps lay a warren of rooms that housed a former brothel.  The piano lid was locked and the bathrooms had tubs with clawed feet.  You saw upside down bar stools, bright blue walls, lace curtains and broken jukeboxes.  The wooden floor creaked.  Downstairs, the bartender looked up from the frying onions and said, "You should be here tomorrow night.  It's wild.  It's what they call Trolley Night.  They open up all these doors and you get people walking up and down South Main Street, actin' crazy, drinkin', eatin' cheese."  Instead you went outside and crossed the railroad tracks, past the Loflin Safe & Lock Co. and a motor parts shop, and watched the sun set over the Mississippi.  And just before crossing the tracks, you looked up and found this 44.

#43

#43, Staré Město, Prague

There are colors in Prague that you can only find in Prague. One of the earliest pleasures of the pre-Pantone days of my youth was looking at a fistful of paint chips and sounding out the names of the colors. These hues had names more exotic than those found in the standard box of Binney and Smith, though few childhood experiences of mine surpassed the joy of cracking open a fresh-smelling box of 64 crayons. Those perfectly pointed tips, that dizzying array of color, that little sharpener in the back of the yellow-orange box. What could anyone possibly need other than these 64 colors? Well, 64 was soon bumped up to 72, 72 went up to 96, and by 1998 Crayola was cooking with gas and 120 crayon colors. Progress. Snazzy new hues were introduced: there was now Shamrock and Mauvelous and Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown alongside the old fuddy-duddy Carnation Pink and Periwinkle. I thought a good deal about color for this 43, striving for le hue juste. It's been a nostalgic-for-no-reason week over here at &7, so I thought I'd stick with the theme and go straight to the source.

Casting a cold eye at the current list of colors on the Crayola Crayon Chronology , it's hard not to feel scandalized by the brash new colors with their cutesy-clever names and to read, as one would the obituary page, the roll of old colors that have gone to eternal rest. When I read the following sentence: Thistle was removed from the 120-count assortment to make room for indigo, a tiny part of me shriveled up and died, falling to the floor like so many carelessly peeled bits of crayon wrapper. Not Thistle! But nevertheless, it was true. Crotchety old colors like Maize and Raw Umber have been booted out for the sunny, youthful likes of Dandelion and Razzle Dazzle Rose. Fair? Hardly. But the color wheel of life rattles onward and so, too, must we.

But how do you describe the colors here? When a building has been weathered this much, bit of Burnt Sienna and a dash of Goldenrod isn't going to cut it. Then again, the times they have a-changed over in that crayon factory I so idolized, so it looks like we're stuck with Wild Watermelon. Except even that's outdated. In 2008, said color was renamed once again to, yes: Awesome. Ick.

#42

#42, Ferihegyi Nemzetközi Repülőtér, Budapest

Yes, that's all a very fancy way of saying "the airport" but let's face it: with little to distinguish this image from the thousands of other airports in the world just like it, we could all do with a handful of umlauts.

I've been reading architecture critic Witold Rybczynski's collection of essays Looking Around. He's got a great bit on airports where he describes perfectly the abhorrence we feel at the prospect of a too-long layover:

Like most people, I dislike airports. I am either walking too far or sitting too long. The food is bad, the chairs are uncomfortable, and the irritating public-address system squawks unintelligibly. The tired potted plants do little to dispel the obsessively mechanical atmosphere. Above all, there is the dispiriting feeling of inactivity reflected in the weary faces of my fellow passengers, for whom ennui has replaced anticipation. They are just as torpid as I am. If Fritz Lang's Metropolis showed the underground city of the enslaved workers as a kind of hell, then the airport waiting room could serve as a convincing vision of purgatory.

But then this was written about ten years ago, before the advent of iPods and text messaging and any other manner of Crackberrying, which now, of course, have replaced any outward appearance of ennui in our fellow passengers. Everyone is continually otherwise engaged. You may see a lot of indifferent faces and bad moods, but you have to go a long way to find torpid. I do on occasion plug into my tunes, but I do still try to dabble in the tried and true airport layover pastimes: listless magazine flipping, wandering between newsstands comparing snack mixes, spritzing perfumes and sampling whiskeys in the duty free, and best of all, people watching. You know, like looking for men in gabardine suits with cameras in their bow ties? Ah, the good old days of low-fi, DIY purgatory.

#41

#41, Asheville, North Carolina

Planes, trains, and buses aren't known for their mouth-watering culinary offerings. If for any reason you need more evidence to brown bag it on your next trip, read this brilliantly bewildered missive to Virgin Airways, a complaint letter so detailed and full of suspense it is raised to the level of literature. Most of us, though, know from first-hand experience not to expect to be anything but jostled from a journey by plane, rail or bus. Finding food and fuel was foremost on my mind on that June day when I first stepped into the streets of Asheville. I was fresh from a four-hour drive in a cargo van. I had eaten nothing for days but trail mix and cheese grits. So when I noticed that a bright red British double decker bus had somehow made its way, intact, across the Atlantic and claimed to be serving food right there in Asheville, North Carolina, I had to suspend my disbelief and give it a closer look.

The Double Decker Coffee Company is exactly what it sounds like: a coffee shop housed inside a double decker bus. The bus, a Route 41 gone horribly astray in its journey from Trafalgar Square to Tottenham Hale Station, is now permanently parked at 41 Biltmore Avenue. You can climb on board any time the door's open and stay as long as you like. It won't take you anywhere near Trafalgar Square, but it will serve you a good strong cup of coffee and a slice of pumpkin bread. Downstairs, the interior has had a few alterations, but you may need to mind your head as you prop yourself up on a stool. It's fun to think of a permanently parked bus as architecture, even though it looks like it might yet break through the wrought iron fence and go galumphing off into that good night. Can buildings be buildings if they're also on wheels? This bus blurs the line, and unlike the red booths outside Telephone Bar & Grill in Manhattan, you can actually enjoy your bit of Brit kitsch from the inside. Brill.

#40

#40, Stary zidovsky hrbitov, Prague

Braille in public space and architecture is usually limited to the pragmatic: it's there on signs and labels to give instructions to the blind or visually impaired. Braille is something most of us encounter every day of our lives but rarely see: inside elevators, along corridors in hotels, on vending machines and inside public bathrooms. If we do ever engage in any discourse about it, it generally doesn't extend beyond the "Hey, did you ever wonder why drive-through ATMs have Braille?" variety. (The Straight Dope, as always, has the answer here.) In a weird reversal, we are the blind ones when it comes to understanding Braille. It clearly has its uses, but it also has possibilities. Why should Braille be limited to purely practical purposes? Could it also be art?

In late August of 2007, an artist named Scott Wayne Indiana framed this question into a mission. He began sticking strips of specially printed paper dubbed "Braille Graffiti" throughout the streets of Portland: on electrical boxes, along railings in music stores, above windowsills. The messages in Braille were not room numbers or instructions but philosophical tidbits. One read: "You don't have to be blind to see that the writing is on the wall". The artist explained his project was "an attempt to create a unique moment for a blind person who might happen across one of these bits of graffiti." You can watch a brief clip of the project here.

In France, a street artist named the Blind has taken it to the next level, making his own mark with Braille graffiti. His starkly beautiful creations, first sprayed onto walls with the aid of a stencil then finished off with rounded white 3-D half spheres roughly the size of half a golf ball, have popped up in highly public places, a la Banksy, on city walls, pedestals of monuments and outside the Palais de Justice. They evoke an immediate reaction as works of art. The white Braille, clean and perfectly aligned, has a cool, modernist look against the weathered classical architecture of Paris. But the longer you look at them -- and this may be the point -- the more you begin to wonder what they mean.

With the aid of a good Braille directory (provided on the Blind's home page), I did eventually puzzle out a few of his pieces, though the process of translating Braille to French, then French to English, was so time-consuming and frustrating that I walked away from the exercise with a headache and only a few fragments of words. But more than that, I came to a much deeper appreciation of the resourcefulness of anyone who has ever, out of necessity or out of a desire to help others, had to learn how to read not with one's eyes but one's hands. Ouvrez les yeux, reads one line of the Blind's graffiti beneath a statue in Paris. We might yet benefit to try to see things from his point of view.

So much for art. Next, I'd love to see how Braille can be worked into architecture.

#39

I'm a big fan of the uncanny resemblance.

#39, Ixelles, Brussels

#39, Worth Street, NYC