Monday, March 24, 2008

A little sightseeing

Over Spring Break, one of the kids had a scavenger hunt assignment where we had to locate several examples of Greek influence on architecture. I misunderstood and thought they all had to be from buildings here in Wichita. It turns out that he could have found example from the Internet, but pictures of the Wichita building actually counted as more points than just examples from the Internet. We actually had a lot of fun looking at the buildings and discovered that Wichita has some REALLY interesting details on a lot of their buildings. Here are just a few examples. Above is the frieze on the clock tower in the Delano traffic round about. As you can see, it appears that vandals decided to leave their mark on it, but thankfully had enough "respect" for the art itself to leave it alone.
This is the mosaic tile entrance to Twist Yarn store. Very pretty.
This is an example of a cornice and pediment from the Old station beside the Cox communication building.
More pretty details from a downtown building.
I love the detailing on these massive columns from the Cox communication building. This building used to be a railway station if I remember right.

I have several more pictures of the beautiful details on some of the Wichita buildings. I enjoyed looking at the art so much that I am going to highlight some more of it in the upcoming months. While we were looking for the different assigned details, we kept finding other buildings that we thought were soooooo pretty. Funny, I had seen some of the building and thought "Pretty", but hadn't really looked at the detailing until this assignment. Isn't it amazing how we can be in the middle of beauty and not notice?

1 comment:

Robin said...

Thanks for sharing the pictures. It is great to see stuff from "home" even though I haven't lived there in almost 7 years.