Seeing the Gugg

It isn't the Guggenheim when the main galleries with their famous windy ramps up inside the circular structure are CLOSED. I paid the reduced entrance to get in anyway -- if you ask me, it wasn't reduced enough -- and fought through the crowds to see some Picassos, Pollock, Renoir, Van Gogh, Kandinskys, Chagalls, etc. There were also some quite large Frank Lloyd Wright rooms with video projections, models, and architectural plans, many of them never built but fascinating structures very different from his famous Prairie houses. Too bad.

As always, I say that audio tours are the scourge of museums, because it causes infinite clumping, especially in a space as small as the Guggenheim's side galleries. If anyone's thinking of going right now, I'd wait till they finish the main installation and reopen the whole thing.

Lots of steel rods

I'm in NYC and enjoying the Olympics on TV. Even if you're quite immune to Olympics fever, the stadium and "water cube" (aquatics center) are more than worth checking out from an architectural point of view. The NY Times had pretty good articles on them here and here. Definitely some of the most interesting Olympic (or other) architecture I've seen in a while. The stadium might be the bigger achievement, but the water cube has my heart. But that might just be because I love swimming.