Salem Train Station

I got a chance to return to the Salem, Oregon, Train Station. I had seen it in the dark from a bus earlier, and the light fixtures drew me back.

In the dark the building seemed more mysterious and baroque. In the gray of an overcast Oregon day, the building seemed almost plain. Or was that plane?

What struck me most about the building was how squares and rectangles made use of threes and thirds. Eyeballing some of the pictures, the design uses golden rectangles, too.

My main photographic goal was to obtain some studies of the lamps. The entrance is flanked by two lights with modern looking glass globes on them. It would be interesting to me to know if these were originally stain glass globes. I think the ones here are a clever, low-cost reference to the lamps inside.

I'd wondered the first time I saw them if the huge fixtures inside were made of curved glass or if the were little flat rectangles soldered together in an approximate globe. They're flat.

This is a Beaux-Arts style building, about nine decades old. Mark told me it was Palladian style. I'm not sure what the difference is other than Palladian seems to be a half-century older.

I think part of what I like about this building is that it has a strong geometry. Maybe I'll allow myself the luxury of making a model of it, as it appears to be made completely out of cubes, cylinders, and spheres. And, uh, no... I haven't finished (yet) that geometric tile pattern I've been working on.