Parliament Building

I fell in love with the Victoria BC Parliament Building.  

Eugene specifically and Oregon generally does not have cool buildings from the late 1800's in it; many of our cool old buildings were knocked over in the sixties, seventies, and eighties and replaced with brutalist concrete, glass boxes, or steel baskets—all of our other buildings are log cabins or cedar ticky-tacky.  

The Parliament Building looks like it came from Rigel VII, where the original Star Trek pilot was shot.  It has writhing grotesques on its pillar capitals.  Various Old Dead White Guys and Figures of Extreme Allegory stand in its niches or along its ramparts.   

Many Oregon buildings look like, to quote Frederic Edwin Church, they were built by people "whose ideal of architecture is wrapped up in felicitous recollections of a successful brick schoolhouse or meeting house or jail."  

And the Parliament Building has a library built into it in the back (the south side)!

If the Parliament Building were in Eugene, chances are good that it would have a dojo, a bellydance studio, a former womyn's bookstore, a bubble-tea place, or (most likely) a cannabis dispensary built into its back.

I circled around the building, gasping every now and then as new features came into view.  The coat of arms for British Columbia hung over the main, gated entrance: a wapati (elk) stag and a bighorn sheep supported a shield with the Union Jack and a western sun of the province.   The grotesques atop pillars enchanted me with the way the masons had carved the figures so that they wrapped around corners, but were still aesthetically pleasing seen straight on.  

Along the west side of the building there is a simple rose garden, with a sundial in the center of a circular pathway.   I really did loose track of time because there were so many details that I wanted to photograph.  

I am not sure why taking photographs of interesting buildings brings me so much pleasure.  Part of it is recording an interesting array of geometric shapes and artistic designs.  It feels similar to how I feel photographing raptors or art in the Metropolitan Museum; part of which is the pleasure of curation—and in the case of the raptors is the desire to create hieroglyphs and other designs from patterns in nature.  Perhaps love of photographic buildings comes from hanging out with architects in the early 1990's, or maybe I'm stocking my mental store of places to use in story.  

I circled around to the north side of the building, where I had started.  I overheard a tour guide say that it was 11 o'clock, which meant that I might have (okay definitely) missed the Water Taxi Ballet.