Parliament Building Interior

After our visit to the Butchart Gardens, we returned to Victoria and went on a walking tour.  Mark and I wound up returning to the Parliament Building.  As we neared it, a man engaged us with some questions; he had a microphone covered with a windsock and a video camera.  Apparently we looked Canadian (and "diverse," which Mark thought was code for "gay")!  He wanted to ask us about Canadian politics, but realized he couldn't as we were US tourists.  We all joked that we could answer questions anyway, and Mark and I improvised some absurd statements about Justin Trudeau, taxes, the environment, and Parliament actually getting things done on their agenda.

Getting inside the Parliament Building was like going through airport security.  After we went through a metal detector and had bags X-rayed, we were free to traipse through the first and second floor halls.  Under the rotunda, a very loud docent was giving a tour, which we avoided.  The stained glass looked more stunning from the inside of the building than the outside.  

In addition to various windows celebrating various British monarchs, there were many windows which were statements about virtues, or which were dedicated to great thinkers and philosophers.  I wasn't able to get a very good photograph, but the most amusing window to us was Cicero (the name of our black cat); I didn't recognize any catnip or mice in the design.

I'd say we spent about forty-five minutes of mostly me photographing building details and Mark actually reading the placards describing what the rooms were used for (Parliament wasn't in session, so we didn't see any legislators).  I forget who commented first that we'd traveled a great distance (over 350 miles) to visit a capitol, and neither of us had taken the trouble to visit Oregon's capitol in Salem, only 65 miles away.

One thing that I haven't written about our trip to Victoria were the great numbers of seagulls flying through the air, but mostly loafing about building eaves, frosting the roof lines (and our balcony) with seagull poop, and filling the air with their mournful screeching.  The award for the most dramatic presentation goes to the seagull who must have been roosting on our hotel's chimney at night and whose unworldly utterances floated out from the fireplace hearth (unlit) which we were drinking around.

Building Details

More photos of the Parliament Building.  I took a lot of photos over several days.

I think this might be a lion.

A floral face.

A little owl.

A statue holding a book titled "Law" and standing on a plinth labeled "Law."  I'm going to guess this is a personification of Law.

Crown atop a book gracing the top of a pillar of the library wing of the Parliament Building.

Foliate Head carved into the keystone of an arch.

 

Two allegorical figures, maybe Architecture and Surveying, on either side of a dome.

Mark sitting regally in a chair installed outside.

Stone stag and bighorn ram supporting the crest of the Province of British Columbia, outlined in large, unlit, white Christmas lights.  I would have to add that the lights looked like a Disney gingerbread wonderland by night, but distracted from the lines of the building by day.  Perhaps some day they will be replaced by more discrete LED strings or illuminated by lasers somehow.

This set of photos does not include the ones I took of the stained glass or the building's interior.

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.