The NAI is July 3 to a exhibition on the work of architect AF Aalbers. Aalbers, born in Rotterdam, worked from 1924 to 1930 and from 1946 to 1961 in the Netherlands, in the intervening period (1930-1942) he worked in the Dutch East Indies. It was his Indian work Dorothee Segaar, curator and co-author of the same name, in 1977 inspired an investigation into the work of Aalbers. The lack of an archive was, however, that Segaar as a true Miss Marple had to work. Another closet corrects the cry.
DENIS bank (De Nederlandsche first Indian Sparkasse), Braga, Bandung Jl (1935).
Armed with a keen eye to “Aalbers one”, a camera, an address book with names of former employees and residents and by technical illustrators, she asked over the years a work list together of 65 works: 22 Dutch, one Belgian Congolese (design competition) and 42 Indian. Most of the designs for the Dutch East Indies (27) was achieved in Bandung. This town, as envisaged in 1916 as the new home of central government in the Dutch East Indies, was the seat of the agency founded in 1931 been “Aalbers and De Waal, architects’. Read the rest of this entry »
The Buffalo & Attica Railroad, Buffalo’s first eastbound rail line, was built in 1843. Amazingly, the original right-of-way of the Buffalo & Attica, laid out over 166 years ago, is still in use for rail transportation today.
Opening to passenger and freight traffic on January 8, 1843, the Buffalo & Attica Road completed the last link in a chain that connected Buffalo to New York City for the first time by rail. Bypassing the Erie Canal only 18 years after the canal’s completion, the rail lines promised a trip to New York in 25 hours, far quicker than the 6 days it would take on canal boats pulled by mules named Sal. The Buffalo & Attica Road, the embryo of a system of iron highways that would Read the rest of this entry »
O, boy, what an amazing door! The Larkin O Building, constructed in 1907 as one of multiple additions to the sprawling Larkin factory complex, contains an odd second-story door that appears more like one that would have opened out onto a ground-level sidewalk.
It’s not only an appearance. The door did once face onto a street – the Van Rensselaer Street viaduct, in fact. Until a couple decades ago, this section of Van Rensselaer Street from Roseville to Seneca streets was an elevated viaduct allowing the passage of trains underneath, along the tracks of the Erie Railroad that have since been removed. Read the rest of this entry »
The Larkin District represents the “skyline” of the Hydraulics. The image of Larkin factory and warehouse buildings towering over the neighborhood is stirring, particularly from rare roof perspectives. The following images, taken recently while peeking through the roof portals (sorry, no public access!) of Larkin Building N at 701 Seneca, communicate a post-industrial agglomeration of prodigious scale, signifying the old and new Buffalo simultaneously.
The reemergence of the Larkin District as an important center of activity is an Read the rest of this entry »
You saw it here first! Rare interior photographs of the Kamman Building at 755-757 Seneca Street, set to be overhauled by a top-to-bottom renovation this year, reveal pre-restoration perspectives of the historic commercial structure only months before construction is set to begin.
The Kamman Building, designed by architect F. W. Caulkins around 1880, has been vacant for more than ten years, but like many structures of its vintage, has held up well against a tide of citywide disinvestment over the past half-century and stands well to benefit from adaptive reuse. Read the rest of this entry »
