building history and boats

Yesterday was a rainy day so we did what every self respecting family does on a rainy day on vacation HIT the museum. The best in this area is the Penobscot Marine Museum. A small collection of 18th and 19th century buildings that reflect the history of the bay's seafaring past. The houses are house museums depicting the life of a few sea captains families and the active congregational church has been a hing pin for the community since the early 18th century. And there are boats, boats and more boats.....models, pictures, real and replicas.. I of course enjoyed the interiors with a killer pumpkin colored painted floor and two buildings that were tin throughout the interior-a material that is practical for low maintenance and thermal conductivity......

Building messages

Those of you that know Little Building Cafe know how I love a painted building. This building in Belfast, Maine was my inspiration. This was the towns fuel company but now (with a new tiny paint job ) is the information center for the town......


Please note post will be hit and miss-internet is a sometimes thing up here and so are my thoughts...

Building Place

I am revisiting this book while I am up here. The Lure of the Local by Lucy Lippard. Its about place and its impact on work that is done in the art world. I have always been taken with it because of its design or organization; very dense "art talk " text through the middle of the book and up at the very top in another type there is a running narrative about her summers in Maine. Isn't that the way life is - that tiny narrative at the top of the page.....

Building Salvage

We are traveling the countryside to find -well bargains....but we are going back and forth about whether to buy the second hand item and have the craftsman work endless hours getting the door or sink or faucet to work in the project.....But in the meantime its fun to see parts of the 19th and early 20th century scattered before us.

Book (hunting) Building

You know how all travel is a means to an end for the search for the perfect Book store. I might have found it (sorry Square Books in Oxford) Left Banks Books in Searsport, Maine is a small little room where the books seem to be curated. I picked up a copy of Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, and Seven Ages of Paris by historian Alistair Horne. And I did take a look at Ruin: Photographs of a Vanishing America by Brian Vanden Brink. A book where it seemed that half of the buildings were in Mississippi and the other half are in Maine.

Un Building

In general I am always on the look out for "un-kitchens" no "built in's", no locked quality....here is an nice example in a Dwell magazine project by Buenos Aires architect Alejandro Sticotti.
This is a nice room to aspire to while looking at Pearl Street

Simple Building

This is the little farm where we spend every summer. The barn was built by my brother in law and Caleb + many other hands. When we got married here 16 years ago my brother in law Jared meet Annaly Bennett an architecture school chum and they got married. The little house was built by Jared as present for his bride. The barn has a working shop and we stay up in the top floor, we cook in the little house and eat dinner in the front of the barn. There is lake down the road where we swim(and maybe this year take the canoe) and the guys get the sauna going some time in August. It's a beautiful place on earth.