The Main House at Petit Detroit

Last weekend we had friends in town and, as happens too often when people visit us in Baltimore, we went to D.C.. The Cherry Blossom Festival was in full swing. We waited in line a lot. There were crowds and strollers and a pillow fight:

We ducked quite unassuming into the Renwick Gallery to use the bathroom. About ten minutes later, I realized I was in my dream house.

The Main House at Petit Detroit will be modeled after the Renwick Gallery of Washington D.C.. The Renwick is currently home to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s collection of craft and decorative arts. The Second Empire-style building was commissioned by William Corcoran to house his collection as the city’s first art museum. The largest room in the building is the Grand Salon which boasts 4,300 square feet of floor space and 40 foot ceilings. That’s about four and a half times the size of our current apartment.

We’ll call our version the Big Room and its purpose will vary. The first image that popped into my head was this massive space with a tire swing. Susie wanted to add a lap steel:

The exterior needs to be a little friendlier (it looks like the Adam’s Family mansion). We’ll have a more open first floor, a two story wraparound porch, maybe a twisty slide.

The place is warm, open, pretty and really, really symmetrical. I want to cook food in a microwave in this house. I want to watch family feud in this house. I could grow really old in this house- it has an elevator.

MOLD-A-RAMA

MOLD-A-RAMA are injection- molded wax/plastic souvenirs made while you wait. The remaining machines seem to reside at museums, zoos and other tourist traps in Midwest and Florida (the Knoxville, San Antonio and LA Zoos also have machines). I have 16 MOLD-A-RAMA castings. None of them are from Florida. I think I would be in to them even if I didn’t have childhood memories of the bubble- top machines that poop out dangerously hot souvenirs.

Major Collector

3-D vs. 5-d

I was at The Walters Art Museum when the gap between then and now closed a little bit.

This is a 16th C engraving by Giovanni Bernardi:

*

*This is not a rock crystal engraving that The Walters has, but rather one I could use from Wikipedia.

This is a personal memory that will last a lifetime from the fine people at 5d-FOTO:

I’m sure you’ve seen this sort of thing being made at a mall kiosk somewhere or maybe a less- personalized yet highly gift- worthy version featuring a stock car or an eagle or a Rollerblade or something.

The Bernardi tells the story of The Punishment of Tityus wherein a giant tries to rape a goddess and ends up being sent to Hades and having his liver eaten by birds of prey for eternity. The keepsake from 5D-FOTO tells a story that we might never know (though the father- guy of the family looks like he is being similarly punished). Almost 500 years passed between the making of these two things, but both were made under the premise that the making of stuff helps us figure out the world because stories and objects and people are related.