by Ian Cochrane | Nov 10, 2013 | Americas
There’s something about these multi-coloured cocoons, the plaque on the wall `Judith Scott: 1943-2005’. I adjust my glasses and lean closer, scratching my head and struggling with the notion of an artist not only deaf and mute, but also stricken with the effects of...
by Ian Cochrane | Aug 5, 2013 | Americas
The sound of our footsteps is muffled by patchwork drifts of snow on a gravel track winding past the bottom of carpark stairs. Surrounding hills are covered in local rhododendron; the air icy, the trees tall, rough barked and bare. Our guide strides ahead – rugged-up...
by Ian Cochrane | May 25, 2013 | Americas, Europe, Oceania, Utopia
A face stares out from my PC screen: a suited-up man about 30yrs old, the boyish face round, the hairline receding. I see a clean face, but for the sparing outline of a beard. I see a thin mouth, the eyes narrowed and slightly turned, the face of a man who killed...
by Ian Cochrane | May 11, 2013 | Americas
Just off Broadway I’m in a side street by City Hall, the ubiquitous New York crowds somehow missing, the hum of traffic vague and distant. A lonesome monument sits silent and tucked in the shadow of City Planning offices and a 30-storey Federal skyscraper; that...
by Ian Cochrane | Feb 25, 2013 | Americas
To the west, lay a somehow insignificant cityscape: the stacked steel and glass profile of a floating Manhattan. We’re among 7700 tonnes of precision-cut gleaming white stone taken from 12,100 tonnes of quarried granite: an architect’s melding of modern imagination...
by Ian Cochrane | Jan 21, 2013 | Americas
It’s Citizen Kane that brings me here, just south of Columbus Circle; to a castle of a place built in 1928 for William Randolph Hearst’s publishing empire. Hearst was a powerful man – with a thing about castles it seems – his newspapers read by 1 in 4 Americans and at...