Stanford Sights
Friday, April 20th, 2001
Stanford Campus
Stanford, CA
  
All Photos © 2001 Randy Vogel
 
 

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 Maya Lin's Timetable (2000)
 Cement Wall, Etude #1
 Cement Wall, Etude #1
 Cement Wall, Etude #3
 Cement Wall, Etude #4
 Sea of Green
 Horsetail Sprouts
 Another View of the Horsetail Patch
 Horsetail Mandala
 the Hole!!!
 

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Back on campus after lunch, I was out doing errands and decided to stop and shoot a few pictures.

First up is a view of the relatively new sculpture installation by Maya Lin, Timetable (2000). Timetable was installed in front of the new David Packard Electrical Engineering Building as part of the 75th Anniversary Celebration for the School of Engineering in the fall of 2000. Maya is best known for having designed the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC. As Maya was a lecturer at Stanford, you can read more about here at this site http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/.

Apparently, this sculpture is part of a series of 'water tables' she has been doing, this one composed of a 16-ton chunk of black granite containing a multi-time-zoned clock, from which one can read Pacific Standard Time, Pacific Daylight Time and Greenwich Mean Time.

The Stanford Magazine did a nice write-up
about the piece, too, though somewhat surprisingly, they dodged the issue of the artist's own description of the work. Here's a link to the write-up:

      http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2001/janfeb/farmreport/news_sports.html#art

Walking back towards Fairchild along Serra Mall from the Timetable sculpture, I stopped to shoot several images of the cement wall of the Paul Allen Center for Integrated Systems. For some odd reason, the narrow strip between the building and the sidewalk has been planted as a sort of swamp, populated mainly by thousands and thousands of horsetail ferns.

The constant flow of water necessary to support these aquatic plants has stimulated the growth of green algae or lichen on the concrete wall of the Allen building, their shadow greens climbing slowly from ground level up towards the top of the wall. At present, most of the green lies within three feet of the ground, but I imagine that in a century or two the wall will be entirely green, provided that the entire structure is still standing.

Last but not least, another installment in the Hole series. Lookin' good, eh?