Clearwater, KS

Welcome to Clearwater, KS. It is in this small town of 2,500 people I will be working on a redevelopment plan for their city park. Well...me and the two others in my group. This will be the closest to a real project than I have had before. The town even covered the travel expenses of the group for driving the 3 hours down there. Well they just recently built an aquatic center here so there is a large pool with several curvy slides that attract a lot of people during the summer months. The first thing that struck me when we drove into this town is that all of their street signs are actualy small windmills with the street names on them. (picture on Left) I think that this is the most unique thing I have ever seen a small town do. The picture on the right is one of the smaller playground sets that is in the park. Our job for this project will be to make the place look better and less of an eye sore. The town has shown with the recent construction of the water park and the windmill street signs that they want to improve their image. Hopefully my group will be able to come up with some nice ideas that they will incorborate into their final plan.

Alexandria

Welcome to the nice town of alexandria. Just across the river from DC, Alexandria is one of the 5 densest cities in america. You can't tell just by looking at it though since there are no highrise buildings and the city has that "Old Town" look to it with lots of brick and wood siding on the buildings instead of steel and concrete. This building on the left is the Masons Temple. It is not a religious building but a building for the Masons Guild, an old and very famous guild that many of our nations origional leaders like Washingtions and Jeferson and Franklin were apart of. Alexandria was the main city of the area back in the 1700's when our country was first staring off. The Picture to the right is a shot of the temple in the daytime at approximatly the same spot. The building is at the higest point in Alexandria so it goes to show how powerful the guild was back then. The great part about this city is that the atmosphere and unity of the community seems great. You walk down this street and there are shops and restaurants and everything for you to enjoy on a nice day. You may think that every city has a little part like this . But not every city is like this 5 blocks in both directions. This is what I mean by being a dense city. Take this street, King Street, and copy it over 3 or 4 times on each side with all the little streets in between and that s Alexandria for you. Oh, and the names for those other Streets: Queen, Duke, Prince... Well have a fun day here at Open House and try not to spend to much of your time looking at the pictures. Enjoy!

Stroll on the mall

For some reason I really enjoy the composition of this picture. This was taken as we were walking from the metro station to the monument to get tickets in the very early morning. I was taking pictures while I was walking like I always seem to do and came upon an interesting picture with our shadows in the picture. When I am experiencing a new space like being in DC, I tend to try to capture the fealing of space from the context of what a visitor would be seing. This is why I end up with so many pictures on my trips since I don't just take one picture of an object like the washingtion monmument and move on to the next object. What I do is take LOTS of pictures that when viewed together, give a close sense of what it really felt like to be there even though you are just looking at pictures. This is why I ended up with 2650 pictures from 5 days. Many of them will never be seen by anyone but me but at least I have an almost complete recording of everything I saw while I was there and can easily look back 2 years from now and run through the entire trip in my head.