Last Look

Concrete poetry

A poetic installation at Paul Rudolph Hall.

Lisa Albaugh

Lisa Albaugh

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“I have a crazy, crazy love of things,” begins “Ode to Things,” a poem by Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (1904–1973). “I like pliers, and scissors. I love cups, rings, and bowls.” For recent architecture grads Lisa Albaugh ’16MArch, Charles Kane ’16MArch, and Andrew Sternad ’16MArch, Neruda’s words were just the things they needed for a project in a School of Art course called Typography at Large. In April, they made and installed laser-cut plexiglass letters to spell out the first verse on the Chapel Street face of Paul Rudolph Hall (once known as the Art and Architecture Building). “The poem celebrates things built by hand, used here in reference to the building’s rough, bush-hammered concrete,” the artists explain in their statement. They add (and we can attest that it’s true): “The ethereal text oscillates into and out of focus as the sun and the passerby change position in relation to the installation.” Unlike concrete and pliers, however, the artwork only lasted for a day.

1 comment

  • Ken Krabbenhoft
    Ken Krabbenhoft, 2:33pm July 18 2016 | Ico flag Flag as inappropriate

    Readers may be interested to know that the line from Neruda's "Ode to Things" used in the Typography at Large project at the School of A&A (July/August issue) is from "Odes to Common Things" (Bullfinch Press, 1994), translated by a Yale grad (Trumbull 1968), namely me. What goes around comes around.

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