Architectural Narratives

And so I made it (at last) to the Big Apple, and to the Waldorf Astoria, where this photograph was taken this past Friday night.

I've written previously about this grand hotel and the man, my great uncle Lloyd Morgan, who designed it. This time, as I walked through the lobbies and stood in a ballroom and photographed clocks, mosaics, fireplace mantels, I was thinking about the narrative that good architecture always is, the stories that my great uncle left behind. The stories that are possible because of spaces he created—secret stairwells, rounded balconies, processional-sized hallways. Clothes dress us. Architecture moves us through itself. A man long gone is still and always provoking the possible and untested.