On Skating and on being wrong

First things first, since Wednesday I have skated every single day except Friday when it rained. My knees are in a million different kinds of pain, but its all good pain, mind you I think I really better shower soon. If I haven't by the time Lesley gets home she's probably gonna divorce me as soon as she smells me. (Today I skated from our place a block West of Bathurst to just East of Hurontario then turned around and skated into the wind all the way home. Total distance, almost 47km, top speed about 41km/h.)

Anyway a few days ago Lesley and I were furniture shopping and we came to a store that sold office supplies. Lesley asked if they had any Barcelona chairs, the proprietor, eager to show his stuff I suppose, did not have any but did start to quiz us on the history of the Barcelona Chair. So here are some useless facts should you ever find yourself being quizzed by bored office supply store proprietors. The Barcelona chair was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and was first put on display in the 1936 Worlds fair in Barcelona Spain. (Only on further research I realize the proprietor is full of crap, there was no World's Fair in Barcelona in 1936, which makes sense since as I said to Lesley as soon as the quiz was over, it is hard to imagine how there could be a World's Fair in the midst's of a civil war!) In fact the World's Fair was the 1929 fair in Barcelona Spain.

The same store owner proceeded to grill me on the easy stuff, seeing as I work downtown. He asked where on King street I could find a Barcelona chair on display? Well that's obvious right at Bay and King in the TD Centre, designed by none-other than van der Rohe. Now I still have some investigating to do, but here the store owner was even more confident when he told me van der Rohe did not actually design the TD Centre, in fact it was an associate of van der Rohe, I believe Philip Johnson, who was the architect of record for the buildings. But everything I can find on the subject says that van der Rohe was in charge of the project and had the master vision.

The owner also said Johnson designed the Seagram Building too, but according to Building New York, The Rise and Rise of the Greatest City on Earth, van der Rohe, chose Johnson as a partner but van der Rohe was the brains behind that building too!

I guess the moral of the story is, unless you are really really sure, don't show off. You end up looking like a complete idiot.

Lesley had asked me to write about war, and how it sadly seems to be the greatest motivator of the human condition. But it seems instead I had to spend the better part of an hour confirming everything that store owner told me was a shades of something between close and completely wrong. Oh well, lovers of violence, no war today, maybe tomorrow.