Andre, have you visited Uillinn, the West Cork Arts Centre at Skibbereen. It's a striking building and features a COR-TEN exterior. Its fair to say that it divides opinion locally. I actually quite like it but I think it's a great shame that the design had to be compromised by cost considerations.
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/2.642/how-compromise-hit-plans-for-skibbereen-s-arts-centre-1.2129557
Hey man, thanks for the link. This is the first I even hear of it. I always make it a principle to contribute to the arts wherever I live, as a way of keeping myself marginally plugged in (by profession I'm a novelist) but in Ireland what the first paper I called (the Irish Examiner, then the Cork Examiner) wanted just then was a critic of serious music, which I just happened to know about, and soon they put an editor who also knew more than just a bit on me, complete with a special page, and he wasn't going to let anyone share me, so until I felt I had done enough when I turned 60, I wrote mainly about classical music. I don't have time to read the papers (not even the ones I write for) or listen to the news, so the doings in Skib quite escaped me. Fascinating. I feel sorry for the architects, first out of 217 entries, having their big chance at a big show project scuppered by bureaucrats. But that's still a good-looking building, though perhaps a little out of scale for little old Skibbereen. It must be twenty years since I was down in Skib last, to see a film producer who was in semi-retirement there. An eye-stopper building like that refocuses a town's ambience and impact. In Sydney, a most inconvenient city, to avoid the permanent traffic jam at King's Cross, I used to come to work from Vaucluse up the bay in a speedboat, which I moored under the Opera House and then walked up Pitt St to my office, and there wasn't a day that the sight of the building didn't lift my spirits. (An American described the Sydney Opera House architecture as "a quarterback being sacked by a gang of nuns"!)
Days are too short now but perhaps next summer I'll make one of "Andre's Flash World Bicycle Tours to the Ends of His Little Patch of West Cork", three days to get there on the zero-stress byways, three to get back again. (The drop bar brigade would make 104km round trip in a day...) Something to go see is always better than, "Oh, I'm just touring aimlessly."
Members who're interested should check the link B cereus sent. It demonstrates that there is no streaking rust from COR-TEN, or it would show on the white surfaces all around the COR-TEN.
On a bike, I fancy the COR-TEN, until it becomes common enough for the knowledge to filter down to the tea leaves (! thanks for the slang), could by appearance alone be a good beginning to decent bike security.
