The Relief Map Museum (Musée des Plans-Reliefs) in Paris is one of my favorite sights anywhere. It has about 30 big, meticulously detailed scale models of towns, ports and forts and their surrounding landscapes. The models were built for military planning purposes from the 1670s to the 1870s.
In another room they show how they made the models, for example, grass and foliage were made of silk fibers trimmed into tiny bits using this device.
These are photos of protests in St. Louis for racial equality (1930) and voting rights for women (1920) from a spectacular exhibition of panoramas at the Missouri History Museum.
Incredibly, the roughly 5-by-30 foot photos are enlargments of the originals which are only about 8 by 50 inches and were also on display – yet they’re sharp enough that you can see individual hairs and the texture of the clothing fabrics. I believe they don’t make cameras any more that can obtain such high resolution except for the most sophisticated professional equipment used in science, the military or aerial photos on Google Maps.
We were in New Haven and rural New England just before Covid hit. Everything was gorgeous. The food was great and there was lots of agrodiversity and local produce and small producers even in the smallest towns, things that you essentially can’t get, by the way, here in Berlin where I live. Hard as it may be to believe, they somehow have only barely started getting the memo on eating local. The pictures may look a little gloomy because this was “mud season”, the time in March after the beautiful snow has melted and before spring has started. The trees are bare, mud is everywhere, and many sights, shops and restaurants are closed or have reduced hours. They even advise tourists to avoid March but we had a wonderful time.
Pictures of the excellent Yiddish Book Center in Amherst are here.
New Haven
Whitlock’s Book Barn, my favorite book store in the world
This is the Yiddish Book Center which lies four hours north of New York City in Amherst, Massachusetts, adjacent to Hampshire College. It’s really great and you should visit. It’s an archives, museum, and cultural center housed in a gorgeous new building recalling a rural eastern European village. A big draw for me was Shtetl in the Sun: South Beach, Miami 1977-1980, an exhibition of photographs of Jewish retirees.
Some of the archiving is done right out in the open and you can walk right up to the desks!
This was an exhibit on globe-shaped and globe-inspired buildings since 1700, some actually built and some just proposed, at a museum called Cité de l’Architecture (click to enlarge)
Pavilion at World’s Fair in Paris, 1900
This was built in Dresden in 1930 and destroyed in WWII
The Musée des Arts et Métiers (“Arts and Trades”) is an historical museum of engineering, communications, construction, transportation, materials and scientific instruments. Nowadays we’d call it technology but the word wasn’t in use when the museum was founded in 1794. The term arts et métiers dates back to the middle ages and meant any kind of economic activity that isn’t agriculture or trade.
Main hall with multilevel display of cars
Car cut in half
The very first motor vehicle in history by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot from 1769
Mechanical music machine; she actually plays the dulcimer
Mechanical music machine
Telegraph
Concentric spheres carved from a single piece of ivory
I wonder if anyone still knows how to make glassware like this
Camera watch
Masks and models from ‘Phantasmagorie’ lantern-projection shows c. 1850
