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!
Vienna is picture-postcard gorgeous. I still need to post my photos of pre-World War II storefronts that are still intact including their shop signs, which is one of the extraordinary things about the city. Even in Paris hardly of these have survived. Vienna even has some modern ones from the 1950s-60s , which are even rarer because they’ve never been considered historical or important. I did see lots of Klimt and Schiele art in the museums but did not take pictures because those are easy to find on line.
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
These are just some miscellaneous little houses in St. Louis that I wanted a friend to see. I didn’t have many photos of my own so some are from Google Street View.
The Darmstadt Artists Colony is one of the world’s most important assemblages of art nouveau buildings, or as it is called in Germany, Jugendstil (“youth style” which got its name from an art magazine founded in 1896), consisting of exhibition halls, artist’s houses (mansions, really), a tower and various park features built from 1901 to 1914 on a hill in the western German city of Darmstadt. The architects were some of the era’s greatest such as Peter Behrens and Joseph Maria Olbrich of the Vienna Secession movement. They and the artists also designed objects such as furniture, ceramics, glassware, and printed matter and one of their principles was to integrate all the diverse media. They carried this out in the form of multidisciplinary exhibitions and built projects, most of which didn’t survive World War II or just changing tastes, such as cafes where they designed everything from the china and menus to furniture and wallpaper.
The whole thing was sponsored by a duke and the tower was just to commemorate his wedding. Each floor has one little room – top floor for visitors and receptions; lower floors for a marriage chamber and a registry office.
The surrounding grounds have a fountain, pavilion, tree plaza and so forth. Also there is an incongruous and unrelated Russian orthodox church which a czar built a couple years prior so he would have a place to pray when he visited. The site is under consideration for UNESCO World Heritage status.
Below is my translation – with footnotes to explain important points that non-Germans won’t know about – of a hilariously and brutally dismissive article from May 2019 about a luxury condo building in Berlin by the star architect Daniel Libeskind, from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s leading liberal-center-left newspaper (out of Munich; the only national newspaper based in Berlin is conservative, which is a good example of how Berlin’s progressive reputation is nowadays mostly a myth, which is one of the main points of the article, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves). The back story is that Berlin is undergoing gentrification at a hyperspeed the likes of which has never happened in the U.S., not even in San Francisco or New York, and that German people, and architects everywhere, generally agree Berlin has the worst modern architecture of any major European city. I added footnotes for clarification.
“Berlin 2019”
Translucence – and raw pork for breakfast: A Libeskind penthouse in Mitte is for sale. A visit explains a lot about the current state of affairs in the capital
What was that Klaus Wowereit said about Berlin? Poor but sexy?(1) Now, centuries later, when you stand on the roof terrace of the Sapphire – which naturally is pronounced in English, like everything in Berlin that’s meant to not sound like Berlin and ends up sounding more like pickled eggs(2) than a precious stone – it fully sinks in how the expression belongs to a truly bygone era. Continue reading “Berlin – “The ugliest, most desolate building in world history””
