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Posts Tagged ‘Museums’

10 Subterranean Museums Reclaiming Abandoned Mines, Tunnels, Cellars & Docks

18 Jul

[ By SA Rogers in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]

Disused subterranean spaces like former mines, quarries, tunnels, bunkers and catacombs can offer just the right combination of spaciousness, moodiness, natural drama and a sense of gravity to house museums and other places of learning. Often making use of raw, rocky walls, cavernous proportions and the temperature-regulating insulation of the earth, these underground museums give us opportunities to explore spaces that are typically closed to the public.

TIRPITZ Museum in Denmark by BIG

Tucked into the sandy shorelines of Blåvand, Denmark, TIRPITZ Museum by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) transforms a former German WWII bunker into a cultural complex housing a venue, exhibits and galleries. “The heavy hermetic object is countered by the inviting lightness and openness of the new museum,” say the architects. “The galleries are integrated into the dunes like an open oasis in the sand – a sharp contrast to the nazi fortress’ concrete monolith.”

Salina Turda Salt Mines Turned Museum, Romania

A cavernous salt mine deep beneath Transylvania, built in the 17th century, is now the world’s largest salt mining history museum. The alien-like quality of the unusual timber structures built within it, along with the suspended tube lights, augment the sense of being in an otherworldly place. These structures offer recreational attractions like a mini golf course, bowling lanes and a ferris wheel. The museum is completely free of allergens and most bacteria and maintains 80% humidity naturally.

Centre for International Light in an Old Storage Cellar, Germany

The world’s one and only light art museum resides beneath the German city of Unna in former brewery storage cellars, hosting site-specific exhibitions by artists like Olafur Eliasson, James Turrell and Joseph Kosuth. The Centre for International Light Art is definitely a hidden gem, attracting just 25,000 visitors per year, partially due to the fact that local laws require limited capacity tours for safety reasons in case of the need for evacuation.

Paris Underground: Catacombs, Tunnels and Unofficial Arts Spaces

Perhaps one of the world’s best-known subterranean historical spaces, the Catacombs hold an estimated 6 million bodies from the Cimetieres des Saints-Innocents as well as a vast network of underground tunnels and rooms, most of which are closed to the public. In addition to officially sanctioned attractions (which also include a museum documenting the history of the French sewer system and the ancient ruins beneath Notre Dame) the tunnels and quarries hold countless works of street art and are often used as settings for informal and often illegal events – and as housing. These images were captured by photojornalist Stephen Alvarez for National Geographic.

Messner Mountain Museum Corones by Zaha Hadid, italy

Telescoping out of the summit plateau of Plan de Corones in the Italian Alps, the Messner Mountain Museum by Zaha Hadid Architects celebrates the career of climber Reinhold Messner – the first to make it to the top of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen — and explores the sport of mountain climbing. Underground gallery spaces contain photographs of the climber’s life and adventures while the three protruding volumes offer views of the alpine landscape. Messner himself designed much of the structure.

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10 Subterranean Museums Reclaiming Abandoned Mines Tunnels Cellars Docks

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[ By SA Rogers in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]

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Mobile Museums: French Train Cars Filled with Impressionist Art

07 Jun

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

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Commuters traveling from Gare Saint-Lazare to Vernon-Giverny in France get to gaze up at a selection of impressionist art from the Musée d’Orsay applied right onto the walls and ceilings of their train cars. The SNCF (French National Railway Company) collaborated with the adhesive experts at 3M for a summer-long installation that will make rail travel a lot more beautiful and relaxing. Three double-height cars on the RER line have been altered for the project, photographed by Christophe Recoura so the rest of the world can catch a glimpse, too.

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An adhesive graphic film printed with impressionist scenes was carefully applied to immerse train travelers in these serene compositions starring the vague painterly brush strokes the movement is known for. Each car has its own theme: gardens and water, local landscapes or Paris industrialization.

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This particular line serves visitors heading to Normandy, the birthplace of Impressionism and home of the annual Impressionist Festival. Sight-seers can gaze up at works by painters like Claude Monet as they travel to his former home in Giverny or to the André Malraux Museum (MuMa), which hosts the second-largest collection of Impressionist works in the world after the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

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15 juin 2013.Le "Train de l'impessionnisme-Musée d'Orsay/STIF/SNCF".

In fact, a long-serving steam train line direct from Paris to Normandy is credited with encouraging artists to travel to that lush, peaceful corner of France in the first place as Normandy became home to a new school of open-air painting. The trains carried the artists, their families and their aristocratic clientele back and forth between the two cities, delivering them from the modern metropolis to a countryside full of cliffs, meadows and Gothic cathedrals.

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Museums of Tomorrow: 13 Out of This World Institution Designs

24 Dec

[ By Steph in Architecture & Public & Institutional. ]

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We’re reaching a point in architectural history where the structures being built look like they could have come straight out of the concept artwork for a science fiction movie, or a video game set on another planet. Some look like flying saucers, others look like blobby aliens that landed on the roof of a traditional European building, but all of these museum designs – the real ones, and the ones that will remain concepts – have a strikingly futuristic feel.

Sci-Fi Museum for Washington by Flying Architecture
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This concept looks just as sci-fi as its purpose with its facade wrapped in sharp-looking metal panels and ring-shaped interior plan. Submitted for an International Architectural Design Competition to design a museum for science fiction in Washington, the proposal is “a vessel of science fiction history and culture” with circular LED screens wrapping the inner face and space reserved for hologram performances.

MVRDV China Comic and Animation Museum
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What looks like a gigantic cluster of textured eggs speckled in red houses a Comic and Animation Museum for China by MVRDV, including a massive comic book library, three cinemas and an interactive exhibition zone. MVRDV’s competition-winning design mimics the shape of speech bubbles for its eight interconnected ovoid volumes fulfilling every comic book lover’s fantasy.

Museum of the Future for Dubai
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This metallic ring-shaped building designed by architect Shaun Killa and set to be 3D-printed for its completion in 2017 looks like the kind of building an artist would envision for an alien planet. The flashy building will be covered in poetry written by Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the hole in its center representing “the unknown.” The exhibits will be changed every six months.

Kunsthaus Graz Art Museum
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Is this a building, or an alien ship? The blobular Kunsthaus Graz Art Museum is an ultramodern landmark in the Austrian city of Graz by Sir Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, known to locals as the “friendly alien” That flowing roof is actually made up of 1,288 semitransparent acrylic glass panels generating energy with built-in photovoltaic cells.

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Museums Of Tomorrow 13 Out Of This World Institution Designs

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Curious Collections: 15 of the World’s Weirdest Museums

10 Feb

[ By Steph in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]

phallological museum 2

You might wonder why anyone would pay money to gaze at collections of dog collars, toilets, packets of ramen and mammalian penises in jars, but one thing we’ve learned from this list of weird museums is that absolutely anything can be collected and put on display. These unusual exhibitions range from the bizarre and macabre, like a Peruvian museum of brain abnormalities, to the oddly specific, like Massachusetts’ Museum of Burnt Food.

Icelandic Phallological Museum
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On the busiest street in Reykjavik, you’ll find a museum filled with shelf after shelf of animal penises in jars. Iceland’s Phallological Museum started as a private collection in 1974 when the founder received a bull’s penis as a joke gift, and it took off from there. “Some of my teachers used to work in summer in a nearby whaling station and after the first specimen they started bringing me whale penises, supposedly to tease me. Then the idea came up gradually that it might be interesting collecting specimens from more mammalian species.

Sulabh International Museum of Toilets, India

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Run by a social service organization that works to protect human rights, sanitation, waste management and social reform through education, New Delhi’s toilet museum showcases the 4,500-year history of toilets around the world, including one disguised as a bookcase and King Louis the XIV’s royal throne, upon which he was said to defecate during court sessions. Sulabh International has been credited with bringing sanitation to India’s poor, and founded the museum to send a message about how important proper disposal of human waste is.

Avanos Hair Museum, Turkey

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The names and addresses of over 16,000 women around the world are taped to delicate little samples of hair hanging from the walls at the Avanos Hair Museum, a bizarre treasure tucked into the caves of Turkey’s surreal Cappadocia beside the owner’s pottery studio. The first lock of hair went up in 1979, supposedly as a memento for founder Chip Galip, starting a bit of a trend in which women voluntarily left their locks behind. Every year Galip chooses ten hair samples at random and invites the women to come back for a pottery workshop and to stay in his traditional guest house for free.

Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum, Japan

instant ramen museum

The history of ramen noodles and Cup Noodles is celebrated at the Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum in Osaka, a free exhibit with recreations of the ramen inventor’s workshop and thousands of cups and packets of instant noodles on display. There’s also an instant ramen workshop where visitors can make their own noodles.

Meguro Parasitological Museum, Japan

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Get up close and personal with tapeworms, mites and other parasites at the world’s only parasitological museum. Located in the Meguro neighborhood of Tokyo, this museum has over 45,000 specimens in its collection, including the world’s longest tapeworm at 8.8 meters. You can even get yourself a parasite-themed souvenir.

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Curious Collections 15 Of The Worlds Weirdest Museums

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[ By Steph in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]

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Forging Fun, Not Profit: Master Copycat Fakes Out 50+ Museums

26 Aug

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

fake priest artist copycat

Mark Landis is a US artist and actor of extraordinary ability, having spent decades faking various identities and committing a kind of faux philanthropy, having donated copied artworks he creates to churches and museums for decades.

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Diagnosed schizophrenic and the subject of a new documentary film Art and Craft (preview below), Landis has not been convicted of any crime since his activities were uncovered over five years ago. Primarily, he is protected by the fact that he has never sold (only gifted) his faked paintings, drawings and watercolors.

Amazingly, it took over twenty years for anyone to work out his ruse – finally, someone noted that not only was a painting he attempted to give previously donated elsewhere, but it was even gifted under the same fake moniker.

The fakes are often painted from catalog photos or over a color-printed copy that he simply creates at a copying shop, takes home and starts working over. Meanwhile, under his real name, he has also sold original paintings for years.

priest copycat artist

No one can be entirely certain of what drives Landis, since honesty and transparency are not his strongest suits, but presumably he enjoys acting the role of a generous donor, tricking the people he dupes, and ultimately seeing his faked works on display in major museums around the United States.

priest fake art

He loves being a prolific philanthropist, real or otherwise, and claims to like his role as faux Jesuit priest as well. In the end, he notes, that it doesn’t really matter to the viewer whether the thing they are seeing is real – so what should they care if the work they see is not original?

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Architectural Apocalypse: Famous Museums Seen After the Fall

13 Aug

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Photography & Video. ]

guggenheim half buried sand

Like that iconic scene in the original Planet of the Apes film, these artists have displaced great works of architecture in time and space to see what each museum might look like after the end of days, relocated in ominous environments and recast in black and white.

guggenheim museum after fall

Ukrainian photographers Vitaliy and Elena Vasilieva use surrealistic landscapes as the backdrop for these imaginative transformations, picturing structures like the Guggenheim in a sand-strewn context that looks like anything but modern-day Manhattan as we know it.

new museum in water

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The New Museum is seen rising up from post-armageddon floodwaters, presumably after rising sees wash away the rest of New York City.

Niteroi Museum snow dunes

snow filled museum fall

The Niteroi Museum is perched precariously on a mound of snow, everything else perhaps buried in the frozen wastes around it.

pompidou center picture fall

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The Pompidou Center is set in a swirling dust storm, Paris long vanished and its inside-out appearance making it look all the more like a remnant than a finished structure.

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When the dust settles, the smoke clears and the world freezes over, what if only our artistic institutions were left? From the creators of the series: “It is difficult to escape the feeling that ‘Apocalypse in Art’ really shows the world, standing on the edge, barren, falling in decay like a story line of a picture that is breaking into fragments.”

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Modern Gingerbread Museums: Realistic Edible Architecture

05 Dec

[ By Steph in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

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The pyramids of the Louvre shine in hard candy, the Guggenheim gleams in solid sugar, and gingerbread makes for convincing concrete on Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi museum in this series of edible modern architecture. Photographed in black and white and illuminated from within, the collection of gingerbread museums by photographer Henry Hargreaves and food artist Caitlin Levin looks strikingly like the real deal.

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The landmark museums depicted also include the Tate Modern, the Museum Aan de Stroom, Mexico City’s Museo Soumaya and the Karuizawa Museum in Nagano, the latter of which is constructed almost entirely of Hershey’s chocolate.

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Bubble gum, candy balls, taffy, lollipop sticks, icing and licorice help create the illusion of bricks, textured stone, glazed walls and other architectural elements for the scale models.

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The pieces go on display today at Dylan’s Candy Bar in Miami for Art Basel 2013.

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20 August, 2012 – Are Museums Destroying Art?

25 Aug

Many photographers find visiting art museums to be inspirational. But there is another type of photographer – trophy hunting tourists and school kids – who are destroying not just the pleasure of a museum visit, but likely also the art itself.

Find out more in Mark Dubovoy‘s most recent essay – Are Museums Destrying Art?

 

   

 "Every time I go back to a module I had already seen, I learn additional things.  I have never seen tutorials that have the excellent mix of what the features are, 
how to use them, enough of the under-the-hood information 
and concepts so that I can utilize the features creatively and efficiently, 
and just enough humor to keep the motivation level high.  Wow!
"


 


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