weeds are just flowers growing in the wrong place
The start of May marks new beginnings and the end of a blustery grey winter. Hurrah! The weather has been super duper and this weekend is going to be super long...meaning super adventures await! This spring-summer beginnings takes over the entire city and there are four day parties and markets and these secret events in abandoned middle of nowhere places that are not publicly advertised but you are invited to if you get a SMS from the host.
I can't see how this could be fun. More like suffocating..
Even though today is a Monday, we took today off because Tuesday is May 1st, and that's an official holiday date. And since I'm free to roam around the city when everyone else should be at work, I went to the museum (and did groceries) --A luxury now because I hardly have time to go now, and there's still so many to cross off the list!
Bauhaus archiv
I've been meaning to come here for a while now but they have these uninviting hours for people who go to work. Although I'm not well acquainted with the history of Bauhaus, I do know it's pretty German, and I do know it makes a dent in the biography of architecture and design, so I'm sort of obliged to go. The best thing about this entire place was the building. The exhibition was small, but I was already so enthralled by the exterior that I was too busy staring at corners and ceilings rather than reading descriptions about Martin Gropius and his friends.
Chairs without Legs - The International Design Museum Munich - as guest in the Bauhaus Archive
The current exhibition was titled Chairs without Legs. If you ask me, most of those chairs have legs, but I guess not. This was just a room with a collection of chairs from people like Panton and Marcel Breuer with his cantilever chairs made of tubular steel. Here marks the beginning of making heavy objects look lighter and using alternative materials like plastic and cardboard (ahem, Gehry). But if I'm going to look at chairs, I would prefer to understand them like this from MAKK in Koln, or like this from the Triennale in Italy. To be fair, I did not actually get to see the additional library and the archives. Those are only open until 1pm, and by the time I gathered myself out of my room it was too late.
bauhaus cafe
People watched as I set up a self timing camera on a bollard to take a picture yet didn't offer to help.
bye bye bauhaus
1. face! 2. building! 3. face!
Jewish Museum
Okay, I thought the Holocaust Memorial was impressive, but this place blew me away. It's sort of unassuming, (I say sort of, because that side building is kind of obvious and huge). However, the unfortunate thing about the Jewish Museum is that it's so giant that either your interest will wane or your feet will ache before you even get to the end of the entire place. Perhaps it's not meant to be taken in all in one visit, but I insist that it should be that way. They even had a temporary exhibition that I forgot to get tickets for at the desk, and so I didn't check it out. Thank goodness because at the end of it all I was tired and was starting to care less, so it didn't even look exciting anyway. There was also a third museum on the menu today, but by the time I finished this one, there was no time for the other one.
The old courthouse side
The Jüdisches Museum has two buildings, one old one which was a courthouse (can you tell) and one new addition by Daniel Libeskind. They are connected together underground via some tunnel. Daniel Libeskind's addition is magnificent. There is a lot of subtle symbolism within the architecture that the museum space becomes alive and appealing “a Libeskind building performs. It sings, it tells stories. It takes you by the elbow and points things out to you. Things you might not have noticed or understood”. Just imagine exhibiting work in a lopsided zig-zag shaped building with narrow hallways and awkward corners all over the place. (a planner's nightmare) The building is probably more conceptual than practical, but carries a message so heavily that it sort of pulls through beautifully.
The additional part is shaped in a messy zigzag like a warped Star of David and is coated in a thin layer of Zinc which forms this bluish patina over time.
Okay, this is kind of the best part. The underground section of the museum. It is in the base of the zigzag building with a straight line intersecting all of it. This makes three paths titled the Axis of Exile, Axis of Holocaust, and the Axis of Continuity telling different stories and leading to different ends. The space is confusing, if not disorienting, but well signaged to make sure you don't get too lost and upset.
artifacts on display
Garden of Exile
In the Garden of Exile, found at the end of the Axis of Exile are 49 columns standing on a slanted floor and arranged in a square; interestingly, the only real square in the entire building.
kind of like the holocaust memorial right?
Learning center
gap in the ceiling, the"voided void"
The Axis of the Holocaust slopes gently towards the Holocaust Tower, an empty 24m high space that is lit only by natural light through a diagonal opening in the wall; and you can still hear sounds from outside the wall.
Through the Axis of Continuity, is the link to the rest of the museum.
The empty void
Another interesting feature of the museum is the void. There is a 20m tall empty space that cuts through the entire building and it's creepy as ever. 10,000 iron faces carpet the floor, and supposedly the visitor is invited to walk across them to hear the crunch crunch sound of the faces echo under your feet. But I don't think anyone dares to. You can peek into this space at almost every level of the building and at different angles. Even without the faces the space feels cold.
*crunch, crunch
The rest of the place was standard museum stuff. There was a lot of history to cover so I don't know which gave in first my feet or my brain.
calculating "on the line"
The German version of the abacus! In the 15th century, calculation tables were used to do addition, multiplication, etc. on the line with calculation coins and not numbers. "The lines, working from top to bottom, stand ten thousand, five thousand, one thousand, five hundred, one hundred, fifty, ten, and one. By moving the calculation coins up and down these lines, the amounts can be worked out.
1. A wishing tree, with spiraly stairs! 2. A thinking area
The gallery of the missing
There are these are black glass sculptures that are actually audio installations. If you pick up the headphones and stand close enough to the glass, you will hear descriptions of lost things and destroyed objects.
Listening to stories of people
Boy are my feet tired..
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