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ashes to ashes (Prague cemeteries #3)
The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague’s Old Town, with its picturesque gravestones leaning drunkenly on one another, is a familiar stop on the tourist trail. The New Jewish Cemetery established in 1890, adjacent to the Christian cemeteries at Olšany, is less well known, though pilgrims do come here in search of Franz Kafka. Aside from…
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always with a smile (Prague cemeteries #2)
Established in 1680, the complex of cemeteries at Olšany, on the borders of Vinohrady and Žižkov, is the largest in the Czech Republic. According to Wikipedia “there is evidence of 230,000 people buried, 65,000 grave sites, 200 chapel graves and six columbariums in Olšany Cemeteries.” Many famous Czechs (and Slovaks) are buried here. But Prague has never…
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a beautiful garden next door to history (Prague cemeteries #1)
A post mostly for Czech and Bohemist friends Maestro! You have brought to an end a great work and are departing to eternal sleep. The Czech nation and Prague are burying you in the most sacred place, in Vyšehrad, in the most noble place … In Vyšehrad, seat of the Princess Libuše, you will talk…
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Mies #2: the Tugendhat villa
At the same time as he was working on his Barcelona pavilion for the 1929 World’s Fair (see my earlier post Mies: light, air, clarity), Mies van der Rohe was planning the Tugendhat villa in Brno, Czechoslovakia. It shares many of the same design elements (the onyx partition wall, the cruciform columns, the vistas of…
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diagonals #2
Prague #1-3 Kampa Museum #4 Franz Kafka Square #1 + 6 Baba #2 Na Příkopě #3 Ovocný trh/Fruit Market #4-5 Trade Fair Palace, Aero poster by František Zelenka) #1 Palladium mall #2 + 3 Prague metro #4 Hradčany Karlín Vyšehrad (#5 apartment block on Neklanova St, Josef Chochol, 1913-14) #1 Smíchov (exhibit in David Černý’s…
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tube houses + motorbikes
The narrow “tube houses” [nhà ống] are a striking feature of Vietnamese urban architecture. They are typically three to four meters (10 to 13 feet) wide. Some of the older tube houses in Hanoi’s Old Town, which were often inhabited by several families, are up to 100 meters deep, while newer tube houses can reach…
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if walls could talk #2
Some walls are alive, blood flows in them, red warm blood pulsates under the thin layer of plaster in the stones … Sometimes when I walk around some wall, I remember the wall that lives in my fantasy, and I am fearful … Mikuláš Medek, diary entry, 13 April 1951 I was in Athens in…
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window shopping #2 (Italy)
The mainstream of photographic activity has shown that a Surrealist manipulation or theatricalization of the real is unnecessary, if not actually redundant. Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by…
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fall at the lake
… and so in the fall we headed back to the Rocky Mountains, this time to explore the much-hyped Okanagan valley. Due to the smoke from raging wildfires, we didn’t see the sun for a week. These were the views. It wasn’t bikini weather. All photographs taken in and around Kelowna and Penticton in September…
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Camera lucida 