FEATURE image: July 1984. Marienplatz, Munich, Germany. 7.91mb 91%
In 1895 M. Morin, an executive at Le Bon Marché, looked to give his wife a gift. Since the 1860s, Japanese art and its influences and practices (known as “japonisme”) had a profound impact on France’s own fine and popular arts, and this craze became even more popular by the 1890s. It was only natural for M. Morin to build a real pagoda as a lavish and fashionable statement next door to the couple’s house in Paris. Pieces were shipped from Asia and reassembled in Paris under the design and direction of Alexandre Marcel (1860-1928) at 57 bis, rue de Babylone on the corner with rue Monsieur in the 7th arrondissement. Built in the middle of a residential neighborhood it boasted all things Japanese including stone figures of dragons, lions, buddhas and birds as well as distinctive Asian-style rooflines. In 1930 it became a 400-seat cinema movie theatre that became an art-house cinema in the 1970s and, after 85 years of operation, closed its doors in 2015. SOURCE: 1000 Buildings of Paris, Kathy Borrus, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, New York, 2003, p. 275 and http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/6906 – retrieved January 4, 2023.
A fruit and vegetable market on the Katschhof square (above) in Aachen, Germany, in March 1992 was held the day before Ash Wednesday. The historic square has Aachen Cathedral on one side and the town hall on the other side and is brought to life during its numerous festivals, markets, and events. In Carolingian history, the Katschhof represented the connection between Charlemagne’s palace hall and his St. Mary’s Church with his throne and tomb. In 2014 it was announced by a team of scientists who started to study the tomb’s bones and bone fragments in 1988 that if they are those of Charlemagne (747-814), the 66-year-old Holy Roman Emperor was tall and thin. See- https://www.archaeology.org/news/1782-140131-charlemagne-bones-sarcophagus – retrieved October 6, 2023.
Opened in 1967, the Berkeley Library building at Trinity College is an example of Brutalist architecture — exposed unpainted concrete, monochrome palette, steel, timber, and glass. The style emerged during the 1950s in the United Kingdom in reaction to nostalgic architecture. In 2023 the name was removed from the library by the governing board of Trinity, Ireland’s oldest university, because its namesake, George Berkeley (1685-1753), an 18th century scholar whose philosophical and scientific ideas on perception and reality presage the work of Albert Einstein (1879-1955), had been a slave owner who actively defended slavery. Berkeley was a fellow of Trinity and, aptly for the library, its former librarian. George Berkeley is also the namesake of the University of California, Berkeley—and the town in which it is located—and Berkeley College, one of the 14 residential colleges at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. – see https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/05/09/berkeley-name-dropped-trinity-college-library – retrieved October 5, 2023. I was studing Irish History at Trinity College in 1979 and used this library and the National Library of Ireland around the corner on Kildare Street extensively for reading and research.
Dating from the late 1100s, these houses in Belgium are among the oldest surviving domiciles in Europe.
A 10-minute walk from the city center, the Rubens House (Rubenshuis in Dutch) is an older Flemish house transformed into an Italian palazzo by the artist, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) in 1610. Married that year to his first wife Isabella Brandt (1591-1626), Rubens purchased and renovated the house on today’s Wapper street whose layout included the couple’s home, the artist’s studio, a monumental portico and interior courtyard (pictured above). The courtyard also opens into the Baroque garden designed by Rubens. Isabella and Peter Paul Rubens had three children together when Isabella died of the plague at 34 years old. Centuries later, in 1937, Antwerp bought the house and opened it to the public in 1946.
