1982 World's Fair: 30 years later

Posted on 1st May 2012 in The monuments of world

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.(WVLT)–It was looked upon as Knoxville’s biggest challenge.

Transform an old railroad yard, foundry and depot into a world’s fair.

The city’s cost, 46 million and many skeptics. The most hurtful, the Wall Street Journal, calling Knoxville the “scruffy little city by the river”.

Local 8 News’ Walter Lambert was Vice President of the event.
“It was going to be disruptive, you were not going to be able to go anywhere, have all these things and didn’t have clue as to what a world’s fair was about.”

Local banker Jake Butcher led the way as the driving force, Bo Roberts was the Executive Director.

A year after the fair closed, Butcher’s bank failed with an ensuing scandal sending him to jail.

Despite its detractors, people came, 87,000 the first day. 387,000 for the first week. .

Bill Schmidt told Local 8 News, “It was just the reality, how could this small city of a couple hundred thousand people put on a world class exhibit?’ And we did. We did.”

Everything from rides to exhibits gave visitors insight into 22 cultures from all over the world, with the center piece a golden sphere with the theme of energy.

President Ronald Reagan gave it a thumbs up. Knoxville Mayor Randy Tyree called it a defining moment in the history of the city.

Former UT athlete, Bill Schmidt had the job as Director of Sports.
“We were able to generate from no budget, a surplus of $300,000, and the fair put it up in fireworks. Literally, they spent it on fireworks. It was fun. It was a blast”

The fair also took care of Knoxville’s infamous I-40 gridlock.
Lambert said, “That in an of itself was worth doing, all those worries about traffic just didn’t materialize they rebuilt malfunction!”

Now, thirty years later the site is now called World’s Fair Park.

The amphitheater is still there, the foundry still stands, as does the iconic Sunsphere soon to be transformed into a nightclub. Even the Rubik’s cube is still around.

All continue to stand as monuments of a time when this “scruffy little city” had something to prove to the world.

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Danby Marble Available For Residential And Commercial Construction

Posted on 30th April 2012 in The monuments of world

San Antonio, TX (PRWEB) April 30, 2012

Materials Marketing Limited (MML) has added Danby marble to their architectural stone and tile product line. The company is proud to offer clients this option in white marble. The stone is quarried in Vermont and is available for the customized manufacturing of architectural stone and tile products.

Mined from the Dorset Mountain, Danby marble is identifiable by its bright white hue and distinct veining. It is a stone with historic roots. It was used in the construction of the Lincoln Memorial and the U.S. Senate building as well as other state and federal landmark buildings and monuments.

“We are very excited about adding Danby marble to our materials selection.” said Jim Rymer, CEO of Materials Marketing. “The quality of this material, combined with our manufacturing capabilities, will present architects and designers the exciting possibility of adding a fashion forward, yet cost effective, stone finish to their projects.”

Danby marble is now available from Materials Marketing in a wide variety of architectural stone products such as fireplaces, staircases, window and door surrounds, as well as natural stone flooring, mosaics and moldings.

The Danby quarry is the largest in the world with a footprint that extends 25 acres and a depth that reaches over 1 and ½ miles. The massive size of the quarry enables the marble to be manufactured into large, monolithic architectural pieces.

About Materials Marketing
Materials Marketing started with a flagship store in San Antonio, Texas in 1962 and has expanded to 11 showrooms across the country. They are the only architectural stone and natural stone flooring supplier in the U.S. that owns and operates their manufacturing facilities. The introduction of Danby marble into their offering coincides with the company’s 50th year in operation.

Related Articles:
Introducing Danby Marble
Danby Marble: A Stone with History & Glory in American Architecture


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The Great Transition

Posted on 26th April 2012 in The monuments of world

Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th–9th Century)
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, March 14–July 8, 2012
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Helen C. Evans, with Brandie Ratliff
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 332 pp., $65.00; $45.00 (paper) (distributed by Yale University Press)                                                  

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Vladimir Trebenin/State Hermitage Museum

A silver plate from Constantinople depicting two companions of Dionysos, Silenus and a Maenad, 613–630. Images from classical mythology persisted in Byzantine art well into the Christian era, and in Middle Eastern art long after the Islamic conquest.

In the century between 630 and 730 a considerable portion of the Old World took on its modern face. Through a series of astonishing campaigns, Arab Muslim armies created a single empire that, for a time, would reach from southern Spain to northern India and the western borders of China. From the “big bang” of these conquests a new galaxy emerged. From then onward, a closely interconnected chain of Muslim regions (one part of which, from modern Morocco to the borders of Iran, came to speak Arabic) stretched across Africa and Eurasia, joining the Atlantic to western China. A new civilization came into being, one that has lasted, with many permutations, into our own days. In the words of Finbarr Flood, a major contributor to the catalog of the Metropolitan Museum’s somewhat modestly titled exhibition “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th–9th Century),” the foundation of the Arab empire was “one of the most remarkable achievements in human history.”

The exhibition takes us to the heart of this great detonation. It embraces the last century of the pre-Islamic Middle East and the first two centuries of Islam. To our surprise, we do not find ourselves in a world swept by a mighty wind. Instead, we enter a series of quiet rooms where time seems to stand still. Like a perfect late fall day, only the occasional rustle of a falling leaf startles us into realizing that the seasons are about to change. The few clear signs that Islam had, indeed, become politically dominant in the Middle East by the end of the seventh century strike us with almost ominous intensity. For there are so few of them.

In the room dedicated to commerce, we suddenly find silver coins that are like all their predecessors, except that they now bear a new religious message in a new, Arabic script. In the room before it, we notice the discreet censoring of the representation of a living creature on the floor of a Christian church, out of respect for Muslim attitudes toward art. In the last room, we come on pages of the Koran that look as ornate and magnificent as any Christian gospels of their time. They are covered with a Kufic script, whose bold, foursquare lines have an ancient grandeur, strangely unlike the fluid scripts that we now associate with medieval and modern Arabic.

In all these cases, we are brought up short by hints of purposive change in a world that, to all appearances, had not changed. Even with Islam present in it, we are looking back into a world before our own, still caught in the grip of antiquity, with its back still turned on the grand future of Islam in medieval and modern times. In retrospect, the first centuries of Islamic rule associated with the Umayyad dynasty (661–750) seem much closer to the ancient world and more open to non-Islamic influences than was the Islamic civilization that would emerge in later centuries.

This exhibition—along with the groundbreaking scholarship that has gone into its catalog—has banished the melodramatic tone with which the rise of Islam has usually been presented in standard accounts of the period. We can now say with confidence that the Arab armies did not leave a trail of desolation across the Middle East. Local populations did not sink into poverty. Far from retreating into the status of timorous minorities, vigorous Christian and Jewish communities continued to maintain their own traditions largely unmolested.

Most surprising of all, we can now suggest that the spread of Islam did not happen overnight. It was not imposed by force on the conquered peoples. Although their position as the rulers of a successful empire doubtless weighed heavily in their favor, Muslims talked their way into the Middle East quite as much as they fought their way across it. The words of Anna Ballian, author of one of the catalog essays, describing the relations between the Caliph Hisham (724–743) and the Christians at the great shrine of Saint Sergios at Rusafa in Syria, catch this strange mixture of curiosity and assertiveness. A Muslim such as Hisham (like many less powerful believers) could think of himself as

an undisputed ruler but by no means a foreign interloper, imposing himself by force…rather [as] a fellow traveler who shares the same heritage.

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Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine, Sinai, Egypt

A bird-shaped copper vessel with an Arabic inscription reading ‘In the name of God the blessing of God to the owner,’ Syria or Iraq, early ninth century

Muslims were not always welcome as fellow travelers. They could be pushy and proud. But they did not stifle debate. Their enterprise in what has been called “competitive self-definition” ensured that they remained in constant dialogue with those around them. As a result, Islamic civilization in its first centuries owed much of its richness to continued religious conversations among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. These conversations slowly changed the religious texture of the Middle East to the advantage of Islam. But until the year 1000, at least, it was the Muslims, and not the Jews and Christians, who were the minority religion. What we are looking at is not the Islam of the modern imagination. It is a very new Islam that was still trying to find a place for itself in a very old world.

Altogether, the Met exhibition offers the thrill of looking at the very first stages of a new world in the making. This new world did not emerge as a result of dramatic ruptures. Rather, it occurred, silently and all the more irrevocably, like a genetic mutation, through the accumulation of small changes in an ancient continuum.

To make one’s way through the exhibition, the catalog—edited by Helen Evans with the assistance of Brandie Ratliff—is more than usually helpful. There are two reasons for this—one bad and one very good.

Let us take the bad reason first. Loans of objects from Russia and Egypt that had been promised to the exhibition were canceled. But these objects are carefully described and commented upon in the catalog. This goes a long way to redress whatever imbalances their absence has created in the overall flow of a magnificently conceived exhibition. I would recommend particularly that readers linger over the discussion of the early Christian icons and of the Christian Arabic manuscripts preserved in the monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai. For here we can listen to a Christianity of the Middle East that resolutely combined engagement with the Islamic present and loyalty to its own past. They show that Christianity found its own voice in the Arabic language, so as to contribute to the exuberant new Arabic culture. At the same time, Christians were still bound by their past. They continued to wrestle as they had for centuries under the Byzantine Empire—through the poignant art of icons quite as much as through formal writings—with the mighty paradox of a joining of God and man, a theme to which Jews and Muslims remained pointedly indifferent.

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Castello Sforzesco, Milan

An ivory carving from the ‘Grado Chair’ showing Saint Mark preaching, eastern Mediterranean or Egypt, seventh–eighth century

But the good reason could not be better. This catalog is an outstanding introduction to the transition from late antiquity to Islam. It presents the views of a new generation of scholars, who have brought significant changes of perspective to our understanding of the period as a whole. Their alert scholarship ranges widely. We have masterly essays by Finbarr Flood, on what was truly new about the art of the early Islamic world and on the production of the first Korans. We can also appreciate the novel application of radiocarbon datings (by Gudrun Bühl, Cäcilia Fluck, and others) to textiles and ivories. These redatings, made while assembling the exhibition, show, for instance, that in Egypt a classical tradition of ivory carving continued to flourish for centuries after the Arab conquest—witness the extraordinary set of ivories associated with the “Grado Chair,” which are usually tucked away in the far reaches of the Castello Sforzesco of Milan. Such expert discoveries prove that the populations of the Middle East, Christian and Jewish quite as much as Muslim, moved to rhythms that Western historians (hypnotized by the notion of the rise of Islam as marking a radical break in the history of the region) had not dreamed of until recently.

With the catalog in hand, let us visit this world. First, it is a world whose center of gravity shifted significantly toward the south. In the year 600, thirty-two years before the death of Muhammad, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and the fringes of Arabia were ruled from a considerable distance by the two great empires of the time—Byzantium and Sasanian Iran. They had languages of their own—especially Syriac and Coptic (the last version of the language of the Pharaohs). Greek was still widespread in the southern provinces of Byzantium. It could still delight (or afflict) students in unexpected places. For instance, around 600 AD, a young monk attempted to learn Greek by copying out onto a potsherd a series of maxims derived from the Greek comic writer Menander. He did this in the monastery of Epiphanios, which looked out over the ruins of ancient Luxor.

The economic heart of this region lay in Mesopotamia, to the east, and in the vast territory of Egypt, to the south. Beyond Egypt lay a yet deeper south. At the southern end of the Red Sea, Axum and what would become the Christian empire of Ethiopia faced the miraculous green of Yemen, an ancient south Arabian civilization where Christian and Jewish kingdoms fought to gain the upper hand throughout the sixth century. When the Arabs of the time of Muhammad spoke with admiration of a “great church,” it was not the far distant Hagia Sophia of Constantinople. It was the Great Church of Sana’a, built by an Ethiopian governor, with its golden mosaics covered with jewel-like images of trees.

For the inhabitants of these southern lands, the Arab conquests were not an explosion. They were an implosion. The two great empires collapsed at a touch, leaving the Middle East as a single zone, no longer divided by the military frontier between Byzantium and Sasanian Iran. For the first time since the days of Xerxes and Alexander the Great, it was possible to travel directly, within a single empire, from Alexandria to the foot of the Zagros Mountains in Iran and beyond. We can see this happen in the mosaics and products provided to the exhibition from Jordan. Regions that had lain on the dead end of a frontier now became thoroughfares. Synagogues and churches adjusted rapidly to the development of what Steven Fine calls a “new umbrella civilization.” The pottery kilns of Jerash in present-day Jordan (ancient Gerasa—a city already three millennia old by this time) briskly turned out new lamps, with a Christian inscription on one side and an Arabic, Muslim invocation on the other.

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Qasr al-Mshatta, Jordan

A limestone fragment carved with a vine scroll and a vase, Qasr al-Mshatta, Jordan, mid-eighth century

Up to the eighth century, mosaics continued to be placed in churches that contained images of the ancient cities of their region. Each city was shown, in a classical Roman manner, with colonnades, elaborate roofscapes, and ancient triumphal gates. Each was distinguished by its best-known monuments. Like images of the skyscrapers of New York, these little vignettes summed up an ideal of what a city should be. They reassured those who stepped on them that life had not changed.

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50 stunning Olympic moments No24: Abebe Bikila runs barefoot into history

Posted on 25th April 2012 in The monuments of world

  • Simon Martin

    • Abebe Bikila
    Abebe Bikila draws away from Rhadi Ben Abdesselam near the end of the marathon at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

    Few could have predicted when Italy hosted the 1960 Olympic Games that come the opening ceremony Rome would be cavorting in the midst of an economic boom. But the legacy of Fascist rule, which had ended 17 years earlier, still remained. And while many axes and insignia had been chipped away in a post-regime iconoclastic orgy, nowhere in the capital was the regime’s presence more evident than around the two Olympic sites.

    Paved with ancient-style mosaics of Fascist sportsmen, slogans and 264 references to Benito Mussolini, the Via dell’Impero, the main Foro Italico thoroughfare leading from the imposing Mussolini obelisk to the Olympic stadium, courted most controversy. Flanked by huge blocks of travertine stone, it was etched with key events in Fascist history, in the midst of which was the conquest of the Abyssinian capital Addis Ababa in 1936. It was into this environment that Abebe Bikila, a private in Haile Selassie’s Imperial Army, stepped.

    Small, lean, barefooted, in bright red shorts and a green vest sporting the number 11, Bikila was a last-minute replacement in the marathon for an injured team-mate. His challenge was taken far from seriously. “Who’s this Ethiopian,” questioned one commentator. He was not alone.

    Bikila’s unofficial personal best for the 42.2km – better than the world record – was widely dismissed as impossible. He arrived in Rome with one pair of running shoes but they were ruined in training in the month before the Games. With his new ones causing blisters, his decision to compete barefoot, feet toughened by miles of shoeless training on the high Ethiopian plains, only added to the general derision.

    The marathon began in the heat of the late afternoon at the Campidoglio, Rome’s civic centre set above the Forum. The athletes followed Mussolini’s triumphant thoroughfare past the Coliseum, the Palatine Hill and the Circus Maximus.

    Here, settled at the back of the leading pack, Bikila glided past the Obelisk of Axum that had been plundered from Abyssinia. Continuing south and exiting the city, a breakaway pack began to materialise: “With the English Kiley, there’s the Irishman Messipy, the Belgian Van der Blicher, the Morrocans Rhadi and Saudy, and there’s that unknown Ethiopian we saw earlier,” announced the commentator. “He’s called Abebe Bikila. He’s barefoot.”

    At the 32km mark, in Rome’s peripheral countryside, with the sun disappearing behind the city, the runners turned from a somewhat bizarre section of the capital’s orbital road and on to the Appian Way that used to connect the ancient city with Brindisi, on Italy’s south-eastern coast.

    Breaking with the tradition of daytime Olympic marathons that concluded in the stadium, the early evening start maximized the spectacle as the athletes negotiated 8km of the cypress-tree-lined Appian Way, in darkness. As Bikila’s bare feet rhythmically kissed the uneven stones, the half moonlight, the illuminated ancient Roman monuments and hundreds of torch-bearing soldiers intensified the atmosphere and added to the drama. As Alberto Cavallari wrote in his Corriere della Sera report: “It wasn’t a marathon it was ‘Aida’, with the Romans roadside making up the chorus.”

    Re-entering the city at the Porta San Sebastiano, with impeccable timing Bikila left his sole pursuer, the Moroccan Rhadi Ben Abdesselam, just as he repassed the Axum obelisk. Finishing in 2hr 15min 16sec, Bikila shattered the Olympic record and set a new world best, before dancing a jig of joy beneath the Arch of Constantine where many of his rivals simply collapsed.

    Coming less than 25 years after Mussolini’s forces had conquered his capital at the end of a cruel colonial war, it was the significance of his victory as much as the ease with which he had consumed the capital’s kilometres that fascinated.

    Marking the rise and future dominance of East African middle- and long-distance runners, in the presence of the all-white South African team that the International Olympic Committee chose not to challenge, and against the vastly better funded and better equipped Soviet, US and European athletes, Bikila ran his name and that of his country into history.

    But his victory was not simply that of Ethiopia, it was also a triumph for Rome and the Games. Transcending his lack of shoes, for which he is most fondly remembered, he dramatically closed the final event under the lights and arch of a long-departed emperor while, at the same time, eclipsing the memory of a more recent wannabe.

    Following the fierce parliamentary debates over the negative image presented by the Fascist-built venues to the outside world, and the retaliatory neo-Fascist graffiti that marked the city in the buildup the Games, there was no better, more apt or powerful demonstration of Italy’s break from the past than this glorious, individual victory by an ex-colonial subject.

    As the editor of the British Olympic Association’s magazine World Sports condescendingly concurred, in his report from Rome: “It is a scene to remember – a moment of theatrical drama; a moment so unusual in modern world athletics, when a virtual unknown from an insignificant country crosses the seas and conquers the heroes. It is a fine, unsophisticated, illogical victory […] This […] was an historic Olympic marathon both in terms of performance and backcloth […] its drama was in its setting, presentation and outcome.”

    Despite the years of preparation, the Games’ greatest and most enduring moment was not only completely unplanned, it was totally unimaginable. Bikila, this tiny, barefoot former colonial subject, mixed the unexpected with drama to create a scriptwriter’s dream and become the greatest symbol of the new, rejuvenated, post-Fascist country.

    What the Observer said

    The Observer: Sunday 11 September 1960

    Bikila Abebe, a 28-year-old member of Emperor Haile Selassie’s bodyguard, won the marathon gold medal in the last big event of the Olympics last night. Abedisiem Rhadi of Morocco was second and B. Magee, of New Zealand. Third. Abebe’s time was 2hr 15min 16.2sec, which was 7min 47sec better than Emil Zatopek’s Olympic record. In fact, the first 15 all improved on the old record. Prowess in big international cross-country races on the Continent had made Rhadi one of the more fancied competitors, but none outside East Africa had heard of Abebe, who won the greatest marathon in the 64 years of Olympic history.

    What happened next?

    Six weeks before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Bikila was taken ill with appendicitis and underwent surgery. Still recovering when he arrived in Japan, he went on to become the first athlete to retain the Olympic marathon title. In 1968, a car accident in the city of Sheno, 76km from Addis Ababa, left Bikila confined to a wheelchair. His competitive spirit undiminished, he won gold in a 25km cross-country sledge competition in Norway in 1970. Suffering complications from his paralysis, he died in October 1973 and was buried in the presence of Selassie.

    On the 50th anniversary of his win, the 2010 Rome marathon was dedicated to Bikila’s memory and, appropriately, Ethiopia claimed a male and female double. The women took first, second and third places, and the men’s winner, Siraj Gena, picked up a €5,000 bonus, offered by the race organiser, for completing the final 300m barefoot. Although few visitors to Rome could have noticed the small plaque mounted on the wall of the Foro dei Imperiali dedicated to Bikila, he remains a local hero, the “escaping Ethiopian” who ran Italy into the democratic dawn.

    Sport Italia by Simon Martin, published in 2011 by IB Tauris, narrates the history of modern Italy through the national passion of sport.

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    Monuments slated for face-lift

    Posted on 24th April 2012 in The monuments of world



    Monuments slated for face-lift

    Staff file photo by Skip Lawrence

    Raising the American flag during a Memorial Day service at Woodsboro Memorial Park are Dwight Reynolds, past post commander, left and Steve Blank, former post commander.

    Advertisement

    Three Frederick war monuments are scheduled for a spring cleaning by conservators this week.

    The monuments include the Frederick World War I Memorial in Memorial Park near downtown, the War Memorial in Woodsboro and the Braddock Monument along Old National Pike in Braddock Heights.

    Conservators began their work in Lonaconing, in Allegheny County, as snow and rain fell Monday morning, said Nancy Kurtz, national register coordinator for the Maryland Historical Trust.

    The trust is directing the work, which was funded by the Maryland Department of Veterans Affairs. Cost of the week’s cleaning is $14,300, Kurtz said.

    About 50 of the state’s 400 military memorials honoring Maryland veterans are on a three-year cleaning rotation to protect bronze and copper, including the three in Frederick County. Work is expected to take about a week.

    Conservators use gentle residue- and perfume-free detergent to clean the monuments of dirt and corrosion and will then add wax after heating the monuments with a blow torch, Kurtz said.

    “By using this wax with heat, it sort of saturates the bronze and darkens it,” Kurtz said, adding, “It kind of gives it that wet look, and it gives it a lot of protection.”

    Conservators will come to Frederick to begin cleaning the Frederick WWI Memorial Friday, Kurtz said. The bronze sculpture is a life-size figure of Victory atop Vermont granite. It features eight bronze tablets with the names of 2,095 people from Frederick County who served in WWI, including 83 who died. It was made by Italian sculptor, Giuseppe Moretti — whose work appears in places such as Pittsburgh and Birmingham, Ala. — and was dedicated in 1924.

    Kurtz said work is expected to be completed on the Braddock Heights and Woodsboro memorials Saturday. The Braddock Monument, dedicated in 1924, marks the site of a spring reported to have been used by British Gen. Edward Braddock and his aide, Lt. Col. George Washington, as they traveled to Fort Duquesne in Pennsylvania during the French and Indian War in 1755, Kurtz said. The Woodsboro Memorial commemorates more than 200 people who served in both World Wars, including 10 who died.

    “Once they’re treated, we want to keep them in good condition,” Kurtz said. “We don’t want them to go back to green again.”

    Larrie Welsh, commander of the Frederick post of AMVETS, said he thinks the work is a nice way to honor veterans. Welsh said he served in the Army in Germany during the Cold War.

    “I think they have special meaning to all the vets,” Welsh said of the monuments. “I think you like to keep your heritage. You don’t want to forget your history.”

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    Malaya Business Insight

    Posted on 10th April 2012 in The monuments of world
    Details
    Published on Wednesday, 11 April 2012 00:00

    ‘Time, they say, heals pain but it is something to be concerned of when history is revised and truth is perverted.’

    IN last Monday’s commemoration of Bataan day, Japanese Ambassador Toshinao Urabe once again expressed his country’s “heart-felt apologies and deep sense of remorse of the tragedy” that occurred 70 years ago.

    It’s good that we commemorate what happened on April 9, 1942 so the younger generation would be told what our forefathers sacrificed to us to enjoy the freedom that we have today.

    Time, they say, heals pain but it is something to be concerned of when history is revised and truth is perverted. The book “Under the Stacks” by Saul Hofileña criticized many of those perversions.

    There is a chapter “The Yasukuni Shrine and the Japanese War Monuments in the Philippines” where he talked about the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo which pays homage to the millions of Japanese war dead.

    He said in the shrine is an Imperial War Museum which displays countless weapons, guns, armaments, military impedimenta and war memorabilia.

    Hofileña said that prominently displayed in the halls of the museum is a “ strange looking midget plane called an Oka aircraft.”

    “It is an engineless, cigar-shaped suicide aircraft. When called to use, its nose was packed with explosives and bore a single kamikaze helmsman who would guide the plane’s deadly cargo to its predetermined target,” he wrote.

    There is also a statue of a lone kamikaze pilot prominently displayed on the museum grounds, he said.

    Hofileña continued his account of the Yakusuni Shrine: “The statue is an identical twin of another statue which stands in an enclosed shrine in Mabalacat, Pampanga and erected by the Japanese with the help of a former mayor of the town. It is outrageous that a government official would agree to the establishment of a kamikaze statue on the Philippine soil when Filipinos suffered so much in the hands of the Japanese during the Second World War.

    “Aside from that kamikaze monument in Mabalacat, there are two other objectionable war memorials erected by the Japanese and situated in Los Baños, laguna. One honors the memory of Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita, the ‘Tiger of Malaya’, who was given the mission by Tokyo to defend the Philippines during the waning days of Japan’s militaristic empire.

    “His monument is erected on the very site where he was hanged before dawn. There is a plaque written in Japanese without an English or Tagalog translation. Some say it is the last haiku written by Yamashita. The other monument shamelessly honors Gen. Masaharu Homma as a martyr to world peace when we know it was he who led the 14th Army responsible for the fall of the Philippines and for the infamous death march.

    “The twin monuments are disgraceful because Laguna was ground zero for the numerous massacres perpetrated by the Japanese in their ‘subjugation’ campaigns in Southern Luzon.

    “The existence of these monuments on Philippine soil are beyond comprehension to those who have read their history. Maybe the alleged haiku extols Yamashita for a job well done.

    “Why we have forgotten our past so soon should be the subject of another monument to remind us of our collective amnesia.”

    Hofileña’s book is good material to jolt us out of that self-induced amnesia.

    Hofileña said the title of his book , Under the Stacks, is a phrase which means “buried under a pile or heap of books, papers, musty documents, unread volumes, and treasured ephemera bearing words embaled by time.”

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    Brilliant design in Modernist towers that ventilate the Holland Tunnel: Legends & Landmarks

    Posted on 10th April 2012 in The monuments of world

    Sometimes close to a century or more must pass before we take notice of monuments in the neighborhood.

    When that magic chronographic moment arrives, surrounding streetscapes become cleared. Gates and blockades are unlocked, de-hinged, swung open. Distance and dormancy are dismantled before us. What was once off-limits becomes, all at once, passable. The ancient, inaccessible throughout time, suddenly becomes within reach.

    DISCOVERY ON PIER 9

    Walking across the wide breadth of Washington Boulevard toward the neatly landscaped junction of River Drive and Newport Parkway, in the Newport section of Jersey City, I find two Holland Tunnel ventilation towers positioned among circuitous clumps and clusters of glass residential buildings and multi-level, concrete parking decks.

    Backdropped behind them, Manhattan’s architectural fabric pops in pure prismatic clarity. The Hudson River’s sweeping surface breaks and shatters at balustraded esplanade bulkheads. Clouds are pulled across a stunning day moon sky.

    Once again I am here to experience — as I have over the last year during deep-trenched research in preparation for an illustrated lecture I will be giving at the Hoboken Historical Museum on Sunday as part of their extraordinary exhibition “Driving Under the Hudson: The History of the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels” — one of the region’s finest, and yet overlooked, works of early-modernist architecture.

    I look intensely at the first ventilation tower flanking the waterfront walkway and am amazed to think that until recently residents and passersby were prevented from seeing them. Their seclusion and virtual invisibility, I discerned in the archives, had been dictated by the Erie Railroad, which owned this property from the mid-19th century until the 1960s when all of the pioneer railroad companies crumbled under consolidation or bankruptcy. Only wharf workers and harbor mariners were privileged with access. All others could only peer in from what was then a walled-off Henderson Street (now Luis Munoz Marin Boulevard).

    But not anymore — at least not in the eyes of intelligent architects and visionary developers who, by building new structures right at the bank, have brought the towers to the public forefront.

    Over the last 30 years, the smoke has been slowly cleared and a pulsing community — a city within a city — has risen around them. Rotted rail yards, ruinous warehouses and collapsed pier after collapsed pier have all been erased and transformed into the vibrant Newport community.

    The ventilation towers, undoubtedly due to their importance to the Holland Tunnel infrastructure and function, were left standing, becoming powerfully familiar — yet still mysterious — monuments to us.

    HOLLAND’S WONDER

    Though still fenced off to the public, only a few feet separate the viewer from the two androidic vents soldiered at the base and foot the former Erie Pier 9, their forked H-shaped forms and raised corner crenellations figured by the 84 enormous fans that spin constantly to clean out and purify the 1.6-mile-long twin-portal tunnel.

    Across the river, aligned with the Jersey City towers on an almost straight axis with Canal Street, two additional vents loom, completing a transverse flow system never attempted before in tunnel design.

    Standing close to the base tower’s concrete cloister-like passage that casts darting shadows onto the sidewalk, I can see that they stand on a visual axis with two others across the river at Canal Street. It is an order devised by Clifford Holland, one of history’s greatest tunnel engineers, who worked with other brilliant scientists and scholars from 1920 to 1927 to create a vehicular tunnel system that would be the envy — and wonder — of the mechanized world.

    When the tunnel opened in 1927, it spoke to the advent of both the automobile and Modernism. Sure enough, Holland — who died before the tunnel’s completion, leaving the project’s completion to his team of engineers, including the famous Ole Singstad — commissioned the best scientists and engineers from scientific government agencies and universities to conduct intricate physiological and mechanical tests that would successfully prevent motorists from inhaling car exhaust.

    The whole engineering task at first seemed impossible. The tunnel, experts argued, was too long to be properly ventilated.

    The digging itself through sludge and bedrock would be challenge enough. Build a bridge instead, they said. Even Thomas Edison expressed his doubts.

    Holland, fueled by engineering obstacles, proved his critics wrong. By 1925, his innovative ventilation system was in place — all that was needed was a worthy architectural enclosure.

    OUTSIDE OF THEIR TIME

    But Holland’s focus went beyond ethereal engineering. His mechanical magnum opus had to be inviting. The entire machine, to him, would have to be breathtaking. Only the most progressive architects could bring his tunnel to architectural life.

    The Norwegian architect Erling Owre was his first and only choice. Trained at the famed Polytechnic Institute in Trondheim, Owre brought a Scandinavian sensibility to the drafting table — minimalism, craftsmanship, form. He would have been schooled in the traditional — medieval motives like the Romanesque, the Byzantine and the Gothic — but also the newly established Bauhaus in Germany, Russian Constructivism, and the architecture of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. The Art Moderne movement raging across America at that time was largely ignored by Owre — his towers would be original works that had no contemporary, not even in his native Norway where Modernism was already the norm.

    For Holland he erected edifices from spectacular steel girders, colossal poured-in- place concrete columns and yellow cathedral brick — all expressed through slender strings of rounded arches, corbeled courses, glass louvre panels, small gargoyle heads and striking cantilevered bases.

    Owre’s ventilation towers opened doors for him in mid-career. Thereafter he was the supervising architect on the Lincoln Tunnel ventilation shafts, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel — each more mechanically forward, each more architecturally advanced.

    TUNNEL TALK

    Standing there as I have done before, I try to envision their steel pilings woven into the actual tunnel tubes far below. Machine sounds emanate from their louvres. I can hear waves crashing and fizzing below piered floors and low-tide shores.

    I turn to Aquablu, a stepped glass tower designed by Poskanzer Skott and Page + Steel that finds roots in and rises literally from the ventilation towers via a row of attached crenellated buildings. I understand that finally, after decades, the towers show their purpose and place in the landscape.

    This will be the architectural discourse offered when I stand at the podium on Sunday inside the museum — that from architecture come chapters and continuums, that our hidden built heritage, when finally unveiled, reveals inspiration.

    Editor’s Note: John Gomez is founder of the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy and holds a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from Columbia University. E-mail him at preservationtv@gmail.com and follow his preservation news network on Twitter @PreservationTV.

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    Unloved Building in Goshen, N.Y., Prompts Debate on Modernism

    Posted on 7th April 2012 in The monuments of world
    By ROBIN POGREBIN
    Published: April 7, 2012

    GOSHEN, N.Y. — As Modernist buildings reach middle age, many of the stark structures that once represented the architectural vanguard are showing signs of wear, setting off debates around the country between preservationists, who see them as historic landmarks, and the many people who just see them as eyesores.

    The conflict has come in recent months to this quaint village 60 miles north of New York City — with its historic harness-racing track, picturesque Main Street and Greek Revival, Federal and Victorian houses — where the blocky concrete county government center designed by the celebrated Modernist architect Paul Rudolph has always been something of a misfit.

    “I just don’t think it fits with the character of the county seat and the village of Goshen,” said Leigh Benton, an Orange County legislator who grew up in the area. “I just thought it was a big ugly building.”

    Completed in 1967, the building has long been plagued by a leaky roof and faulty ventilation system and, more recently, by mold; it was closed last year after it was damaged by storms, including Tropical Storm Irene.

    Edward A. Diana, the Orange County executive, wants to demolish it, an idea that has delighted many residents but alarmed preservationists, local and national, who say the building should be saved. The county legislature is expected to decide whether to demolish or renovate it next month.

    Those who want to save it call it a prime example of an architectural style called Brutalism that rejected efforts to prettify buildings in favor of displaying the raw power of simple forms and undisguised building materials, like the center’s textured facade.

    “Preservation is not simply about saving the most beautiful things,” said Mark Wigley, the dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. “It’s about saving those objects that are an important part of our history and whose value is always going to be a subject of debate.”

    A similar debate is going on in Chicago, where preservationists have been fighting to save Prentice Women’s Hospital, a concrete, cloverleaf-shaped 1974 structure designed by Bertrand Goldberg that the National Trust for Historic Preservation has placed on its endangered list. In New Haven, the 1972 Veterans Memorial Coliseum was demolished in 2007 despite a campaign to rescue it.

    In Manhattan, 2 Columbus Circle, the 1964 “lollipop” building by Edward Durell Stone, escaped demolition but was renovated in 2008 in a way that stripped away its original facade.

    Preserving charming confections from the 18th- and 19th-century can be a struggle; convincing people to keep more recent, decidedly uncute structures built from 1950 into the 1970s can be a battle of an entirely higher magnitude, especially if they’ve sprung leaks.

    “The phenomenon of a building that’s about 30 to 40 years old being severely out of style and leading to people wanting to alter it or demolish it is very real,” said Frank Sanchis, the director of United States programs at the World Monuments Fund page, about the Orange County Government Center here. The fund put the Goshen building on its 2012 watch list.

    Opinions are even stronger when it comes to Brutalism, a style closely associated with the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, and one that tends to produce weighty monoliths like the F.B.I. headquarters in Washington and Boston City Hall.

    In an interview Theodore Dalrymple, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has written about the architecture of Le Corbusier, described Brutalist buildings as “absolutely hideous, like scouring pads on the retina.”

    “One of those buildings can destroy an entire cityscape that has been built up over hundreds of years,” he said.

    Barry Bergdoll, the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, said: “Brutalism was supposed to bring back all sorts of things like craft — the concrete wasn’t smooth, you could feel the hand of the worker there. But it was perceived in almost the exact opposite way. It’s one of the great public relations failures of all time. Most people think of Brutalist architecture literally — as aggressive, heavy, boding and forbidding.”

    Rudolph, who died in 1997, was a prominent Modernist architect who also designed Yale’s Art and Architecture Building, among others. Architectural historians say the Goshen government center, which features protruding cubes and a corrugated concrete facade resembling corduroy, represents Rudolph at his best.

    “I would easily identify this as one of his top 10,” said Sean Khorsandi, a director of the Paul Rudolph Foundation.

    But Mr. Benton, the county legislator, called it “a world monument to inefficiency.” Each camp has its own estimate for how much it will cost to renovate the center — the preservation side says about $35 million, the county says $65 million. For an additional $20 million, county officials say, they would be able to build a new center (probably traditional) and to improve several other county buildings. The government offices that were in the center have dispersed around the county.

    “I’m a pretty modern type of person when it comes to architecture and paintings,” said Mr. Diana, the county executive. “If the building functioned in the right manner and was effective and efficient, I’d leave the building right where it is.”

    Economics aside, many say the Rudolph building simply has never belonged in Goshen and never will.

    “It’s just so out of place,” said Barbara Hatfield, a longtime county resident. “Goshen is the county seat. There’s a lot of history there.”

    But others argue that the building is part of the area’s history, too.

    “It reflects a snapshot in time in the late ’60s and ’70s, when our history was turbulent,” said Patricia Turner, a resident trained as an architect who wants to save the building. “Isn’t that just as relevant as something that happened in 1868?”

    John Hildreth, a vice president at the National Trust, said architectural taste changes over time and then can change again.

    “There was a time when people weren’t concerned about saving Victorian houses, bungalows, Art Deco buildings — all were not favored styles,” he said. “You have to focus on the significance of the building and not its style, because styles will come and go. We’re at a point where we’re evaluating the recent past and coming up against that.”

    Historians also say appreciating architecture can require an education.

    “It’s like saying, ‘I don’t like Pollack because he splattered paint,’ ” said Nina Rappaport, chairwoman of Docomomo-New York/Tri-State, an organization that promotes the preservation of Modernist architecture. “Does that mean we shouldn’t put it in a museum? No, it means we teach people about these things.”

    But Mr. Dalrymple said the notion that the public needs to be educated to appreciate Brutalism is like saying that people “need to be intimidated out of their taste.”

    No expertise is needed to decide that a building is ugly, he said, adding, “It’s an aesthetic judgment.”

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    Windows Of The World

    Posted on 3rd April 2012 in The monuments of world

    What if you can visit about 120 different cultural landmarks and famous monuments from all over the country in one place? How absolutely convenient, amazing and fun that would be right? Well, Windows of the World at Shenzhen offers just that. But wait, there’s a twist. It’s all in miniature version. Miniature as in, a little smaller than the real ones but nevertheless still exudes a sense and feel of elegance and exquisiteness.

    It is located in the western part of Shenzhen in the People’s Republic of China at Overseas Chinese Town along the beautiful Shenzhen bay covering an area of 480,000sqm. Window of the World is a tourist attraction or theme park with more than 120 reproductions of some of the world’s most well-known attractions such as the breathtaking Eiffel Tower, the famous Arc De Triomphe monument, the gladiator arena, the Rome Colosseum, the good luck fountain of Trevi Fountain, the picturesque Niagara Falls, the history rich Angkor Wat, the mysterious Pyramids of Egypt and Sphinx of Giza, the exquisite Taj Mahal, the giant Big Ben of London, the mind-boggling Leaning Tower of Pisa, the opera loving Sydney Opera House, and the ever popular figure of Statue of Liberty. There’s even a Jurassic Park theme area!

    If you are feeling lackluster before arriving, the moment you step into the Window of the World and explore what it had to offer, one will simply be hype up and begins to feel the energy and life flowing into you. How could one not when surrounded by magnificent sculptures, landmarks and monuments around! Taking pictures will be the first thing that popped into all the excited minds and one does not even need to scratch the head to look for ideal places to take pictures. Almost anywhere, and everywhere can be a perfect post-card picture location. I kid you not! Since most of us (I believe) had never been to that many countries before, having all this popular tourist attractions under one roof, I mean one sky, is simply amazing, albeit at a cost of them being miniature in size.

    Apart from discovering all these unique and interesting landmarks from different countries and taking a plethora of pictures to show off back home to envious friends, family members and relatives, the Window of the World also offers a variety of international restaurants serving cuisines ranging from French cuisine to Mexican delights to Italian pizzas right down to Chinese temptations. Whatever your taste buds craved at that particular moment, you can rest assured that one of the many restaurants there will satisfied your grumbling and demanding stomach and keep it satisfied. However, bear in mind that prices varies from top-end to really affordable mouth-watering food. Whatever your decision, always remember to calculate your budget well beforehand.

    If you got bored or tired from walking around the theme park, there are entertainment shows available in the evening with shows such as “Fervorous Paris Nights” at “Caesar’s Palace” which feature dancers dancing to popular music. Feeling playful? Then you can even get to dressed in Japanese kimonos, take pictures in a Japanese background setting and visit the park around on a horse!

    If you are feeling more adventurous and seek for some thrill and fun activities instead, fear not, there’s always skiing and snow tubing available at the ‘Alps Indoor Skiing’. Skiing in a subtropical city might sound a little far-fetched, but the Indoor Alpine Ski Run in Shenzhen Window of the World offers you four thousand square metres (about 6,200,012 square feet) of indoor piste to ski and it definitely is a one of a kind experience. Other thrillers include navigating the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, playing with bows and arrows at the Archery Field or simply visit the park via cable car. Due to time constraint, we couldn’t join all the rides and entertainments that were offered.

    The admission fee is 120 yuan, roughly around B$25 (or 50 yuan after 7.40pm). Those who are between the ages of 65 and 69 and whose heights are between 1.1 metres and 1.4 metres are charged half-price. Elderly over the age of 70 and those under the height of 1.1 metres gets to enter for free. To reach the Window of the World, one can use the Shenzhen Metro choosing Line 1 at Shijiezhichuang Station, which costs roughly around five yuan. One tip though. Remember to wear comfortable shoes such as sport shoes or sneakers. Definitely not slippers or high heels as the amount of walking you have to do will kill your feet.

    After about four to five hours exploring and discovering the sights and sounds of the Window of the World and it should be enough for sightseeing and tonnes of picture taking moments. Unless of course, if you are highly enthusiastic or have time to kill, spending more time around is not that bad either. I mean why not, when and how often can you say, you have seen nearly what the entire world has to offer. Of course, it’s not the real thing but who cares! After visiting the Window of the World, you can’t help but wish the window at your bedroom offered the same kind of view as well.

    –Courtesy of Borneo Bulletin

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    Artist Falcon Hildred's life work on Wales' industrial heritage safeguarded for future

    Posted on 30th March 2012 in The monuments of world
    Falcon Hildred

    Falcon Hildred at the drawing board

    His eye for detail and love of the history of what mankind has built around it has led him to move into an inhospitable mill in one of the most picturesque parts of Wales.

    Now a North Wales artist has had much of his life’s work observing the world around him safeguarded for future generations – preserving rare records of Wales’ and the UK’s industrial heritage.

    Falcon Hildred, originally from Grimsby, has seen a collection of more than 600 original drawings and watercolours bought for the nation – and will be displayed in an exhibition from September this year.

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    The haul was acquired by the Aberystwyth-based Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), which awarded it £46,700 to buy the unique collection.

    Mr Hildred, 76, now of Blaenau Ffestiniog, moved to Wales in the 1960s, occupying a beautiful – if uninhabitable – Grade II-listed slate mill, called Melin Pant-yr-Ynn, the main structure of which he wasn’t able to live in for five years, forcing him to take up residence in a makeshift shed.

    Around two-thirds of the collection to go on display at the Coalbrookdale Gallery, near Telford in Shropshire, will be of Welsh subjects – with towns that have been captured by Mr Hildred including Cardiff, Newport and Swansea, as well as English towns he lived in including Grimsby, Coventry, London and Birmingham.

    He said: “Drawing was always the strong thing in my life, right from my earliest memory.

    “I was always interested in places where I lived.

    “When I was younger, that was in Grimsby, a predominantly fishing town in Lincolnshire, so it had cranes and that sort of thing.

    “I was always interested in older, industrial stuff – I think I was programmed for that, rather than influenced by what I saw.”

    Mr Hildred went into art school at the age of 16 in the 1950s, and aimed to become an architect, but – in his own words – “failed to make the grades”, subsequently going on to work as an industrial designer.

    He saw that the buildings that had survived the war were starting to be pulled down in the 1950s, to make way for comprehensive redevelopment in the 1960s – but maintains the process was something that “excited” him as an artist.

    “A lot of the good older industrial stuff was being destroyed all over the country,” he said.

    “I was doing it in my spare time – capturing these buildings before they came down, and as that took over, I went from being what I’d term an industrial designer to an ‘industrial archeologist’.”

    His path led to Blaenau Ffestiniog in the late 1960s after he remembered a trip years before with his sister to Snowdonia, and returned to “see what it was like”.

    “I got a map, came here and found it was just a wonderful place,” he said. “It had a wonderful, working country life and I discovered what a wonderful character for industrial archaeology it had,” he said.

    “In the late 1960s I was living in London, but I wanted a place of my own, with character”.

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