Architects created ambitious spaces with an eye toward the sensory in a series of museums, memorials and public places such as the the Museum at the Gateway Arch, St. Louis seen above. If there are themes connecting the best architecture of 2018, one of them is certainly the eagerness of architects to give shape to complex and varied experiences, the more sensory the better. This is architecture that offers a sequence of events revealed gradually with constantly shifting perspectives, as opposed to classic modernism’s tightly controlled image of architecture as geometric tableau.
On Tuesday January 29, 2019, Europe’s biggest fire festival Up Helly Aa lit up the sky as Lerwick, in far nothern Scotland's Shetland islands, celebrated the Vikings who once ruled there. The event takes place annually on the last Tuesday of every January, and now attracts visitors from all around the world. While it starts with a morning parade through the snow, it’s at night that the festival is at its most enchanting, and when its strange costumes and customs come alive. As seen above, a replica Viking longboat is set alight during the Up Helly Aa festival in Lerwick, Shetland Islands, far northern Scotland.
The exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London presented an extraordinary collection of personal artefacts and clothing belonging to the iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Locked away for 50 years after her death, this was the first exhibition of this collection outside Mexico. Clothes were more than just clothes to Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), the Mexican tyro of Surrealist self-portraiture. This should be underscored by “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving,” an exhibition — based on one by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London — which opens Feb. 8, 2019 at the Brooklyn Museum.
Anyone who has seen “Casablanca” knows the connection between Portugal and World War II refugees. But few know the story of the Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who in 1940 saved tens of thousands of lives only to be punished for this heroism by his own government. As we mark Holocaust Remembrance Day on Sunday, we should honor this man who engaged in what one historian called “perhaps the largest rescue action by a single individual during the Holocaust.”
