A rotary snowplow is a railway machine built around an enormous spinning wheel of blades. Pushed into mountain snowdrifts by locomotives, it cuts through packed snow and throws it away from the tracks through a directional chute. Early models carried a separate steam engine whose only purpose was to turn the blades.
The F60 is a half-kilometre-long mining machine built in East Germany and among the largest movable machines ever constructed. Excavators fed it soil and rock, which travelled across the open mine on conveyor belts before being deposited on the opposite side. Its purpose was not to extract coal, but to remove up to 60 metres of earth covering it.
The DaisyBell is an avalanche-control device carried beneath a helicopter. Hovering above unstable snow, it ignites hydrogen and oxygen inside a metal bell, directing a pressure wave downward to trigger a controlled avalanche. Nothing is fired into the mountain or left behind, and one load can produce up to 50 blasts.
French writer Roger Caillois spent more than twenty-five years collecting stones whose natural markings resembled landscapes, forests, storms, ruins and figures. None were carved or painted; their images were produced by mineral pressure, fractures and time. His collection eventually grew to more than a thousand specimens and inspired The Writing of Stones, in which geology becomes a form of art created before human beings arrived to look at it.
Espai Corberó is the architectural world created by Catalan sculptor Xavier Corberó in Esplugues de Llobregat, outside Barcelona. Monumental concrete arches, stairways, pools, courtyards and rooms open to the sky form a labyrinth occupied by sculptures in stone, marble and bronze. Beneath it is a 700-square-metre vaulted auditorium built without a single supporting column.
Villa Durazzo Pallavicini is a nineteenth-century Romantic garden in Genoa designed as a theatrical journey. Its route is divided into a prologue, three acts and an exodus, leading visitors past a hermitage, amusement park, ruined castle, captain’s tomb and Dantean grottoes before emerging beside a lake and the gardens of Flora. Scenery, architecture and Masonic symbolism move the visitor through nature, history and death toward a final act of catharsis.
Coccoi pintau, meaning “decorated bread,” is Sardinian ceremonial bread sculpted into lace-like crowns, flowers, pomegranates, birds, fish and turtles. The firm semolina dough is cut with knives, scissors, wheels and tweezers before baking, with different forms made for weddings, Easter and religious festivals. Breadmaking was traditionally a communal ritual beginning at dawn; decoration was entrusted to the women with the steadiest hands.
In 1831, Prussian architect Carl Ferdinand Langhans built the Pleorama, an indoor simulation of a voyage around the Bay of Naples. Twenty-four passengers sat inside a wooden boat floating in a pool while enormous painted coastlines moved past on either side. The boat rocked, a boatman sang, the light changed and Mount Vesuvius appeared to erupt. The journey lasted an hour and went nowhere.
Bruno Munari was an Italian artist and designer who treated children’s books as seriously as machines or architecture. His 1963 book Bruno Munari’s Zoo leads readers through a half-real, half-imaginary menagerie using bold colours, unusual layouts and mischievous signposts. More than twenty animals receive brief introductions: a rhinoceros is always ready to fight, a kangaroo is all legs but does not know it, and a peacock is proud simply because he is a peacock.
Domenico Gnoli was an Italian painter who enlarged the smallest details of clothing and furniture until they became strange, monumental landscapes. A collar, zipper, braid, pocket or corner of a bed might fill an entire canvas, usually with its owner cropped away. He mixed sand into acrylic paint, giving fabric the weight and texture of architecture. Gnoli died of cancer in 1970, aged 36, just as his paintings were gaining an international audience.