Villa Mairea
Villa Mairea is a villa, guest-house, and rural retreat designed and built by the Finnish modernist architect Alvar Aalto.
Travelling menagerie
These days a travelling menagerie is so far removed from the reality of our daily lives that it barely seems possible such a thing existed at all. But in the 18th and 19th centuries the only chance people who lived in villages and most towns ever had of seeing live wild animals was when a travelling menagerie visited their area. An event that invariably caused great excitement.
Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky was a patient poet. His major work was the long poem "A" - he never referred to it without the quotation marks - which he began in 1927 and was to work on for the rest of his life, albeit with an eight-year hiatus between 1940 and 1948. The poem was divided into 24 sections, reflecting the hours of the day. The first eleven sections contain a lot of overtly political passages but interweave them with formal concerns and models that range from medieval Italian canzone through sonnets to free verse and the music of Bach. Especially the sections of "A" written shortly before World War II are political: Section 10 for example, published in 1940, is an intense and horrifying response to the fall of France. The tone of the poem changes for good with Section 12, which is longer than the first eleven sections combined. Zukofsky introduces material from his family life and celebrates his love for his wife Celia and his son Paul. From here on "A" interweaves the political, historical and personal in more or less equal measure. The extensive use of music in this work reflects the importance of Zukofsky's collaborations with his wife and son, both professional musicians. "A" grew frequently difficult and even eccentric (section 16 is only four words long). The complete poem, 826 pages long, beginning with the word "A" and ending with "Zion", was published in 1978.
Villa Necchi Campiglio
Villa Necchi provides an oasis of calm in the centre of Milan. Surrounded by a beautiful garden with swimming pool and tennis court, the villa is an unexpected find an otherwise hectic city.
Enzo Mari
Enzo Mari was an Italian designer.
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian Bengali polymath. Had he been born in the West he would now be as revered as Shakespeare and Goethe, according to Ravi Shankar.
Hashima Island
Hashima Island is an island off the coast of Nagasaki in southwest Japan. Coal mines operated on Hashima from the 1890s, and at one point in time it was the most densely populated place in the world. At its peak, over 5000 miners lived with their families on an island measuring just over a kilometre long and half as wide, working in mines at depths of up to 660m. When the mine closed there was no reason for anyone to reside here, and in the early 1970s the entire island was abandoned, leaving the structures and contents to rot.
AtomAge magazine
AtomAge magazine was a fetish magazine published in Britain by the clothes designer John Sutcliffe.
Giant soap bubbles
Giant soap bubbles have extremely thin film of soapy water enclosing air that forms a hollow sphere with an iridescent surface.
Delmore Schwartz
Delmore Schwartz spent time at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin before finally graduating from New York University in 1935. Soon after graduation, he made his parents' disastrous marriage the subject of his most famous short story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" which was published in 1937 in the first issue of Partisan Review.