Architectural Digest takes you to New York City for an insightful walking tour of Greenwich Village with architect Nicholas Potts. From jazz clubs and coffee shops to the dramatic arch at Washington Square Park and the landmark buildings on Waverly Place, “The Village” continues to exist at the nexus of New York’s past, present, and future.
Come along with Nick as he explores the architectural details hidden in plain sight. Check out Nicholas Potts here:
DW Reporter Lukas Stege explores the Polish city of Gdańsk, where the Eastern Bloc began its decline! Communism‘s deterioration picked up pace when the port workers at Lenin Shipyard went on strike in 1980 and the independent union Solidarity was founded.
00:00 Intro 00:15 The Old City of Gdańsk 01:04 A Port Ride in the Pirate Ship Ferry 01:44 The Old Shipyard and the Solidarność or Solidarity Movement 06:57 Lost Place and Free Space for Artists, Galleries and Bars 07:58 Gallery Mleczny Piotr 08:36 100cnia
Join Lukas on his journey through Europe’s recent history, which was heavily influenced by these events in Gdańsk. And he also brings us to a very special lost place in this port city!
CREDITS Report: Lukas Stege, Anne Termeche Camera: Holm Weber Editing: Klaus Hellmich
The Battle of Stalingrad began in August 1942, subjecting its residents to months of living hell. But few doubted that the city was worth defending; its significance to the Soviet project made it too important to abandon.
Below the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico lies a submerged world of extraordinary beauty. Caves once created a subterranean labyrinth that the earliest human settlers seemingly associated with magic. After these passageways flooded at the end of the last Ice Age, they created reservoirs that proved essential for the success of Maya cities. Now a fascinating project is revealing the remarkable range of archaeology preserved in this underworld.
Goddesses and spiritual beings also display an impressive range, in this case of powers. There can be a tendency for modern audiences to focus on a single attribute – Venus as the goddess of love, for instance – but this obscures the remarkable breadth of gifts they could bestow on worshippers. An exhibition examining the nature of feminine power provides an opportunity to consider the divine and the demonised.
The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil’s Triangle, is an urban legend focused on a loosely-defined region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and ships are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
For centuries, scientists have struggled to explain why hundreds of ships disappear when they reach the Bermuda Triangle. This area in the Atlantic Ocean is home to approximately 300 vessels, with several of these ships capsizing under mysterious circumstances. Today, experts are diving into these crystal clear waters to visit some of the abandoned shipwrecks and determine why they never made it to dry land.
Archaeologists Vinzenz and Ulrike Koch Brinkmann have spent the last 40 years dedicated to the study of polychromy—or “many colors” in Greek—in ancient sculpture. Once a fringe area of study, their research combats the misconception of white purity in ancient Greece and Rome. They reflect on the marble bust of Caligula and how the reconstruction of its former color can help us better understand history.
“The underworld, the afterlife, is fairly dank, dark, shadowy; quite frankly, it’s a bit boring. Somewhat like waiting at a bus depot.”
Homer’s Odyssey depicts an afterlife that is relatively dull, with heroic actions and glory reserved for the living. Nonetheless, people in Southern Italy in the fourth century BCE were captivated by the underworld and decorated large funerary vases with scenes of the afterlife—the domain of Hades and Persephone, where sinners like Sisyphus are tortured for eternity and heroes like Herakles and Orpheus performed daring feats.
Little is known about precisely how these vases were used and seen in death rituals. A new book by Getty Publications, Underworld: Imagining the Afterlife in Ancient South Italian Vase Painting, brings together 40 such vases and explores new research on them.
In this episode, Getty Museum curator of antiquities David Saunders discusses these enormous and often elaborate vases, explaining the myths they depict and what is known about the ways in which they were used. Saunders is editor of Underworld.
This short film by Martin Mulcahy was created for the launch of the 2022-23 exhibition of the Made In Chicago Museum, currently running at Klairmont Kollections, 3117 N. Knox Ave., Chicago, IL.
The film, the museum exhibit, and the corresponding online museum, highlight the many “everyday objects” manufactured by Chicago companies between 1900-1970, bringing to life the stories behind them and the legacy of items we might otherwise view as obsolete (or at best, “vintage”).
The Made In Chicago Museum was founded and curated by Andrew Clayman, and design elements of the exhibit, including this short film, are the work of Chicago designer and filmmaker Martin Mulcahy. For more, visit https://www.madeinchicagomuseum.com/
Henri Matisse’s landmark painting “The Red Studio” documented the artworks displayed in his workspace just outside Paris as it existed in 1911. For the first time since then, almost all the individual pieces depicted in his painting have been reunited for an installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Correspondent Rita Braver reports.
Is there a novel more revered—and more famously unread—than James Joyce’s Ulysses? Despite its complexities, this love letter to Dublin, published a century ago, is a very readable chronicle of everyday life and everyday struggles. It’s a book about marriage, sex, religion, food, art, loneliness, companionship, and so much else. It’s a book, that is, about life. We hope that the following essays will send you on a quest to discover, or rediscover, this most staggering of epics.