Chillin' in the Summertime

" Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness ." - Frank Gehry (architect of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao) Sydney has the Opera House. Paris the Eiffel Tower. New York the Statue of Liberty. Iconic structures that instantly identify the major city in question. And since 1997, Bilbao—a lovely city but one that heretofore had never been considered major in the same class as Sydney, Paris, or New York—has had the Guggenheim Museum. Guggenheim, from under the spider sculpture A triumph of design by Canadian architect Frank Gehry, the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao dominates the city. A contest was held among architects for a design that could weave between existing structures and a sloped hillside to create a museum for masterpieces that could become a masterpiece itself. Gehry won that contest, and the result was a structure that put both Bilbao and Gehry on the international map. Another Guggenheim view, with the bridg

“ I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another .” – Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front WWI Cemetery This year marks the 100 th anniversary of the end of WWI, or as it is known in many places in Europe, the Great War. And though no more veterans of that war are alive now, its scars are still vivid. Some are physical scars on the land. Some are emotional scars living deep in the psyches of towns and nations. Most are the scars of events that had their origins in the Great War, particularly the Russian Revolution that succeeded in large part in reaction to the toll WWI was taking on Russia at the time, and WWII which had its seeds in conclusion of the first world war.   Nowhere are these scars more apparent that i