Despite there is still a lot to say about the latest haute couture shows, I'd like to stop for a while and continue yesterday’s architectural thread.
If you’re into architecture and design and happen to be in Stockholm, don’t miss the Arkitekturmuseet (Architecture Museum – already mentioned in a previous post).
The admission ticket is really cheap (50 SEK) and you can even get a combined ticket and visit it together with the Modernamuseet.
The main exhibition space consists in a wide room with big windows where you can admire a lot of scale models, projects and plans set along work-tables with pictures and texts explaining inspirations, influences and urban planning ideas.
The museum also has a rich archive (that can be accessed through a database) of roughly 2 million drawings and sketches, 600.000 photographs and more than 2000 models illustrating the history of Swedish building and the work of both Swedish (among them also Gunnar Asplund, Sigurd Lewerentz, Sven Markelius and Ralph Erskine) and foreign architects working in Sweden.
During the Christmas holidays the museum hosted the "Gingerbread House Contest and Show", a fun event that put a smile on my face.
Divided in different categories - 'architects', 'bakers', 'children' (up to 12 years old) and 'everyone else' - and with a panel of judges including museum experts, architects and bakers, the competition was about building your own gingerbread house following a specific theme, “Monster Architecture” and its impacts on modern life and human beings.
I absolutely loved the main topic since it helped raising economic and architectural issues and tried to find an answer to one of the questions posed by the organisers, "what hides in the darkest closets of architecture?", while at the same time it gave free rein to people’s fantasy and imagination, but I also liked the fact that, being divided in different categories, the event was open to practically everybody.
I found it really great to have a category for children in a competition that had a rather "grown up theme" while it asked its participants to employ for their works a rather unusual and fun material, gingerbread.
The results were absolutely amazing and extremely original: there were monsters eating houses, spooky houses à la Addams Family with a little graveyard included, elaborate cathedrals, ghosts hiding in little gingerbread cupboards, robots, shopping malls, skyscrapers casting monster-like shadows and even runways complete with models.
One of my favourite gingerbread creations was a vintage 1958 Vogue cover with a model clad in a shocking pink dress with matching hat and shoes. A perfect example of stylish architecture, rather than "monster architecture".
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