The Hammering Man is a 21-meter metal statue by the American sculptor Jonathan Borofsky, located in front of the city entrance to the Frankfurt Trade Fair. When the statue was commissioned in 1990 it was intended as a symbol of Frankfurt’s industrious economy. But at some point in the early Read More …
In the Restoration period of the nineteenth century, every self-respecting European country had to have a King. So when Belgium declared its independence from the Netherlands in 1830, finding a King was the first order of business. There was no tradition of a Belgian royal family (in fact no tradition Read More …
Around 792 A.D. Charlemagne ordered the building of the Palatine Chapel on this site, and the rest of the cathedral was gradually built up around it. On Christmas Day of the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned “Emperor of the Romans” by Pope Leo III. This did not happen in Aachen, Read More …
No, this is not the kind of fountain where you throw in a coin and make a wish. It is a fountain which symbolizes ‘The Circulation of Money’ (in German ‘Der Kreislauf des Geldes). I suppose the message might be that money isn’t of much use unless it’s circulating. The Read More …
Every summer since 2008, the city of Weikersheim has hosted an outdoor sculpture exhibition of works by a prominent contemporary sculptor. When I was in Weikersheim in the summer of 2009 they had an outdoor exhibition of eighteen works by the German sculptor Guido Messer (born 1941 in Buenos Aires), Read More …
Quinquennially, that is once every five years, the city of Wuppertal holds a mid-summer celebration called ‘The Long Table’ (der lange Tisch) in honor of the city’s founding in 1929, when the cities and towns of Barmen, Cronenberg, Elberfeld, Elberfeld-West, Heckinghausen, Langerfeld-Beyenburg, Oberbarmen, Ronsdorf, Uellendahl-Katernberg and Vohwinkel were all merged Read More …
For years I was mildly puzzled about who Saint Germain was, but only mildly. Now that I have finally looked him up, it turns out he was born around the year 496 and was Bishop of Paris from 555 until his death in 576. According to a poet called Venantius Read More …
Montparnasse Cemetery, with a surface area of 19 hectares, is the second largest cemetery in Paris. It is located in southern Paris and was opened in 1924. When you come in at the main entrance, at 3 Boulevard Edgar Quinet, there are some laminated cemetery maps hanging by strings on Read More …
More than a hundred meters above the old town of Besançon, Vauban’s Citadel covers eleven hectares on the top of Mont Saint-Etienne. Besançon was controlled by the Spanish until 1674, when it was besieged and conquered by a French army of about 70,000 men under Vauban’s direction. Under one of Read More …
This highly unusual memorial consists of 2,711 concrete slabs or “stelae” arranged in a grid pattern on a slightly sloping ground occupying an entire city block of 19,000 square meters. You can enter and walk through the field from all four sides and experience the wave-like form of the stelae Read More …