Melencolia I (1514) by Albrecht Dürer

Conjectures and theories about Dürer’s solid: an overview

(See also “A new link between Melencolia I and the golden ratio” and “A Melencolia sequel: tracing Dürer’s point of view”)

The copper engraving “Melencolia I” (1514) by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528) remains one of the most enigmatic works in the history of Art. At first view, the composition seems as a jumble of apparently unrelated objects, some of which cannot even be recognized or named. Behind the first layer of perception, that the eye catches immediately, a closer inspection reveals smaller objects, chaotically scattered or even half hidden.

The picture is dominated by a sitting angel, presumably feminine but muscular, whose glance is fixed somewhere in the distance. With her right hand she holds a seemingly idle pair of compasses, while with her left hand she supports her head, gloomy faced, as if dried up of inspiration. At her feet, and half hidden underneath her long garment, lay several carpenter’s tools: a plane, a pair of pliers, a saw and some nails. On her right, a putto sits on a round millstone or grindstone, occupied with scribbling something on a small board fixed on his knees, hiding his work from the viewer with his left hand. Remarkably, the millstone seems to have an axle socket slightly off – centered. Diametrically of the angel stands a large geometric solid, which we will refer to as “the Dürer solid” in this essay. Only four faces of the solid can be seen from the viewer’s point of view. In front of the solid, a dog is calmly rolled up before a sphere. In the background of all these stands what seems to be part of a building, two walls meeting seemingly perpendicularly and fixed on them appear a balance, a hourglass and a bell. A magic square is inscribed on the wall facing the viewer: a square arrangement of the numbers 1 to 16 such as the sum of each row, column and diagonal is equal to 34. A ladder leans on the wall behind the structure while far in the horizon, through the only part of the composition which is not crammed with objects, providing thus an unobstructed view, some sea or lake can be seen and even the houses of some village on its shores. A luminous celestial object on the night sky, possibly a comet, sheds light over the landscape, which is covered by a bright arc, resembling a lunar rainbow. And against the sky, over the whole composition of objects, earthly and heavenly, hovers an imaginary bat – like creature, having only two clawed front legs and the tail of a lizard. The creature stretches its body and its wings to reveal, as if tattooed on its own skin, the inscription “Melencolia§I”.

The conundrum presented by the engraving has been studied extensively in the past by many researchers, and several different interpretations have been offered. Most of these are attempts to guess Dürer’s own intentions, while some could even be described as wild guesses or long shots. Sometimes the interpretations given are not very different from the interpretations of a rather abstract poem: it seems that none of them is more or less “correct” than the others. Dürer has left for us a riddle whose answer is highly susceptible to subjectivity, without leaving any instructions on how this enigmatic work should be read after all. Only a few features of the picture are rather clear, such as the year 1514 appearing in the base row of the magic square. Dürer signed his work AD1514, giving himself the solution to this minor puzzle (note that AD stands for “Anno Domini” and “Albrecht Dürer” at the same time). The inverted 5 of the magic square is generally agreed that represents the month of the year 1514 in which Duerer’s mother died, an event undoubtedly linked to melancholy. It has been suggested that the magic square itself is borrowed from a talisman of the German occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Netteshime (1486 – 1535). Cornelius Agrippa intended the talisman, or “Jupiter’s square”, as a shield from the bad influence of planet Saturn, which could cause melancholy (in medieval times, scholars associated Saturn with melancholy, one of the four humors of ancient medicine). This explanation is at least possible and reasonable, and is supported by the fact that Agrippa had visited Nurnberg, Dürer’s city, in 1510. Little else, if anything, about the picture has been resolved satisfactorily, let alone undoubtedly.

The comet, the bat – like creature, the landscape, the lunar rainbow, the building, the ladder, the scales, the hourglass, the bell, the putto, the millstone, the angel, the tools, the sphere have all been, and still are, subjects of guessing. Even the title of the work, “Melencolia I”, remains largely unresolved, partly due to the misspelled “melancholia” (in latin) and partly due to the mysterious “I”. Of special interest in this essay is the Dürer’s solid, the geometric object dominating the left part of the engraving. The proposed theories or conjectures about the solid can be distinguished in two categories. The first is comprised of theories about the exact geometric nature of the solid. The second collects all theories about the possible message the solid conveys or about what the solid stands for in the general context of “Melencolia I”.

Examining the first category, these are some of the proposed solutions of the riddle:

1. The truncated rhombohedron hypothesis: Most researchers agree that the solid is probably what in Solid Geometry is called a “truncated rhombohedron”. The name of it may seem somewhat repelling, however it is a rather simple solid with six faces, all of which are rhombi. A rhombus is a quadrilateral with all of its sides having the same length (by school Geometry it can be proved that it is also a parallelogram). The rhombohedron is a solid constructed by repeating a rhombus six times and looks like a dice whose angles are not right. A “truncated rhombohedron” is a rhombohedron with its two facing vertices cut off. It must be stressed that the assertion that the Dürer solid is a truncated rhombohedron is simply a conjecture and is not supported by any of Durer’s writings or by any other data. The only reason leading to a general agreement on the truncated rhombohedron hypothesis is that the Dürer’s solid simply looks like a truncated rhombohedron.

2. The truncated rhombohedron – 72° hypothesis: Some researchers have even made a step further, to assume that the angles of each face of the rhombohedron are 72 and 108 degrees (i.e. 1/5 and 3/10 of the full turn). Mathematically, these values are of special importance and link the Dürer’s solid to the notorious number φ, the ancient “golden ratio” or “golden mean”. Indeed, the above angles refer to a special kind of polygon, called a regular convex pentagon, which is a shape with five equal sides and five equal angles (all of them equal to 108 degrees). It can be proved that the chords of such a shape are in golden ratio to its sides.

3. The scaling hypothesis: It has also been argued that a vertical compression of the engraving by a factor sqrt(φ) turns the picture into a square and the solid into a truncated cube, providing thus another link to the golden ratio.

4. The truncated rhombohedron – 80° hypothesis: According to another point of view, resulting from measurements based on quantitative assumptions, the angle of the rhombohedron is approximately 80 degrees, which by mathematical standards is a rather humble number with no miraculous properties as the ones mentioned above.

5. The heptagon hypothesis: Despite the apparent humbleness of the number 80 mentioned above, it has been observed that it is suspiciously close to the number 77,2, which would be the value of an angle of the irregular pentagon produced if five of the seven vertices of a regular convex heptagon were joined.

6. The truncated rhombohedron – circumscribed sphere hypothesis: According to this theory, Dürer observed that while six of his rhombohedron vertices lie on the same sphere, the other two, those at the bottom and the top, stick out of it. In order to make his solid beautiful, the artist cut of the two protruding vertices in a way that the resulting truncated solid is circumscribed in a sphere. The theory is supported by the familiarity of the artist to the so called “plan and elevation” method, i.e. the using of projections of solids on planes, which would have been of great assistance in the process of the truncation.

7. The rectangular slab hypothesis: Apart from the rhombohedron conjecture, the Dürer’s solid has also been viewed as a nearly rectangular slab, or parallelepiped (a matchbox), with two opposite corners cut off.

8. The ambivalence hypothesis: This can be summarized in physicist David Finkelstein’s phrase “I propose that Dürer designed the Octahedron [meaning the solid] to be ambivalent, irresistibly construed as a truncated rhomboid in one orientation, as a truncated slab in another, and as something else from yet another”.

Number 1 of the above hypotheses may be traced to Erwin Panofsky (“The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer”, 1943), a standard reference on Dürer. Numbers 2 and 6 have been proposed by Peter Schreiber (Historia Mathematica 26, 1999, 369 – 377). Numbers 5 and 7 are found in works by David Finkelstein, who attributes number 7 to personal communication with Dr. Basimah Khulusi, apparently a medical doctor. Number 4 has been proposed by C. MacGillavry (Mac Gillavry C., Nederl. Akad. Wetenschap. Proc. Series B 84, 1981, 287).

A number of explanations have been proposed about some meaning conveyed by the solid, or why Dürer included it in “Melencolia I”, putting it in such a prominent position. Some of these are:

1. The philosopher’s stone hypothesis: According to a point of view, the Dürer’s solid is a symbol, or image, of the medieval philosopher’s stone or the “stone of Saturn” (this is the same stone that, in ancient Greek mythology, Saturn swallowed instead of Jupiter). Such alchemic positions can be found in www.alchemylab.com.

2. The star of David hypothesis: David Finkelstein sees a Jewish star (a hexagram) of David on the projection of the solid on the ground. In his opinion the “circumcised rhomboid” is a sign of Hebraicism from Dürer’s part.

3. The human skull hypothesis: Many see a rather deformed human skull in the strange stain on the front face of the Dürer’s solid, with unclear meaning.

4. The four ghosts (or hidden faces) hypothesis: David Finkelstein again noticed in 2004 that “anyone who steps back several paces from a good print and focuses on the shading of the front face of the polyhedron patiently for a minute or so, will soon find or construct a face” which, by some sort of Necker’s cube illusion, could be at the same time either a man’s or a woman’s face. After mentioning that these faces may represent Dürer’s mother and father, Finkelstein denotes that “I am less certain of a third hidden face”. By 2008 Finkelstein had discovered two more faces on the solid which he claims first to have inferred and then found. His overall theory about “Melencolia I” is a medley of subliminal images, gematria, rebuses and anagrams, to arrive, as far as the solid is concerned, to the conclusion that it is a puzzle “unsolvable in principle but appears to solve itself in some views. It declares that the Intellectual World may have a mathematical design but, if so, that design is inaccessible to us”.

I must say that some of the above theories and explanations seem to be, to me at least, too farfetched and perhaps many of them did not cross Dürer’s mind, not even as a distant possibility. It must be taken into account that Dürer was an artist of the Renaissance era and, a genius as he might be and a master of the burin, his capabilities were certainly within the boundaries of human ability. It is rather doubtful whether, apart from some basic principles of perspective, Dürer could have rendered his solid with such precision and mastery to deliberately create such a subtle illusion as the ambivalence hypothesis requires. As pointed out in a previous essay (Albrecht Dürer’s eyer lini), the bell of the upper right corner of the picture is after all inaccurately drawn. The 72 degrees hypothesis is plausible and rather tempting to adopt, however there is nothing specific in the engraving to support it. I have more respect to the 80 degree hypothesis, as it is the result of a calculation with data taken directly from the picture, be it so under certain assumptions. The scaling hypothesis is simply wrong: it takes some imagination to link the dimensions of the picture to number φ, and the solid does not look like a cube under the scaling by a factor sqrt(φ). The circumscribed sphere hypothesis is the only one providing a reasonable explanation of why and how Dürer arrived to his solid. The heptagon hypothesis is supported by a newly found sketch of Dürer, showing an irregular pentagon inscribed in a circle with an apex angle approximately equal to 80 degrees (Weitzel, Hans. A further hypothesis on the polyhedron of A. Dürer, Historia Mathematica 31 ,2004, 11). If this is accepted as a rough sketch of the solid, then MacGivallry’s result is confirmed. The rectangular slab hypothesis is plausible but unsupported.

I have several times ventured to discover for myself the ghosts that allegedly haunt Dürer’s solid and I have indeed found several figures that might be taken for human faces. I have also found other figures that might be taken for the head of a rat, the head of an alien and the head of a lamb. It seems to me that there might be still other such figures that remain undetected, which however are of not very different nature than the face on Mars.

Instead of trying to explore Dürer’s mind, by sometimes wild guesswork, in order to understand what he could possibly have intended to depict with this enigmatic solid of his, I find much more interesting the problem of understanding what he actually did depict. And the only way to achieve this, in my opinion, is to build up solid arguments based on direct measurements and calculations.

The Nuremberg Battle, 1561

The citizens of Nuremberg, Germany behold what appears to be a large scale aerial battle followed by the appearance of a large black triangular object and a large crash (with smoke) outside the city. A news notice (early form of newspaper) was printed 10 days later (April 14, 1561) describing the event.

At sunrise on the 14th April 1561, the citizens of Nuremberg beheld “A very frightful spectacle.” The sky appeared to fill with cylindrical objects from which red, black, orange and blue white disks and globes emerged. Crosses and tubes resembling cannon barrels also appeared whereupon the objects promptly “began to fight one another.” This event is depicted in a famous 16th century woodcut above by Hans Glaser.

Here is the local news eyewitness report of 1561 :
At dawn of April 4, in the sky of Nuremberg (Germany), a lot of men and women saw a very alarming spectacle where various objects were involved, including balls “approximately 3 in the length, from time to time, four in a square, much remained insulated, and between these balls, one saw a number of crosses with the color of blood. Then one saw two large pipes, in which small and large pipes, were 3 balls, also four or more. All these elements started to fight one against the other.” (Gazette of the town of Nuremberg).

What is really amazing is that 5 years after this incident on August 7th 1566, the same black spheres were seen fighting again, this time over Basel Germany this time the balls would either vanish or appeared to be “consumed” by the other. Below is another woodcut from that event.

Found Here: http://mysteryhistory.tv/2011/04/april-4-1561-ufos-battle-over-nuremberg-germany/

One of the most astounding of documented sightings of aerial phenomena took place on April 4, 1561 at dawn over Nuremberg, Germany. What was described could only be called a war in the heavens, with a wide variety of craft ranging from spheres to spear-like cylinders to crosses and “plates”. The sky was apparently filled with the machines, clashing in battle for well over an hour. The battle was such that a winner was perceived as well. Spheroid UFOs were seen emerging from cylindrical ‘motherships‘. At the conclusion of the battle, it seems a magnificent, black, spear-like super-ship of some kind came upon the scene. An ancient woodcut was created by Hans Glaser to document the event.

Found Here: http://jasonsalyers.com/articles/theories/nazi-ufos/

Konrad Wachsmann

Konrad Wachsmann (born May 16, 1901 in Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany; died Nov. 25, 1980 in Los Angeles, California) was a German modernist architect. He is notable for his contribution to the mass production of building components.

Originally apprenticed as a cabinetmaker, Wachsmann studied at the arts-and-crafts schools of Berlin and Dresden and at the Berlin Academy of Arts (under the Expressionist architect Hans Poelzig). During the late 1920s he was chief architect for a manufacturer of timber buildings. He designed a summer house for Albert Einstein, one of his lifelong friends. He received the Prix de Rome from the German Academy in Rome in 1932.

In 1938 he emigrated to Paris and in 1941 to the United States, where he began a collaboration with Walter Gropius and developed the "Packaged House System", a design for a house which could be constructed in less than nine hours. Before the end of the Second World War he also developed a mobile aircraft hanger for the Atlas Aircraft Corporation. He would later design aircraft hangers for the U.S. Air Force in the 1960s.

Wachsmann taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago from 1949 to 1964 and at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles from 1964 to 1974.^[1]

He is buried in his native Frankfurt an der Oder.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Wachsmann

Form finding Techniques
Some architects have based their work in the interest in natural systems, in the relation of experimental models to geometry and in iterative mathematics and the contribution of irregularity to the strength in biological and architectural structures.
His research includes a brad range of studies in nature as a source for architectural an engineering design, and is always dirtied towards applications in construction.
They are particularly interested in the natural processes of self-generation of forms and in the structural behavior of those forms.
In their work, form finding is a design instrument, based on empirical processes that utilise the self-organisation of material systems under the influence of extrinsic forces. The range of possible forms is determined by the choice and definition of the conditions under which the form finding process take place.
One of this architects was Konrad Wachsmann.

Konrad Wachsmann was born in 1901. After an apprenticeship as carpenter he studied at the arts-and-crafts schools of Berlin and Dresden and at the Berlin Academy of Arts. In 1938 he emigrated to Paris and in 1941 to the United States, where he developed several projects and collaborate whith different architects.
The project that best shows form-finding processes is the large span aircraft hangars for the American Air Force, a space grid system that incorporated a relatively complicated universal connector, made from a combination of four standard die forged elements which allowed up to 20 tubular members to be connected at each joint.

Found Here: http://parasitevisions.wordpress.com/2010/09/04/form-finding-techniques-konrad-wachsmann/

The Holocaust | Pentagram | Burnt Offering | Ritual Mass Human Sacrifice

The word "holocaust" originally derived from the Greek word holokauston, meaning "a completely (holos) burnt (kaustos) sacrificial offering", or "a burnt sacrifice offered to a god". In Greek and Roman pagan rites, gods of the earth and underworld received dark animals, which were offered by night and burnt in full. The word "holocaust" was later adopted in Greek translations of the Torah to refer to the olah^[3], standard communal and individual sacrificial burnt offerings that Jews were required^[4] to make in the times of the Beit HaMikdash (Temple in Jerusalem).

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Holocaust



Many who will read or hear excerpts of the previous article about the Vatican-Jesuit Holocaust will remain unconvinced, if not horrified by the claims which its contains.

The claim that a three hundred mile (plus) wide Pentagram of supreme evil can be formed by the precise true geographic location of the worst Nazi Human Sacrifice Camps of WWII will strike many as the “imagination” of conspiracy writers – the same fanciful notion as those who would see religious symbols in simple pieces of toast, or clouds.

Yet the Pentagram is able to be drawn and at its precise center of power is an actual Temple dedicated to Cybele- otherwise known as Inaana, Ishtar and Sibyl --the most ancient goddess whose most sacred site is Vatican Hill. So it is not something that can be discounted entirely.

Logic is a critical tool in the search for truth – what is mere fable and sometimes wild slander – and what makes common sense, sounds reasonable and probable. But what is even more important that a logical perspective is a respectful one.

When anyone mentions World War II and the slaughter of innocents by Roman Catholic Dictators and their allies, we are discussing an event of unprecedented evil. Therefore, uptmost care must be given to respecting their memory and surviving families. Any claim needs to be provable - unquestionably factual and not reckless, unfounded theories.

To answer any outstanding doubt concerning the complete involvement of the Roman Catholic Church through Pope Pius XII and Jesuit Superior General Wladimir Ledochowski S.J., let us examine some additional evidence concerning the Pentagram, the satanic religious nature of sacrificing over eighteen million people.

Found Here: http://continuingcounterreformation.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html

	(Secret) Knowledge is Power
	The evidence of who won the Jesuit Civil War is all around us. Universities have blossomed. Science discovery has accelerated and knowledge is universally accepted as power—the power of imagination and the era of the United States. The New World Order won the Civil War and remain firmly in control.
	In terms of key satanic knowledge that relates to their power, the secret knowledge of the Great Vatican-Jesuit Pentagram of Evil is very important knowledge, forgotten by many. So too, is the clear and unmistakable image “makeover” of evil from satan and “the devil” to Lucifer- or the spirit of Francis Borja personified as evil.
	It is why Borja ordered every church to ever be built by the Jesuits in following years to be constructed under strict codes of similar design—every Jesuit church was purpose built to be a readymade temple to Lucifer -- to the spirit of Francis Borja, the real founder of the Jesuits.
	Similarly, human sacrifice to the satanic gods became more sophisticated, starting with the atomic bombs on Japan. No longer did the New World Order Jesuits need massive and expensive human sacrifice camps to “burn” millions of victims, one tiny bomb could do it in seconds.
	One of the greatest criminal acts in history remains the executive order by President Truman to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and disgraced Jesuit city Nagasaki in 1945 after receiving not one, but several official notices of surrender from the Japanese. Thus began the “modern” age of sacrifice to the satanic gods of the Vatican and Jesuits.

Found Here: http://one-evil.org/acts_holocaust/acts_vatican_holocaust_part_4.htm

Ulrich Lamfuß

ULRICH LAMSFUSS, ''The Raw and the Cooked,'' Lombard-Freid, 531 West 26th Street, (212) 967-8040 (through April 5). This Berlin painter copies photographs from fashion, news, travel and other sorts of magazines. A gallery release and two portraits of Andy Warhol, one a copy of the other, suggest that he has ulterior conceptual motives, but his faithfully nondescript renderings of fighting elephants, a movie zombie and a herd of wild horses leave one uncertain about exactly what he is up to (Johnson).

Found Here: http://www.lombard-freid.com/artists/lamsfuss/lamsfuss_press/lamsfuss_NYT_3_21_03.htm

& here: http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2009/01/ulrich-lamfus-at-max-hetzler/

Via Grafik Sculptures

Via Grafik is both a graphic design studio and an art collective based in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Working in the fields of graphic design, motion design, art direction and illustration, we are interested in developing design solutions at a unique visual level. Our aim hereby is to provide the best suitable design for the specific content of each individual project, wheter it be large or small.

The realisation of art projects increases our range of experience from which we richly profit on the creative process for commercial projects.

Our clients come from industries such as music, culture, art, and advertising as well as youth culture oriented brands. We work for clients like Nike, Adidas, Nintendo, MTV, VIVA, Junges
Staatstheater Wiesbaden, We the People.

Frank Auerbach Paintings

Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin, to Max Auerbach and Charlotte Nora Burchardt, both of whom had studied art.^[3] His parents sent him to England in 1939 to escape the Nazis as part of the Kindertransport programme^[4]. (The family was jewish; his parents subsequently died in a concentration camp). He left Germany 7 April 1939, a month before his eighth birthday, to attend Bunce Court, a boarding school for refugees near Faversham in Kent, where he was sponsored by the writer Iris Origo. At Bunce Court, he was already seen as an artistic prodigy, and where his work already showed an expressionistic style. He also distinguished himself there as a stage actor.^[1][5] Auerbach has remained in England ever since, taking British nationality in 1947.^{[citation needed]} He studied art at St Martin's School of Art in London and later at the Royal College of Art, but was more strongly influenced by lessons with David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic, and especially so by Bomberg's exploratory attitude. He also encouraged his St Martin's classmate Leon Kossoff to attend Bomberg's classes.^[1]

At 17, while playing a bit part in Peter Ustinov's first play House Of Regrets, he met the 32-year-old Estella Olive West, (generally known as "Stella" but referred to as "E. O. W." in the titles of his works), a widowed amateur actress who ran a boarding house in Earl's Court whose residents at the time included historian and novelist Len Deighton. She would be his lover for the next 23 years (including after his marriage to fellow Royal College of Art student Julia Wolstenholme) and also one of his most-depicted models. With her, he established his pattern of working and reworking paintings, so that some works took hundreds of sittings to complete: "It was quite an ordeal," West later remembered, "because he would spend hours on something and the next time he came he would scrape the whole lot down. That used to upset me terribly. I wondered what I was doing it all for." Their relationship was "often fraught, occasionally bordering on violence"; both agree that the violence was mainly Stella's, but that his work captured that intensity.^[1][6]

His paintings of E. O. W. featured in Auerbach's 1955 Royal College of Art graduation show, leading Helen Lessore of the Beaux Arts gallery to give him his first solo exhibition in January 1956. While reviews of that show were mixed, David Sylvester of The Listener declared it "The most exciting and impressive first one-man show by an English painter since Francis Bacon in 1949."^[1] Auerbach had five solo shows at the Beaux Arts Gallery between 1955 and 1963.^[3][2] (Before Kossoff, the studio had been used by Gustav Metzger, who was also a young Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.^[3]) He was slow to find his artistic bearings again; in nearly two years he produced no paintings, and only 10 drawings. "I somehow felt that what had been private had become public," the Guardian quoted him saying in 2001. "I had put myself into a uniform: there I was, this chap who had done these thick paintings in earth colours."^[1] Auerbach married Julia Wolstenholme in 1958; they had one son, Jake; but they broke up over his continuing, passionate relationship with Stella West. They reunited in 1976, after he and Stella had split.^[1] While still a student at the Royal College, he took over from his friend Leon Kossoff the Camden studio that has been his base since.

Porsche Museum, Stuttgart

The Porsche Museum is a museum in the Zuffenhausen district of Stuttgart, Germany on the site of carmaker Porsche.

The new Porsche museum stands on a conspicuous junction just outside Porsche Headquarters in Zuffenhausen. The display area covers 5600 square meters featuring around 80 exhibits, many rare cars and a variety of historical models.

The musuem (official opening: 31 January 2009) is open Tuesday to Sunday from 9am to 6pm. Entrance price: 8 euros (4 euros for concessions, children 14 years and under get in for free when accompanied by an adult).

The museum was designed by the architects Delugan Meissl. The design concept is based on a model by HG Merz who was also involved in the building of the award winning Mercedes Benz museum.^[1]

[edit] Construction

The original Porsche museum opened in 1976 in a side-road near the Porsche factory. It was a relatively small works museum with little parking space and it was only big enough to hold around 20 exhibits (in rotation).

Porsche built the museum as a kind of "rolling museum" with rotating exhibits from a stock of 300 restored cars, many in pristine condition and still in full driving order. Originally there was discussion that the new museum would be built alongside a new Mercedes-Benz museum on former trade fair grounds in the Killesberg area of Stuttgart.^[1]. After the new Mercedes-Benz Museum opened in the east of Stuttgart in 2006, Porsche went ahead with plans to upgrade and extend its museum in the northern district of Zuffenhausen next to the company headquarters. Originally costs were set at 60 million euros but days before the official opening ceremony on 29 January 2009, it was confirmed that the actual costs hit 100 million euros^[2].

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_Museum,_Stuttgart

Acorn's Outlandish Characters | Erratic Phenomena

At Thinkspace's "Ink Advance" show Friday night, I discovered Acorn, a street artist who's been showing with GhostpatrolMiso in Melbourne, Vienna and Berlin. Together, the three of them have created a limited edition book of drawings titled Ink Advance, which was released earlier this year. Acorn, a.k.a. Scott Kennedy, originally hails from Vancouver, but has been living in Edinburgh recently and now seems to be traveling so much I imagine he's not sure exactly where he lives at the moment. Reports are that he's settling back down in Vancouver for a while. Apparently Acorn has only been drawing seriously for about four years (he's just 21), but he's already developed a really singular style and a cast of intriguing characters.

Acorn is a true street artist who's getting up all over the world. He says that this first character's arms are unfinished because he was caught while painting it in Bucharest. I want to stress that this intricately detailed piece was painted with brushes, and is not a pasteup. I think that's pretty amazing!





Fortunately, Acorn hasn't limited himelf to painting graffiti in places beyond the reach of most of us artizens. His insanely detailed drawings, which span the realms of pen, pencil and watercolor, are loaded with cryptic symbolism and feature a cast of characters that include (in my interpretation) Icelandic ninjas, a cat army, tree-eating Chinese dragon wood-processing stills, futuristic fashion-forward Yakuts with winged chandelier headdresses, children inside cumbersome robotic exoskeletons styled after ancient Japanese armor, and a host of strange rubbery monsters.

Acorn gave some insight into his work in a recent interview:

"Usually when I start a drawing, I don't have much of an idea what I'm going to do until I get halfway into it.

I think mixing cultural influences has really helped me progress when it comes to style. I guess I was first into Japanese stuff, but then I got really into Mexican and Aztec patterns and such. Also Russian costumes and stuff like that from the east are really inspiring. I guess that got me more into it, because it seems more like fantasy than just fashion.

I think imagination is far more fulfilling than reality. If someone can look at my work and make up their own story for it, then that makes me happy."

Some of my favorite Acorn drawings are in his forest series. I guess it makes sense that someone named Acorn would have an affinity with trees. (Though to be fair, he says he started out as Acornlique and shortened it to Acorn for convenience in tagging, and not due to any particular affinity with oaks.)

You're going to need to click into these to see how cool his detail work is. Keep in mind that the originals are small drawings... the linked images are just about actual size.

Found Here: http://commandax.blogspot.com/2008/05/acorn.html