Stuttgart, Porsche, und das Museum

Tour of the Porsche Museum by Kaffee und Kuchen

Last month...I had a chance to visit the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen. I had driven past this museum every time I'd taken the bus into Stuttgart (so well over 100 times) but until that day, I had never stepped inside. When the Metropolitan Club of Stuttgart organized a free tour of the museum, I knew it would be the perfect opportunity to finally go check it out. While I'm not a car buff by any stretch of the imagination, I was curious to see this world-famous auto museum minutes from my home.

Porsche sculpture in front of the Porsche Museum.

Opened in 2009, the museum is located right next to the Porsche Headquarters in Zuffenhausen. The design proposal from the Viennese architects Delugan Meissl was selected from over 170 entries in a European-wide competition. To reflect the company's bold and dynamic nature, the monolithic main structure of the museum is supported on only 3 V-shaped columns to make it appear as if it's floating above ground.

We visited the museum on May 22 ("Transaxle-Day") to see the special Transaxle Exhibit. Unlike Porsche's famous 911 model with the rear-mounted engine, the transaxles built by Porsche between 1976 and 1995 featured water-cooled front engines and rear-transaxles. We got a chance to see 23 unique transaxle models as well as several other cars and exhibits throughout the museum.

Each member of our tour group received a headset connected to our guide's microphone so we could easily hear him as we wandered through the museum. The tour ran for 30 minutes and covered some of the key displays in the museum, especially the transaxles in the special exhibit. The tour was in German and our guide used a lot of car-specific vocabulary so a lot of it went over my head. However, the museum itself is a work of art and the exhibits were clearly drool-worthy amongst the sports car aficionados in our group.

After the tour, we were free to roam the rest of the museum at our own pace. Some of my favourite cars on display included the Porsche police car (the one-millionth sports car produced by Porsche and gifted to the German Federal State of Baden-Württemberg), an old red fire truck, and a life-size model of Sally Carrera (the love interest of race car Lightning McQueen from the 2006 animated movie "Cars").

The Transaxle Exhibit runs from April 27 to October 16, 2016 if you're curious to check it out yourself.

How to get there: The Porsche Museum is located at Porscheplatz 1 in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen and is open from Tuesday to Sunday, 9am – 6pm. If using public transportation to get to the museum, you can take the S-Bahn on the S6 line to the Neuwirtshaus/Porscheplatz stop.

Dortmund Fußball Museum: Jetzt ist das Runde im Eckigen!

DW (Deutsche Welle) zeigt:

       Das Runde muss ins Eckige...



Aus dem Gewinn des 2014 WM in Brasilien entsteht jetzt ein neues Museum in Dortmund.

Gezeigt sind:

• die über 60,000 Fußballvereine Deutschlands
• wie wichtig der Titel 1954 war für das bekämpfte Deutschland
• was für Zeiten es in 1974 und 1990 waren, als das Land das Pokal wieder gewann
• wie sich den Sport 2000 ändern müsste
• Sommermärchen 2006
• Lutz Engelke, der Hauptdesigner des Museums
• das eventuelle Erfolg der Frauenfußballgeschichte
• Mario Goetzes WM Gewinner . . .

-- und vieles mehr !

The Body as Art in Dresden Exhibit

100 year old wax figures together with various art pieces on display --
(Danke, FluentU)

In Wien (Vienna) das Klangmuseum -- Haus der Musik

-- in der Wiener Innenstadt

Direct a symphony?  Compose a song (using dice)?

I just learned about this interactive museum, which, in its authentic setting, seems extraordinary.  The USA students I learned about who had visited it recently, just had to go back a second time.

Entry fee of 9 Euro seems like true bargain. 

9. November: Only 1 more day left in Berlin's lighted balloon celebration

9. NOVEMBER BERLIN NACH 25 JAHREN:  CELEBRATE ALONG WITH THE PEOPLE OF BERLIN!

Welches ist dein Lieblingsfoto?  Which of the above photos is your favorite? 

Deutsche Welle published the photo below to accompany an article about the weekend celebration in Berlin.  The tourist board reported that there were over a million participants.  Some of the day's highlights were:

• The opening of a new museum chronicling the lives of some of those caught up in fleeing this wall, including a two-and-a-half hour visit by Chancellor, Angela Merkel.
• Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" (which has become the European Union's anthem)
• The release of those 7000 white helium-filled balloons which lined much of the old wall. 
•  Fireworks and Light Show

German Researchers Recreate Dinosaur Bone Using 3-D Printer

This article from  Nov 20, 2013 can be found in its original at  germany.info   

German researchers have identified and recreated a mislabeled fossil that was damaged in the Museum of Natural History in Berlin during a World War II bombing.

Enlarge imageDinosaur skeletons on display at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, Germany.(© dpa)

The vertebra fossil, which belongs to a type of plant-eating dinosaur called a Plateosaurus, was discovered in Halberstadt, Germany, more than 100 years ago. After its discovery, it was tucked into a plaster jacket to prevent it from disintegrating, and displayed at the museum. But when bombs fell on Berlin during World War II, the museum was damaged and many of its fossils were reduced to dust or destroyed. Surviving artifacts were scattered, and many of them still remain unidentified to this day.

During the war, fossils from both Tanzania and Germany were housed in the same room in the museum's east wing, labeled only by dinosaur type - not location. Researchers have thus struggled to separate surviving fossils based on location. Removing the fossils from the plaster jacket, which would make the identification process easier, can cause further damage to the bones.

But German researchers have discovered a new way to identify dinosaur fossils: using computed tomography (CT) scans, they were able to see through the outer layer to learn more about the bones inside. Using CT scan technology, a team of German radiologists, paleontologists and printing experts discovered that one particular fossil - which they assumed was from Tanzania - was originally discovered in Halberstadt, Germany, between the years 1910 and 1927.

"The most important benefit of the [CT scan] method is that it is non-destructive, and the risk of harming the fossil is minimal," study author and radiologist Ahi Sema Issever of the Charite Campus Mitte told Science Daily. "Also, it is not as time-consuming as conventional preparation."

Enlarge imageThe foot of a Platysaurus, which was discovered in Halberstadt, is displayed at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin.(© dpa - Report)After identifying it, the researchers contacted a nearby technical university, asking to use their 3-D printer.

"We didn't plan the study ahead, the study planned itself along the way," Issever told ABC News.

Using a powerful 3-D printer, researchers were able to replicate the dinosaur bone from Halberstadt, leaving out the damage it had suffered in the bombing and producting a copy that was accurate down to one-thousandth of a millimeter - a feat that allows scientists around the world to exchange and share information about fossils with one another.

"If someone in Australia is a researcher on a certain dinosaur and in Canada there's another researcher and they want to exchange the fossils that they have, they don't actually have to send the real one... they could go ahead and just send a CD," Issever told ABC.

Although this is not the first time that a dinosaur bone underwent a CT scan or 3-D printing, it is the first time the two techniques were combined, and opens the door to more extensive and accurate information-sharing of fossils around the world.

"Just like Gutenberg's printing press opened the world of books to the public, digital datasets and 3-D prints of fossils may now be distributed more broadly, while protecting the original intact fossil," Issever said.

© Germany.info

SW Germany (in Ulm) Sculpture, 40K years old

THE ART NEWSPAPER

Ice Age Lion Man is world’s earliest figurative sculpture

Work carved from mammoth ivory has been redated and 1,000 new fragments discovered—but it won’t make it to British Museum show

By Martin Bailey. Web only Published online: 31 January 2013

40,000 years old: Lion Man sculpture. Photo: Thomas Stephan, © Ulmer Museum

The star exhibit initially promised for the British Museum’s “Ice Age Art” show will not be coming—but for a good reason. New pieces of Ulm’s Lion Man sculpture have been discovered and it has been found to be much older than originally thought, at around 40,000 years. This makes it the world’s earliest figurative sculpture. At the London exhibition, which opens on 7 February, a replica from the Ulm Museum will instead go on display.

The story of the discovery of the Lion Man goes back to August 1939, when fragments of mammoth ivory were excavated at the back of the Stadel Cave in the Swabian Alps, south-west Germany. This was a few days before the outbreak of the Second World War. When it was eventually reassembled in 1970, it was regarded as a standing bear or big cat, but with human characteristics.

The ivory from which the figure had been carved had broken into myriad fragments. When first reconstructed, around 200 pieces were incorporated into the 30cm-tall sculpture, with about 30% of its volume missing.

Further fragments were later found among the previously excavated material and these were added to the figure in 1989. At this point, the sculpture was recognised as representing a lion. Most specialists have regarded it as male, although paleontologist Elisabeth Schmid controversially argued that it was female, suggesting that early society might have been matriarchal.

The latest news is that almost 1,000 further fragments of the statue have been found, following recent excavations in the Stadel Cave by Claus-Joachim Kind. Most of these are minute, but a few are several centimetres long. Some of the larger pieces are now being reintegrated into the figure.

Conservators have removed the 20th-century glue and filler from the 1989 reconstruction, and are now painstakingly reassembling the Lion Man, using computer-imaging techniques. “It is an enormous 3D puzzle”, says the British Museum curator Jill Cook.

The new reconstruction will give a much better idea of the original. In particular, the back of the neck will be more accurate, the right arm will be more complete and the figure will be a few centimetres taller.

An imaginative sculptor

Even more exciting than the discovery of new pieces, the sculpture’s age has been refined using radio-carbon dating of other bones found in the strata. This reveals a date of 40,000 years ago, while until recently it was thought to be 32,000 years old. Once reconstruction is completed, several tiny, unused fragments of the mammoth ivory are likely to be carbon dated, and this is expected to confirm the result.

This revised dating pushes the Lion Man right back to the oldest sculptures, which have been found in two other caves in the Swabian Alps. These rare finds are dated at 35,000 to 40,000 years, but the Lion Man is by far the largest and most complex piece. A few carved items have been found in other regions which are slightly older, but these have simple patterns, not figuration.

What was striking about the sculptor of the Lion Man sculptor is that he or she had a mind capable of imagination rather than simply representing real forms. As Cook says, it is “not necessary to have a brain with a complex pre-frontal cortex to form the mental image of a human or a lion—but it is to make the figure of a lion-man”. The Ulm sculpture therefore sheds further light on the evolution of homo sapiens.

Conservators experimented by making a replica of Lion Man, calculating that it would take a highly skilled carver at least 400 hours using flint tools (two months’ work in daylight). This means that the carver would have had to be looked after by hunter-gatherers, which presupposes a degree of social organisation. There is an ongoing debate on what the Lion Man represents, and whether it is linked to shamanism and the spirit world.

Initially, it was hoped that the original of the Lion Manwould be presented at the British Museum’s exhibition, but this has not proved possible because conservators need further time to get the figure reconstructed as accurately as possible. The Ulm Museum now plans to unveil it in November.

"Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind", British Museum, London, 7 February-26 May and “The Return of the Lion Man: History, Myth, Magic”, 16 November-9 June 2014, Ulmer Museum, Ulm.

Comments

8 Feb 13   21:13 CET

RICHARD WRIGHT, KENOSEE LAKE, SK CANADA

Imagine that before the last Earth Crustal Displacement about 13,000 years ago Southern Germany was situated at the 30th parallel of latitude. Very likely there were lions living in the area.

8 Feb 13   18:58 CET

BUDDY PAGE, PORTLAND, OREGON

As alluded to earlier, this figurine was created during the zodiac age of the Lion (aka Leo). The evidence shows that the Great Sphinx and Pyramids were created during the previous age of the lion, circa 11-13,000 years ago, or six ages ago. This Lion Man was created a full zodiac precession cycle (26,000 yrs.) before the Great Sphinx, but also during the zodiac age of the lion, or 18 zodiac ages ago. The importance of this is that the new dating shows the lion figure was carved during the zodiac age of the lion and thereby appears to be using the same zodiac sourced symbolism as the Great Sphinx of Egypt, but a full 26,000 years earlier. This is stunning evidence that core elements of ancient symbolic wisdom can be traced deep into the ancient past, long before most accept possible. What is also interesting is that the artist was likely to have been Neanderthal, just like the artists of the cave paintings in France and elsewhere. Very interesting indeed.