Author: mark

Behold the Museum aan de stroom (MAS), Antwerp’s new municipal history museum. The building, designed by the Dutch architects Neutelings Riedijk, is due to open late next year. Certainly it’s dramatic; a spiraling diagram for itself that will give visitors walking its long ramp privileged views of the city in all directions. It sits on a Napoleonic-era dock in a formerly abandoned port/industrial quarter that has been reintegrated into the city over the last decade, a process still ongoing. (This was the subject of my recent story on Antwerp’s reinvention, for Metropolis.) During its sixteenth-century heyday, Antwerp was the financial capital of northern Europe, and a great international port city, so the location of the museum is fitting. Appropriately enough, the materials to build it come from all over the globe: red stone from Rajastan, glass from Germany, wood flooring from Louisiana. During construction, the museum staff is actually working out of the landmark sixteenth century warehouse of the Hessen trade federation. The titular “stream” is actually the Scheldt river, which connects the city to the North Sea. A few more images after the jump.

Continue reading MAS Macho

In 1772, the Antwerp alderman Adrien van den Bogaert purchased a historic property in the center of the city, and then hired architect Engelbert Baets to renovate the place. Of course, a toilet was in order. These were typically housed in dank closet rooms, but Bogaert had something a bit more grand in mind, and being a bibliophile, he and Baets arrived at this classic solution, known today as the “Book Toilet.” It is said that the Latin titles on the spines of the leather volumes actually told an erotic story, and were thus burned off by monks who occupied the building in the century after Bogaert’s death. Today, the entire Bogaert complex, which includes a massive ceiling painting and is known as the Hofkamer, is under restoration.

Continue reading The Most Beautiful Crapper in the World

This is the first in what will be a series of posts generated over my recent trip to Belgium. Call it an appetizer, served with pleasure. Above is the fine Antwerp delicatessen Hoffy’s, with the generous proprietor in front of the store. I’m not going to tell you it’s in the same class as Fine & Schapiro, reduced as it may be, let alone Katz’s, but Mr. Sax swears by it, and there’s no greater praise in the world of deli. To follow are a few of Hoffy’s neighbors on Lange Kievitstraat.

Continue reading Kosher in Antwerp

Master of Shadows will be published in Europe this November, and I’m hoping my distinguished Dutch publisher will undertake a guerilla art project to promote it in Holland. Perhaps you’re familiar with the Amsterdam city logo, “I Amsterdam,” from Heineken’s ubiquitous television spots. My rebranding requires only a couple of pieces of cardboard and some orange paint. Makes for a distinct improvement, I’d say. I Amsterdam? Yes I Lam.

I’ll settle for the middle version.
[PS: apologies for the crap photoshop work.]

I’m off to the Continent, which is a good excuse to dip into the family photo archive for a few reminders of a time when European travel was a bit more of a novelty. My grandmother was quite the snappy dresser. Here she is in France, Italy, and elsewhere in the 1960s.

My review of Michael Shapiro’s new book on the aborted life of the Continental League, a would be addition to the majors, appears in today’s Los Angeles Times. (I sure picked the right day to run a baseball story in the paper.) “Bottom of the Ninth” is a book that’s absolutely worth your time, though not an easy one, and not without its flaws. Though we all have a tendency to stick our heads in the sand when it comes to the ugly shenanigans that are the business of baseball—we watch baseball because it’s supposed to be entertainment—unless we keep an eye on history’s fine print it’s impossible to hold accountable those who control the game. Those who are ignorant of the past, are condemned to repeat it. Or perhaps we’d be condemned anyway, but a little bit of knowledge doesn’t hurt, especially if it comes in an enjoyable package.

The New York-Amsterdam connection has been much in the news of late, and rightly so, as this is the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s Dutch-sponsored voyage of American discovery. An exhibition at the MCNY, a new book on the landscape he found, and any number of events mark the occasion. With all that, it would be easy to overlook a small exhibition on Eugeen Van Mieghem and the Red Star Line at Flanders House. The show documents the relationship between New York and Antwerp, Amsterdam’s rival to the south. In the sixteenth century, when Amsterdam was barely a mark on the map, Antwerp was the cultural and financial capital of Northern Europe, a position it lost to its northern neighbor. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, Antwerp was a major port of embarkation for the deluge of humanity fleeing Europe for America. Some two million emigrants departed Antwerp on Red Star Line ships, the preponderance coming to New York. Eugeen Mieghem, an Antwerp native, captured the lives of those harried travelers in his tender paintings and pastels. The beautiful Red Star Line posters featured in the show are also a treat.

I’ll skip commentary on the grim events at the Holocaust Museum in Washington in favor of more sanguine news in the Jewish museum world. Earlier this week plans were released for the new Jewish museum in Moscow, to be placed in Konstantin Melnikov’s landmark Balhmetvsky bus depot. The renovation is by the German firm Graft. The exterior will remain essentially untouched. Inside, a scrolling blobby insertion—”intervention,” to use the architectural term of art—will connect the two floors of the structure, and serve various programmatic needs. I use the term scrolling, but I’m not sure the architects had anything so literal in mind, which makes it a nice change of pace from the architectural parlante of other Jewish museums, to say nothing of Daniel Libeskind’s abstracted Hebrew letter forms in Berlin and elsewhere. How well or poorly such amoebic shapes will relate to Melnikov’s open space, or serve their functions, is another story. We’ll see.

My cousin Barbara Schaefer is having a show of recent work at Shop Art, on Bergen Street in Brooklyn. (Convenient!) Barbara is walking sunshine, and her pictures—big tactile abstractions, with caligraphic skeins of paint—channel her personality. I’ve always thought there was something Rubensian about them in their energy and handling of the painted surface. Also, they make me smile.

We spent this past weekend at the beautiful weekend home of the Woo family, a masterwork of modernist architecture sequestered high in the rolling Vermont hills. Kyu Sung Woo, the paterfamilias, designed it himself, and his limpid vision and great attention to detail show everywhere. (The project may be familiar; it was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal.) The main house is comprised of a pair of light-filled, two-story bar structures, hinged at the middle. The volumes and geometries are asymetric but have a natural sense of harmony to them. Horizontal and vertical bands in a variety of materials (blond-wood floors, green clapboard siding panels, corrugated metal) give interiors and exteriors visual energy and direct the eye into the landscape. It’s all controlled and executed with immense care and polish. A few pictures: