Eddie Izzard once said of Stonehenge "no one's built a henge like that ever since." As far as a Google search can tell me, he never visited Nebraska. This Americanized henge lies in the middle of a field, mostly isolated but with a few houses in view. A recreation of Stonehenge that used monstrous land cruisers that crossed the highways in the 50's, 60's and 70's as megaliths make up the monument. Cadillacs, Fords and Chevys all have been used, stuck in the earth and painted grey. Creator Jim Reinders was influenced by his time in England, and his automotive monument was built as a memorial to his father on the family's farmland.

The small, nearby town of Alliance has little to see and only a few places to stay, so a visit takes planning. Carhenge signs can be found before coming into town, but missing them can mean incomplete direction, and for us a turn took us far off course. Take care in planning your route. Once there you will find the site has an abandoned and boarded up visitor center and a message board covered with broken plexiglas and faded newspaper articles. Besides the main monument, additional sculptures include a large fish made from car parts, a representation of Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring in the "Ford Seasons", and a car for signing your name, the "Autograph."

But the main purpose for visiting is is to walk the well-worn foot trails that lead to Carhenge. Dragging a pile of large rock many miles made sense to the Druids but here in the states we make our monuments mobile, until they are parked for all time.

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Posted by Robert on November 30, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)

If the walls at The Old Operating Theatre could talk, they would most likely scream in agony rather than strike up a conversation. Standing on the tiered steps which arch around the operating pit, the centre piece in one of London’s lesser known and quirkier museums, it only takes a pinch of imagination to visualise the grim realities of surgery in a time before anaesthetic. The operating table, no more than a slab of wood, stands on stripped floorboards beneath the vast glazed skylight which once provided the illumination by which the surgeons could slice. These men, often dressed in frock coats, went about their business ignorant as to the merits of antiseptic and without the benefits of effective painkillers or unconscious patients. Operations required speed, skill, a strong stomach and more than a little luck to ensure those beneath the blade survived. It’s safe to assume that during the early decades of the nineteenth century the wooden walls of the operating theatre witnessed enough gore and suffering to make even the Christmas special of ‘Casualty’ seem tame.

Getting to the operating theatre is a peculiar business as the entrance is to be found in St Thomas’s church, an eighteenth century baroque building whose dusty loft space, or garret, houses the museum. The narrow spiral staircase which leads upwards, seems ill suited to the care of the sick and the location is only explained when one learns that the church roof abuts the wards on the south wing of St Thomas’s hospital. When the church was rebuilt in the seventeenth century, the new building was constructed with a large ‘aisle barn’ garret which became home to the resident Apothecary at the neighbouring hospital. This seller and maker of medicine would have cultivated a herb garden and recent renovation work has found remains of dried opium in the rafters. Part of the museum recreates the workshop of the apothecary and the combined smells from exotic ingredients such as Frankincense, Santolina, Comfrey, Horsetail and Gum Arabic assault the nostrils as soon as you reach the top of the staircase. Signs detail the medicinal benefits of these raw materials although some remedies appear to have more in common with witchcraft than science. One of the least promising must be the recipe for Snailwater, which purports to offer a cure for venereal disease through a mixture concocted largely from crushed snails and earth worms.

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Posted by Maurice on November 25, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Seeing the Apollo Pavilion today, it’s hard to imagine how it ever seemed like a good idea. Designed by artist Victor Pasmore and built between 1963 and 1970 in Peterlee, a new town in County Durham, it’s an abstract concrete er, thing - half architecture, half sculpture. At eighty-two feet wide, it's a hulking great brute, spectacularly out-of-scale to everything around it. It’s not so much ugly as inappropriate. Loathed by many, but loved by a dedicated few, it is at once a symbol of the idealism of modernism and the new town movement, and the epitome of where it went horribly wrong.

When Peterlee was founded in 1948, Modernist hero Berthold Lubetkin was brought in as master planner but when his proposals for high-rise living proved unsuitable for mining terrain he left, disillusioned, and become a farmer. Abstract artist Victor Pasmore who was then Master of Painting at Kings College in Newcastle-upon-Tyne stepped into the breach. He designed “The Pivvy” as it's known locally as a bridge and focal point in a problematic area of the Sunny Blunts housing estate where a lake divides the housing estate and the road. Aspirations were high, and it was named The Apollo Pavilion after the moon mission which was reaching for the stars around the same time

Pasmore described it as 'an architecture and sculpture of purely abstract form through which to walk, in which to linger and on which to play, a free and anonymous monument which, because of its independence, can lift the activity and psychology of an urban housing community on to a universal plane.’ Well, he was half-right. People lingered and played alright, but not in a good way. Almost immediately it became a haven for vandals and teeny-tipplers. To add insult to injury, a local government spat ensued when the Peterlee Development Corporation that commissioned the £33,000 work was wound up and the Easington District Council which inherited it refused to touch it with a bargepole, or more usefully a paintbrush.

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Posted by Anne on November 08, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (3)