
From Bilbao to Las Vegas: Frank Gehry’s incredible architecture – in picturesSwooping, swirling, gleaming, sculpted — Frank Gehry made buildings we'd never seen before. The architect behind the Guggenheim Museum in Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles transformed contemporary architecture. He died Friday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., after a brief respiratory illness, according to his chief of staff. He was 96.
Gehry won all the top awards — including the Pritzker Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1999, when the American Institute of Architects gave him their Gold Medal, Gehry looked out at an audience that included contemporary gods of building — Philip Johnson, Robert Venturi, Michael Graves — and said, "it's like finding out my big brothers love me after all."
The scale of a new living trees artwork has been revealed by an installation of hundreds of lanterns.
Echo Wood, between Bristol and Bath, is the latest project by artist Luke Jerram who created a giant Earth artwork which toured the country.
When finished, Echo Wood will feature 365 different species of trees planted in a circular pattern. The permanent installation at the centre of the new Lower Chew Forest in Compton Dando, will encircle an events space it is hoped will be used for generations.
Sometimes, if you are lucky, you are given a unicorn for Christmas. Around 1567, the Duchess of Amalfi, Costanza Piccolomini d’Aragona, commissioned a nativity scene, a gift for her household. In this scene there were figurines of Joseph, Mary, the angels, sheep, dogs, camels carrying treasure, the ox and the ass — and a unicorn. Unicorns were, at the time, the height of fashion.
We are unlikely to be offered robust peer-reviewed evidence of a unicorn being present at the birth of Christ. But the duchess was not being whimsical; an educated woman of the 16th century would have believed in the existence of unicorns in the same way that she believed in the existence of giraffes; exotic, far away, surprising, true.
If Costanza had wished it, she could have traced the unicorn back through 2,000 years of history. It would have been worth her time, because to follow the lineage of the unicorn is to encounter the meeting point of science, natural history, generously lunatic myth and human desire.
Not sure if this is art or history or what, but it's an interesting read from the Financial Times (Evernote link because paywalled)
The Secret History of Unicorns
Oh, sure. The old, "Open your lap and close your eyes. In a snap you'll be getting a big surprise." NOT FALLING FOR THAT ONE AGAIN!“...if a virgin girl is set before a unicorn, as the beast approaches, she may open her lap and it will lay its head there with all ferocity put aside, and thus lulled and disarmed it may be captured.”