#museum

#museum

Harvard University is Collecting the World's ColorsThanks to modern chemistry, it's rather simple to produce any of thousands of colors in paint, dye, and other materials. Once upon a time, it wasn't so easy, and producing a new color was like discovering a new world, or maybe more like magic. Harvard University has a collection of now more than 2700 of these rare and original pigments, each with a story behind them. The Forbes Pigment Collection has original versions of colors from a wide range of sources: plants and insects of course, but also strange sources like human corpses and the dried urine of cows that eat mango leaves. You have to wonder how those discoveries came about. Great Big Story has more.

Writer's Homes You Can Visit for InspirationOne's surroundings can open the mind for creativity. A writer's home doesn't have to be sumptuous, but to produce classic literature, a writer must be comfortable enough to contemplate and craft stories. Of course, some writers start out poor and with success work their way up to owning a grand mansion, while others are born into wealth, education, and time of one's own. An author who achieves worldwide notoriety may eventually have a museum in their honor, often at the home they lived in. The grand house above was where Vladimir Nabokov lived in Siverskaya, Russia. Below, you'll see the famous boathouse Dylan Thomas occupied in Laugharne, Wales. While not quite as grand, it was inspirational. He wrote poetry in the garage he turned into a studio.

World’s Largest Astronomy Museum in Shanghai, China, Has a Planetarium, an Exhibition Space and a 78-Feet Tall Solar TelescopeAs the world’s largest astronomy museum was unveiled to the public in Shanghai, China, its designers are eager to tell the story behind the museum’s marvelous architecture. Ennead Architects, the designer of the Shanghai Astronomy Museum, aimed for a dynamic form that represented the movement of planets and stars in the skies.“In making this building, we wanted to create a place where the institutional mission is fully enmeshed with an architecture that itself is teaching, and finds form in some of the fundamental principles that shape our universe,” said Thomas J. Wong of Ennead Architects. “The big idea of the Shanghai Astronomy Museum was to infuse a visceral experience of the subject matter into the design and to deliver that before you even enter the building, and at the end of your visit, there is this culminating moment directly with the sky, which is framed and supported by the architecture,” he added.Composed of 420,000 square feet of space, the museum includes a planetarium, general exhibition space, and a groundbreaking solar telescope that measures 78 feet tall.Visitors experience the museum by progressing through three parts of the building. First, they see a large oculus high above the main entrance. Sunlight enters through the opening of the oculus and slowly moves across the entryway as the sun changes its position in the sky throughout the day. Next, in the second part of the museum, the planetarium theater, visitors see a futuristic sphere that resembles a planet floating in space. From afar, the sphere is a dramatic icon for the museum. The last and final feature is an inverted dome that gives visitors a breathtaking view of the sky above.Image: Ennead Architects and Arch-Exist#museum #astronomy #ShanghaiAstronomyMuseum #Shanghai #EnneadArchitects #telescope #planetarium #oculus