A treasure hidden below the Padmanabhaswamy temple

Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple. From http://www.dnaindia.com/

¨Round-the-clock police patrolling around the famous Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram was put in place on Monday as the stock-taking of priceless assets, hidden in the shrine’s cellars, by a Supreme Court-appointed panel resumed after a day's break.

The patrolling, monitored by an exclusive control room set up at the Fort police station, was enforced based on the decision taken by a high-level meeting convened by chief minister Oommen Chandy on Sunday.(...)The cellars of the shrine, managed by a trust controlled by the erstwhile Travancore royal family, has revealed invaluable wealth running into thousands of crores since the inventory got underway last week.

According to temple sources, the panel today made the list of articles in a chamber, which is frequently opened for using its jewellery, lamps and silver and brass platters for temple rituals.

A decision on searching one remaining chamber, which is seldom opened, was deferred as it required technical expertise and support to avoid damage to the structure. A decision on this was expected to be taken on Friday, the sources said.

Since the exercise started, five cellars had been examined and the list of articles found from them would be submitted to the apex court by the seven-member panel, which included two former high court judges.

A stunning range of gold ornaments, idols inlaid with precious stones, jewels, heaps of solid gold coins and silver and gold platters and lamps have been discovered from the cellars so far.¨

From:

http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_padmanabhaswamy-temple-gets-round-the-clock-patrolling_1562330

Padmanabhaswamy temple. Photo by Rainer Haessner

Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple is a Hindu temple dedicated to Lord Vishnu, maintained by the erstwhile Travancore Royal Family, and located within the East Fort in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala state, South India. The temple is one of 108 Divya Desams (Holy Abodes of Vishnu) principal centres of worship of the deity in Vaishnavism. The temple, constructed in the Dravidian style of architecture is referenced in the early medieval writings of the Tamil Alvar saints (6th-9th centuries CE), with structural additions to it made throughout the medieval period up to the 16th century CE.

The history of the temple dates back to the 8th Century. It is referenced in the Divya Prabandha canon of literature by the Tamil Alvar poets.

The foundation of the present gopuram was laid in 1566.The temple has a 100-foot,seven-tier gopuram. The temple stands by the side of a tank, named Padma Theertham (meaning the lotus spring). The temple has a corridor with 365 and one-quarter sculptured granite-stone pillars with elaborate carvings. This corridor extends from the eastern side into the sanctum sanctorum. An eighty-foot flag-staff stands in front of the main entry from the 'prakaram' (corridor). The ground floor under the gopuram (main entrance in the eastern side) is known as the 'Nataka Sala' where the famous temple art Kathakali was staged in the night during the ten-day uthsavam (festival) conducted twice a year, during the Malayalam months of Meenam and Thulam.

REFERENCE:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padmanabhaswamy_Temple

Lea la noticia en español:

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1386613-hallan-un-tesoro-en-un-templo-de-la-india?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=titulares&utm_campaign=NLCult

On the difference between Pure and Empirical Knowledge

House wreck. By swainboat at flickr.com/photos

¨That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it.

But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion), an addition which we cannot distinguish from the original element given by sense, till long practice has made us attentive to, and skilful in separating it. It is, therefore, a question which requires close investigation, and not to be answered at first sight, whether there exists a knowledge altogether independent of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions? Knowledge of this kind is called a priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge, which has its sources a posteriori, that is, in experience.

But the expression, "a priori," is not as yet definite enough adequately to indicate the whole meaning of the question above started. For, in speaking of knowledge which has its sources in experience, we are wont to say, that this or that may be known a priori, because we do not derive this knowledge immediately from experience, but from a general rule, which, however, we have itself borrowed from experience. Thus, if a man undermined his house, we say, "he might know a priori that it would have fallen;" that is, he needed not to have waited for the experience that it did actually fall. But still, a priori, he could not know even this much. For, that bodies are heavy, and, consequently, that they fall when their supports are taken away, must have been known to him previously, by means of experience.

By the term "knowledge a priori," therefore, we shall in the sequel understand, not such as is independent of this or that kind of experience, but such as is absolutely so of all experience. Opposed to this is empirical knowledge, or that which is possible only a posteriori, that is, through experience. Knowledge a priori is either pure or impure. Pure knowledge a priori is that with which no empirical element is mixed up. For example, the proposition, "Every change has a cause," is a proposition a priori, but impure, because change is a conception which can only be derived from experience.¨

REFERENCE

The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant.Translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn. First edition 1781

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4280/pg4280.html

Inspired by "The City"

City 3. Digital art by Myriam B. Mahiques

" THE city waited twenty thousand years.

The planet moved through space and the flowers of the fields grew up and fell away, and still the city waited; and the rivers of the planet rose and waned and turned to dust. Still the city waited. The winds that had been young and wild grew old and serene, and the clouds of the sky that had been ripped and torn were left alone to drift in idle whitenesses. Still the city waited.

The city waited with its windows and its black obsidian walls and its sky towers and its unpennanted turrets, with its untrod streets and its untouched doorknobs, with not a scrap of paper or a fingerprint upon it. The city waited while the planet arced in space, following its orbit about a blue-white sun, and the seasons passed from ice to fire and back to ice and then to green fields and yellow summer meadows.

It was on a summer afternoon in the middle of the twenty thousandth year that the city ceased waiting." 

From the story " The City", by Ray Bradbury. In his book " The Illustrated Man".

Selection of projects by Peter Zumthor

Art Museum of the Cologne.

Bruder Klaus field chapel

Peter Zumthor (born 26 April 1943) is a Swiss architect and winner of the 2009 Pritzker Prize.

In 1994, he was elected to the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In 1996, he was made an honorary member of the Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA). In 1998, Zumthor received the Carlsberg Architecture Prize for his designs of the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Bregenz, Austria and the Thermal Baths at Vals, Switzerland (see below). He won the Mies van der Rohe Award for European Architecture in 1999. Recently, he was awarded Praemium Imperiale in (2008) and the Pritzker Architecture Prize (2009).

The Vals spa—famed among architects for its evocative sequence of spaces and exquisite construction details—presents intriguing correspondences between Heidegger’s writing and Zumthor’s architecture. Writing in his architectural manifesto, Thinking Architecture, Zumthor mirrors Heidegger’s celebration of experience and emotion as measuring tools. A chapter entitled “A way of looking at things” begins by describing a door handle:

I used to take hold of it when I went into my aunt’s garden. That door handle still seems to me like a special sign of entry into a world of different moods and smells. I remember the sound of gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of waxed oak staircase. I can hear the heavy front door closing behind me as I walk along the dark corridor and enter the kitchen[...].(1998:9)

Zumthor always emphasises the sensory aspects of the architectural experience. To him, the physicality of materials can involve an individual with the world, evoking experiences and texturing horizons of place through memory. He recalls places he once measured out at his aunt’s house through their sensual qualities.

Zumthor´s project for serpentine´s gallery, 2011

A chapel in Switzerland

Thermal bath at Vals

REFERENCE:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Zumthor

All pictures from:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2011/jun/19/architecture-serpentine-pavilion

A house that reminds me the story ¨The Veldt¨, by Ray Bradbury

Does anybody remember the movie ¨The Illustrated Man¨, based on Ray Bradbury´s book? The story of the children that were inside this white apartment and had the room with the African lions in an African landscape? This house reminds me the story, and I don´t like it....

At last, the children send their parents to this particular room and the lions kill them. How could anybody raise up children inside a container?

From ¨The Veldt¨, by Ray Bradbury:

¨They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them. Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity.

'Well,' said George Hadley.

They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. 'But nothing's too good for our children,' George had said. The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.

'Let's get out of this sun,' he said. 'This is a little too real. But I don't see anything wrong.'

'Wait a moment, you'll see,' said his wife.¨

Download ¨The illustrated man¨:

http://www.mediafire.com/?6gf4rmphc6lcf0i

House designed by Level archs., Tokyo, Japan.

Pictures from architectural record construction

http://archrecord.construction.com/residential/featured_houses/2011/06/Nakameguro.asp

Exposición multimedia sobre la historia del barrio La Boca

Hombres de trabajo en los astilleros que ya no están.  / Gentileza Eduardo Alvelo. La Nacion.com

¨A través de los relatos de antiguos vecinos del barrio y de viejas instituciones locales, con fotos y objetos, con imágenes, voces y sonidos, la exposición multimedia De La Boca, un pueblo crea un rompecabezas con un objetivo central: mantener viva la memoria de un emblemático barrio porteño.

La muestra, curada por Eduardo Alvelo, repasa la historia del barrio y su gente, desde fines del siglo XIX hasta los '80. La exposición propone conferencias sobre distintos aspectos de La Boca, como la arqueología o la gastronomía, la historia y el tango, sin descuidar el Riachuelo o las pinturas de Benito Quinquela Martín.

Entrar en la exposición es retroceder en el tiempo. Una serie de fotos repasa la mutación de Caminito. "Hay mucha historia de la ciudad que comenzó allí y hoy hay muchas instituciones que la pelean día a día, pese al olvido", explica Alvelo.

Alvelo es realizador de cine documental y vive un poco aquí y un poco en los Estados Unidos. "Esta muestra nació como desprendimiento de un documental que estoy haciendo y que rescata el testimonio de los viejos habitantes de La Boca", explica.

En una esquina, cuatro cuadros muestran un collage de postales viejas. Las luces de las cantinas sobre la calle Necochea, de noche, muestran una imagen que ya no se ve. "Ir a esa zona ahora es arriesgar tu vida", lamenta el curador.

Algunos objetos, como una medalla de plata de 1914 que se repartió en la inauguración del puente transbordador Nicolás Avellaneda o la actual Medalla del Bicentenario, que recibió el Ateneo Popular de La Boca, se suceden con un remo y con imágenes de los remeros del Club de Regatas Almirante Brown, que surcaban las aguas del Riachuelo. Antes de su contaminación, claro está. Como Oscar Almirón, que representó a la Argentina en los Juegos Olímpicos de Londres 1948.

Una sucesión de postales de los años 20, 30 y 40 muestran imágenes de La Boca que ya no es. Y se puede ver cómo las inundaciones cambiaban por completo el paisaje.

Los visitantes pueden disfrutar también de un documental con material inédito, que formará parte del que prepara Alvelo, con imágenes de los bomberos voluntarios de La Boca de 1911, de estibadores cargando y descargando y de Quinquela pintando a la orilla del río.

Hasta el 10 de julio puede visitarse en el Salón de Exposiciones de la Corporación Buenos Aires Sur, en Bolívar 1268. De martes a domingos, con entrada libre y gratuita.¨

REFERENCIA

artículo de Cynthia Palacios en La Nación

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1385577-postales-recuperan-la-memoria-de-la-boca?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=titulares&utm_campaign=NLCult

The importance of lightning rods or conductors

Some time ago, I posted this shot I´ve taken from the movie The Bride of Frankenstein, and I saw it as an artistic manifestation. Today, I´m thinking about the technical importance of the lightning rods, after reading about the children dead inside a classroom in Uganda. From Wikipedia.org:

¨A lightning rod (US, AUS) or lightning conductor (UK) is a metal rod or conductor mounted on top of a building and electrically connected to the ground through a wire, to protect the building in the event of lightning. If lightning strikes the building it will preferentially strike the rod, and be conducted harmlessly to ground through the wire, instead of passing through the building, where it could start a fire or cause electrocution. A lightning rod is a single component in a lightning protection system. In addition to rods placed at regular intervals on the highest portions of a structure, a lightning protection system typically includes a rooftop network of conductors, multiple conductive paths from the roof to the ground, bonding connections to metallic objects within the structure and a grounding network. The rooftop lightning rod is a metal strip or rod, usually of copper or aluminum. Lightning protection systems are installed on structures, trees, monuments, bridges or water vessels to protect from lightning damage. Individual lightning rods are sometimes called finials, air terminals or strike termination devices. The lightning rod was invented by Benjamin Franklin in the Americas in 1749 and, perhaps independently, by Prokop Diviš in Europe in 1754.¨

"Machina meteorologica" invented byVáclav Prokop Diviš worked like a lightning rod. Wikipedia.org

Wooden church with lightning rods and grounding cables. Wikipedia.org

Now, the sad news, excerpt from Guardian.co.UK:

¨Eighteen schoolchildren and their teacher have been killed in a lightning strike in Uganda, police said.

The country has one of the highest rates of lightning deaths in the world and its capital, Kampala, has more days of lightning per year than any other city, according to the World Meteorological Organisation.

The lightning hit the victims in a classroom at a school in Kiryandongo, 130 miles north of Kampala. Another 38 children were admitted to hospital.

The east African country has suffered several fatal lightning strikes in recent weeks during unseasonably heavy rains.

The deaths were debated in parliament on Monday, with MPs calling on the government to come up with strategy to deal with what several termed "a crisis". (...) Local meteorologists have criticised the government for not providing enough lightning conductors for buildings in storm hotspots.¨

Read the article in full:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/29/uganda-schoolchildren-killed-lightning

The importance of a roof. In the words of John Ruskin

Picture from www2.warwick.ac.uk

¨16. I am sure that all of you must readily acknowledge the charm which is imparted to any landscape by the presence of cottages; and you must over and over again have paused at the wicket gate of some cottage garden, delighted by the simple beauty of the honeysuckle porch and latticed window. Has it ever occurred to you to ask the question, what effect the cottage would have upon your feelings if it had no roof? no visible roof, I mean;—if instead of the thatched slope, in which the little upper windows are buried deep, as in a nest of straw—or the rough shelter of its mountain shales—or warm coloring of russet tiles—there were nothing but a flat leaden top to it, making it look like a large packing-case with windows in it? I don't think the rarity of such a sight would make you feel it to be beautiful; on the contrary, if you think over the matter, you will find that you actually do owe, and ought to owe, a great part of your pleasure in all cottage scenery, and in all the inexhaustible imagery of literature which is founded upon it, to the conspicuousness of the cottage roof—to the subordination of the cottage itself to its covering, which leaves, in nine cases out of ten, really more roof than anything else. It is, indeed, not so much the whitewashed walls—nor the flowery garden—nor the rude fragments of stones set for steps at the door—nor any other picturesqueness of the building which interest you, so much as the gray bank of its heavy eaves, deep-cushioned with green moss and golden stone-crop. And there is a profound, yet evident, reason for this feeling. The very soul of the cottage—the essence and meaning of it—are in its roof; it is that, mainly, wherein consists its shelter; that, wherein it differs most completely from a cleft in rocks or bower in woods. It is in its thick impenetrable coverlet of close thatch that its whole heart and hospitality are concentrated. [18] Consider the difference, in sound, of the expressions "beneath my roof" and "within my walls,"—consider whether you would be best sheltered, in a shed, with a stout roof sustained on corner posts, or in an inclosure of four walls without a roof at all,—and you will quickly see how important a part of the cottage the roof must always be to the mind as well as to the eye, and how, from seeing it, the greatest part of our pleasure must continually arise.

Image from picturesofengland.com

17. Now, do you suppose that which is so all-important in a cottage, can be of small importance in your own dwelling-house? Do you think that by any splendor of architecture—any height of stories—you can atone to the mind for the loss of the aspect of the roof? It is vain to say you take the roof for granted. You may as well say you take a man's kindness for granted, though he neither looks nor speaks kindly. You may know him to be kind in reality, but you will not like him so well as if he spoke and looked kindly also. And whatever external splendor you may give your houses, you will always feel there is something wanting, unless you see their roofs plainly. And this especially in the north. In southern architecture the roof is of far less importance; but here the soul of domestic building is in the largeness and conspicuousness of the protection against the ponderous snow and driving sleet. You may make the façade of the square pile, if the roof be not seen, as handsome as you please,—you may cover it with decoration,—but there will always be a heartlessness about it, which you will not know how to conquer; above all, a perpetual difficulty in finishing the wall at top, which will require all kinds of strange inventions in parapets and pinnacles for its decoration, and yet will never look right.¨

From Lectures on Architecture and Painting. By John Ruskin. Delivered at Edinburgh, November 1853

Read the full book:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23593/23593-h/23593-h.htm