ox horn campus

A Chinese telecoms giant has built a research and development centre near Shenzhen, which will be home to some twenty-five thousand employees (find out more about model factory towns here) and which includes twelve faithful recreations (see also) of European landmarks. Among them are the Neckar Bridge and Palace of Heidelberg, the halls of Oxford, Freiburg and Verona, co-located on the car-free compound serviced by a Swiss Rail train. Learn more and peruse a slide show gallery at the link up top (nur auf Deutsch).

bedroom community

Aiming to draw people away from the comfort of home and back into the theatre, Cinema Pathé has retrofitted a couple auditoria with double beds in their movie halls in Spreitenbach in the canton of Aargau.
Beds are freshly made after each screening, the limited capacity lending an air of exclusivity to the experiment, and tests of the concept suggest that audience members would deport themselves in a respectable and courteous manner. What do you think? Laying in whilst consuming media experts tell is a bad sleep hygiene association and there’s no word on dress code.

musterküche

Via the always brilliant Nag on the Lake, we learn about the Frankfurt kitchen (die Frankfurter Küche), which transformed our relationship to food preparation, dining and living, created by interbellum designer Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (*1897 – †2000) and first Austrian woman to be credentialed as an architect.
Assigned the task of creating the kitchen spaces for a new, post-war housing project to rebuild Frankfurt am Main in 1926, Schütte-Lihotzky took inspiration from the efficiencies of railway dining cars and created kitchens for hundreds of thousands of units and though perhaps not as narrow, one can detect elements of Schütte-Lihotzky’s vision and basic layout in our own new kitchen. Sensing the eminent fall of the Weimar Republic, she and other architects joined Ernst May—the chief designer behind the New Frankfurt project and other rebuilding and re-housing efforts to form the “May Brigade” and went off to the Soviet Union to help with Stalin’s Five Year Plan. Once conditions again became untenable during the Great Purge (Большой террор, 1937 – 1938), their group became unrooted again and Schütte-Lihotzky settled in Chicago and worked on the World’s Fair Century of Progress exposition.

biblioclasm

Among many other events of great pith and moment, our faithful chronicler records that on this evening in 1933 Hermann Goebbels agitated an already blood-thirty fraternal order, still giddy from their organised attack on the Sex Research Institute of Magnus Hirschfeld earlier that same week, and expressed their rage with a symbolic book burning (Bücherverbrennung) in the square (now known as Bebelplatz) before the State Opera building in Berlin.
The Student Union coordinated other similar events in university towns across Germany, attended by area Nazi officials, aiming to consign to the flames everything that was un-German. This was not the last of such rituals but some twenty thousand volumes deemed subversive where destroyed that night in Berlin alone, including works published by socio-economic theorist Karl Marx, novelists Thomas and Heinrich Mann, the Bauhäuslern, Erich Maria Remarque who penned the pacifistic recollection All is Quiet on the Western Front, playwright and lyricist Berthold Brecht, imminent scientist Albert Einstein and psychologist Sigmund Freud.

chumbox

Exploring further the “rewards” (see here, here and here) we get for actually finishing an article, Vox correspondent Kaitlyn Tiffany wades through the dregs of advertising—dubbed in the industry as chumboxes.
The goal was to chase down the elusive identity of the “vegetable” that an equally dodgily credentialed gut doctor is begging Americans to throw out now, or one of any number of snowclones in the form of body horror, oversized aloe vera, distressed comfort animals, celebrities behaving badly and far off–the-mark “targeted” ads. It’s impossible to track down definitive answers (and not like the answer would be less than enlightening and not very satisfying ultimately) but rather bounces one from spammy website to another, lower-rent one featuring progressively worse advertising marginalia, chumboxes being bait for bigger fishes that in turn lure bigger fishes, a regular pyramid scheme or rather multilevel marketing opportunity is the preferred term nowadays, comprising an unending garbage food-chain. Much more to explore at the link above.

mars: the ride

Via the always interesting Kottke, we find ourselves transported to the desert hills of the Gobi where a company called C-Space has recently opened a simulated Martian base as an education and outreach facility and tourist destination, with a space-themed hotel and restaurant. Though perhaps more of an amusement park than practical training centre, vis-à-vis institutions like Space Camp and similar programmes especially, we ought not to underestimate the power to inspire. Browse an extensive gallery of the base and its features at the links above.