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~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 2nd 2012

Visitors to Makkinga, a northern village in the Netherlands, are greeted on the outskirts by a nice joke. After a road sign that announces the 30kph speed limit, and another that says "Welkom", there's a third that says "Verkeersbordvrij". That translates as "free of traffic signs". It’s a sign that tells you something you can work out for yourself.
 
As Tom Vanderbilt explains in his book "Traffic" (2008), the sign captures the philosophy of Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic engineer, who overturned years of bossy thinking by arguing that the fewer road signs there were in social settings, the safer those places would be. (Motorways were another matter.) When car drivers use their own intelligence, and interact with others who are sharing the same space, they slow down, and there are fewer accidents. 
 
The latest example of this counter-intuitive thinking was unveiled in London yesterday. Exhibition Road runs half a mile from South Kensington tube station to Hyde Park, and passes entrances to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. It has cost nearly £30m to redesign this stretch of road and the best bit about it is the stuff that's not there.  read more »

Angelo Soliman is probably best known in his fictional incarnation as the disgraced African servant boy in “The Man Without Qualities”, Robert Musil’s novel about the end of the Austrian monarchy. The real Soliman mixed in Vienna’s high society. His ignominy came in death rather than life.

Soliman, the subject of an exhibition at the Wien Museum in Vienna, arrived in Austria as a slave from western Africa, where he was born in 1721. There was a fashion for "House Moors" at this time and Soliman was apparently an exceptional man. He acted as a soldier and adviser in one princely household and then came to Vienna in 1753 to serve as a valet and tutor in another. There were some 40 African inhabitants of Vienna in the 18th century—many of them noble servants like Soliman. He successfully integrated into Austrian society, joining an elite Freemason’s lodge to which Mozart belonged and strolling in the capital’s tree-lined Augarten with Emperor Joseph II.

In modern terms, he might be seen as the perfect immigrant. But after he died his stuffed skin was put on display in the imperial natural history collection, a fate that reflected a deep ambivalence towards non-whites. In Vienna this ambivalence continues to this day, as illustrated in a video in the exhibition of interviews with Africans now living in the Austrian capital. 

“Soliman: An African in Vienna” devotes as much attention to this racial context as to the former slave’s life. Pictures, documents and household objects from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries portray Africa and the Orient as both frightful and fascinating. African men are depicted as savages, docile servants or courageous fighters in the Ottoman armies that besieged Europe’s south-eastern flank.   read more »

Michael Morpurgo’s young companion, Flora Fergusson, didn’t just write an article about the trip: she produced a 32-page book, complete with maps, photos and a note about the author (her, not him). “I knew nothing about Ypres,” she writes. “All I knew was that I was allowed to miss a day of school as it was going to be a very ‘educational’ trip.”

Flora’s tale is full of telling details, from the 6.10am start: “Michael was getting his sat-nav ready…he was anxious about getting the train, but [his wife] Clare was very laid-back about it. This contrast carried on all weekend.”

Once in Ypres, Flora notes the “exceedingly polite” drivers, the “delicious” fried eggs and “enormous” chips. The museum is “fascinating”, but she is most struck by the outdoor sites. “We visited the site of the Christmas truce and I found it truly amazing. I looked down the valley and wondered what a soldier in 1914 would have thought, standing in the same place.”

Later, she goes on, “I saw Private Peaceful’s grave...It was heart-breaking seeing all the names on the graves, some with messages from their families, some with no message at all…[At the Menin Gate] My mouth hung limply open as I stared at the rows and rows of names…I will always vividly remember my weekend and what the soldiers did to save their countries and loved ones.”

Flora ends on a lighter note. “A lady checking the passports said, ‘Are you the Michael Morpurgo?’ and Michael replied, ‘Yes’. As we left, she shrieked ‘WOW!’.”  read more »

Apart from the standard dinosaur fare and a few French oils, Denver's museums tend to reflect their frontier location, with plenty of Native American artwork and old mansions of mining barons. The Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab (also described as the Centre for Empowered Living and Learning), or CELL, does not fit this model. The aim of this somewhat odd two-year-old $6m project—which sits right next to the Daniel Libeskind-designed Denver Art Museum—is not cultural elucidation or historic preservation. Rather, it is a non-profit institution that is all about terrorism: where it comes from, how it manifests itself and what people can do to reduce its threat. Larry Mizel, a local businessman and regular donor to the Republican party, both founded and funded the museum. It is affiliated with his Mizel Museum, a local museum dedicated to Jewish life and culture.

The CELL's mission, according to its website is "to provide the knowledge and tools needed to proactively effect change in order to help shape a better, safer world." But how threatening is Denver? This is the CELL's main point. Its well-crafted interactive exhibition, "Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere: Understanding the Threat of Terrorism", warns visitors that terrorism affects us all, even those who are far away from centres of power. If this sounds like an expensive, museum-size example of America's paranoia, that's because it is.  read more »

It’s hard to draw a line between Disney and Walt Disney. Disney is the craggy monster at the top of the mountain in Fantasia; Mr Disney created the mouse. Disney is Aladdin’s all-powerful genie; Mr Disney had a Clark Gable mustache. Disney is an enormous and sunny paradise stretching all the way to the elephant graveyard; Mr Disney... again, I can only think of the mouse. But the man and the legend are indeed distinct, as the Walt Disney Family Museum intends to prove.

A new museum sponsored by Disney--the family, not the multinational corporation--seems strange at first. When it opens in October in an historic building in San Francisco's Presidio district, it will make for a somewhat humble $112m tribute. But this is appropriate. The museum celebrates a great American fantasist--a man, not just a mouse or a billion-dollar brand.   read more »

Today's New York Times has an article about one of the creepiest, most disturbing collections of photographs I have ever seen. It belonged to Karl Hoecker, the adjutant to Auschwitz's commandant, and it comprises 116 photographs of Auschwitz guards and personnel frolicking during their off hours. A slide show accompanies the article (unfortunately, some rather grating and obvious narration from an archivist accompanies the slide show), so you can see Auschwitz's joyous guards for yourself. The image - or rather the person from an image - that stays with me is a young German woman holding a bowl upside down and contorting her face into a mock sob because she just finished her portion of blueberries. At first it seems a typical summer idyll, before you realise that it was taken just a few miles away from an Auschwitz operating at full capacity.