Lisa's World: November 2018

Friday 30 November 2018

The 9 most stunning stained-glass windows around the world

USUALLY FOUND IN churches, mosques, and other houses of worship, stained-glass pieces dance with color and light to produce visual displays that inspire wonder and remind us of the majesty this mysterious world has to offer. Whether they inspire you to pray, or just pause to appreciate a thing of beauty, check out these stunning stained-glass masterpieces around the world and prepare to be wowed.

1. Sainte-Chapelle — Paris, France

Photo: SIAATH/Shutterstock

The towering purple-hued stained glass of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris is one of the most iconic and breathtaking works of glass art in Europe, if not the world. With 1,113 scenes depicting history across the Old and New Testaments, this Gothic masterpiece was built in just seven years. The Sainte-Chapelle is open every day (save for New Year’s Day, Christmas, and May 1st) at 9:00 AM, and closing time varies by season. Entry tickets cost 10 euros (about $12).

2. Palau de la Música Catalana — Barcelona, Spain

Photo: Rodrigo Garrido/Shutterstock

Though the Sagrada Família has earned its reputation as one of the most awe-inspiring churches in the world to visit — in large part due to the rainbows of stained glass making the whole place glow from within — Barcelona’s lesser-known Palau de la Música Catalana has just as beautiful stained-glass creations. The grand glass skylight functions as the centerpiece and is meant to resemble a drop of water and honey, casting a warm glow throughout the multi-story venue. The Palau de la Música is a working concert hall, so attend an opera performance or go for a tour. Tours are available daily between the hours of 10:00 AM and 3:30 PM and start at just 15 euros (about $18) for a self-guided tour.

3. Santuário Dom Bosco — Brasília, Brazil

Photo: Diego Grandi/Shutterstock

Floor-to-ceiling stained-glass windows in shades of blue and purple line all sides of the sanctuary at Santuário Dom Bosco, and, as if the digs needed more bling, there’s also a massive Murano glass chandelier hanging in the middle of the room. It’s made of 7,400 pieces of Murano glass and was designed to symbolize Jesus as “the light of the world.” Named for Saint John Bosco, who dedicated his life to adolescents and young people, the active church hosts mass several times per day and is free to visit.

4. Nasir Al-Mulk Mosque — Shiraz, Iran

Photo: Alexander Mazurkevich/Shutterstock

Iran’s Nasir Al-Mulk Mosque is one of those places you’ll have to see to believe. Also referred to as the Pink Mosque and the Mosque of Colors, Nasir Al-Mulk Mosque provides an inspiring display as thousands of colors alight through the stained-glass patterns and colorful tiles that make up the interior. Built in the late 1800s, the mosque today gives visitors the chance to experience what it might be like to step inside a kaleidoscope. It’s open every day except Fridays (visit in the early morning for the full experience) and has an entrance fee of 150,000 Iranian rial (about $4).

5. Erawan Museum — Bangkok, Thailand

Photo: Copycat37/Shutterstock

When in Bangkok, don’t miss the Erawan Museum, topped with a three-headed elephant sculpture, and its three floors of antiques, ancient religious artifacts, and collections of art. At the feet of the elephant is a massive round stained glass window, rare in Thailand. You can even climb the stairs to walk around inside the elephant. The museum is open every day from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, and admission costs 300 baht (a little less than $8 USD).

6. Gran Hotel Ciudad de México — CDMX, Mexico

Photo: Vincent St. Thomas/Shutterstock

Guests of the Gran Hotel Ciudad de México will find themselves beneath one of the four largest works of Tiffany stained glass in the world. A masterpiece of Art Nouveau style, the hotel that the glass piece calls home dates all the way back to 1899. The Gran Hotel Ciudad de México is a working hotel, so either book a room or walk through the atrium and look up at the massive domed roof of glass and wrought iron.

7. Chapel of Thanksgiving — Dallas, Texas

Photo: James Kirkikis/Shutterstock

The Chapel of Thanksgiving is the spiritual epicenter of a complex called Thanks-Giving Square, which also features meditation gardens and the Hall of Thanksgiving, a forum and meeting space that tells the story of the American Thanksgiving tradition. Inside the chapel, which is open to all faiths, visitors will find a stunning spiral of colorful stained glass called the Glory Window, which rises 60 feet into the air. The colors transition from cool to warm as the glass ascends, mimicking the journey through life toward a golden conclusion. The chapel is open from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM every day except Tuesdays (and on Mondays, it doesn’t open until 1:00 PM). Admission is free but leaving a donation is encouraged.

8. Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint Sebastian — Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Photo: Christian Vinces/Shutterstock

Better known as the Metropolitan Cathedral of Rio de Janeiro or the Cathedral of St. Sebastian of Rio de Janeiro, the Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint Sebastian is dedicated to Saint Sebastian, the patron saint of Rio de Janeiro. Conical in shape, the massive cathedral is reminiscent of a Mayan pyramid, save for four 200-foot panels of stained glass stretching to the pinnacle. It is a working cathedral open to visitors every day from 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM and is free to enter.

9. Iglesia El Rosario — San Salvador, El Salvador

Photo: Kobby Dagan/Shutterstock

Don’t be fooled by the nondescript exterior of this place of worship — it hides one of the most strikingly beautiful churches in the Americas. A rainbow of light pours in through the arched concrete semicircle that forms the roof of Iglesia El Rosario in San Salvador. Built in 1971 by Rubén Martínez, the church abounds with art, including a prominent web of metal forming a sort of umbrella over the altar. People from all walks of life are welcome to stop in or enjoy a church service.

https://matadornetwork.com/read/9-stained-glass-windows-world/

Dogs Really Do Look Like Their Owners — But It Doesn't Stop There

It can be hard to stifle a laugh when you see a tall redhead with long hair walking an Irish setter. Or a burly man with a pugilist's nose accompanied by his big, round bulldog. Or a komondor playing in the park with its dreadlocked owner. You're not imagining things — people really do tend to look like their dogs. But the phenomenon of people resembling the things they're around most doesn't stop there.

The Mastiff in the Mirror

The phenomenon was first verified in 2004 when a study led by psychologist Michael Roy found that strangers were able to match up purebreds with their owners about 64 percent of the time. Other studiessince then have shown the same thing: It's (relatively) easy for strangers to pick out which dogs belong to which people based only on their looks. But what's going on here? Is it that people prefer to buy dogs that look like them or do dogs and people slowly converge on a similar look the longer they live together?

Part of that answer lies in the place that this phenomenon comes up short. It only works for purebreds. In Roy's original study, he found that mutts were a lot harder for people to match with their owners — they only got the right answer about 35 percent of the time. Furthermore, there was no correlation between how long the owners had lived with their dogs and how accurately the strangers guessed. That all suggests that people tend to fixate on a particular type of dog — one that vaguely resembles them — and seek it out.

Beyond Bow-Wows

Okay, so dogs sometimes look like they have certain haircuts and facial expressions, and it's easy to see how you might look at a particular breed and think, "Say, that's a pretty handsome pup. Reminds me of a face I see in the mirror every day." But what about things that don't actually have faces? It turns out that people still like the ones that look like them.

In a study published in 2014, participants were put in almost the exact same situation, only with cars instead of dogs. Just like with the canines, they guessed which cars belonged to which people at a degree greater than chance — but only when they saw the cars head-on. That suggests that it really is the cars' "faces" that match up with their owners.

Here's one more interesting wrinkle, though. Is it that people are more likely to buy a car that looks like them, or that they're more likely to be sold one? A study that came out in 2018 casts a darker light on the subject. In it, researchers discovered that regardless of the customers' preferences, salespeople had a distinct tendency to pitch round-shaped products to overweight customers. The researchers sent an actress to shop for wristwatches and perfume bottles in two different circumstances — first, in her natural body size of 4 feet, 11 inches (150 centimeters) tall and 102 pounds (46 kilograms), and second, in a professionally made prosthetic to make her appear obese. In the first outings, salespeople showed her narrow, rectangular watches and perfume bottles, and in the second, they favored round-faced watches and circular bottles. Unlike the case with dogs and cars that look like peoples' faces, there is no evidence to suggest that overweight people prefer rounder products. That suggests that, at least some of the time, people are picking up the products that are being pushed on them based on their looks instead of based on their preferences.

https://curiosity.com/topics/dogs-really-do-look-like-their-owners-but-it-doesnt-stop-there-curiosity?utm_campaign=daily-digest&utm_source=sendgrid&utm_medium=email

There’s a Secret Code Hiding on These Madrid Security Bollards

It took the power of the internet to crack it.

BY JUAN PABLO GARNHAM

NOVEMBER 21, 2018

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE hundreds of nondescript iron bollards—the sturdy cylindrical poles that are designed to stop cars from getting in pedestrian areas—stationed across the city of Madrid. To the common observer, there was nothing special about it. But for Joseángel Murcia, there was something different about this particular bollard. And Murcia is not a common observer.

“I was surprised one day driving in my car when I saw a pattern that wasn’t symmetric,” says Murcia, a mathematician and educator. “When I travel, one of the things that I do is to look for geometrical patterns… It’s a little OCD.”

On the top of the bollard in question, Murcia noticed an unusual pattern comprised of 40 lines that would soon be all over Spanish Twitter and featured by dozens of Spanish news outlets. The lines extended from close to the center of the bollard to the border of the circumference. And they were grouped in a strange way: first one line, then a space. Then 12, and another space. Then 2, 13, 3, and 9.

Murcia had long made a habit of taking photos of the geometric patterns he notices, sharing them on his Instagram account, but on this occasion he was driving, so he couldn’t. A few months later he came back to capture it. After taking the picture and counting the lines, he put the numbers in the OEIS sequence database, a site where you can search known mathematical sequences. Nothing matched. Stumped, he turned to social media.

View image on Twitter

Joseángel Murcia@tocamates

Ayuda, please, ¿alguna hipótesis de por qué los bolardos de la zona del puente de Segovia tienen este patrón: 1, 12, 2, 13, 3, 9?
¿Un RT?

2,893

“Help, please, any hypothesis about why the bollards in the area of the Segovia bridge have this pattern: 1, 12, 2, 13, 3, 9?,” his tweet read. To date, the message has accumulated almost 2,000 retweets and more than 600 replies. All kinds of theories arrived. Someone suggested it might have something to do with the arcs of the nearby Segovia Bridge. Or could the answer be related to the spaces between the lines? “60 segments, 60 seconds? Some active, some not,” Rubén Holguera wrote. “Could it be the pattern of repetition of a lighthouse, for example?” Another Twitter user found in the pattern’s shape a hexagon that he related to the Landau–Ramanujan constant, a famous theorem.

This being Twitter, there were plenty of jokes, including the theory that it must be related to crop circles. Others just gave up, mystified. “Two hours looking at a bollard like it was a matter of life and death,” said @LizTravel1. “My vote is that is just a decorative design.” One person made a 3D printed replica. Another person wrote a song based on the pattern.

A journalist from Gizmodo en Español put forward a theory that the pattern might be a code from the company that designed the bollard. In a post on their website, that company, Forjas Estilo, explained that the bollard was a model called “Río Bajo” and that “the most extended” explanation would be that the lines have to do with the Fibonacci numbers, a sequence in which every number after the first two is the sum of the two preceding numbers. That explanation didn’t convince many, including Murcia. The pattern didn’t quite match the Fibonacci sequence. “There was a lot of confusion,” he says.

Finally, a week after the company published its first explanation, they posted a follow-up with a big revelation: they had located the designer of the bollard. The 36-year-old Spanish architect Víctor Muñoz Sanz had worked on it 10 years ago, when the Madrid Río park was built alongside the Manzanares river.

“At first, the design just had lines on its sides, something that I designed too, but when I presented it, my bosses told me that the top was too empty,” Muñoz Sanz tells Atlas Obscura, from the Netherlands, where he lives and works as a researcher. “We needed to add something.”

He says he started thinking about the material of the bollard, iron. “Maybe I could do a reference to places where this metal is extracted, I thought. And from there I got to the idea of cities [that are] built for extracting resources, or to be factory-cities,” says Muñoz Sanz.

Using Madrid as the center, Muñoz Sanz drew straight lines pointing to the locations of several such cities. He pointed to Fordlandia, a currently abandoned town in Brazil built by the Ford Motor Company in 1928. He marked the spot of Ivrea, the Italian city where Olivetti is headquartered. And he pointed towards to Zlín, in Czechia, a place that would become a new obsession for him.

“I would eventually write my thesis about the Bata Shoe Company, which started in Zlín,” Muñoz Sanz says.

A row of Víctor Muñoz Sanz's security bollards, near Madrid's Segovia Bridge.

It was a pretty design and it made for a nice effect in sunlight. It was quickly approved and no one involved gave it another thought until 10 years later, when Muñoz Sanz’s former boss messaged him about the Twitter debate and subsequent media coverage.

“It was kind of mind-blowing to discover what had happened. I was surprised by the imagination of the people. I loved that a woman wrote a piano composition,” the architect says. “We designed these bollards so that they would be something nice, something that wouldn’t go out of fashion, something that remained in the city, but at the same time wouldn’t draw attention.”

Thanks to Joseángel Murcia’s eye (and Twitter), the opposite happened, and a humble bollard had its five minutes of fame. Now the mystery is gone. The mathematician and his daughters from time to time wear t-shirts they had printed with the design from the bollard.

Still, a question does remain, one that might never be answered. “There’s actually only one bollard that correctly points to those cities,” Muñoz Sainz says. The rest were installed without regard to the direction in which the pattern was positioned. At the time, no one cared too much. The bollard’s creator never told anyone the logic behind his design, until now. “And today even I don’t know where the correct one is… It’s been a long time.”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/secret-code-on-madrid-security-bollards?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=212e537f34-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_11_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f36db9c480-212e537f34-65897069&ct=t(EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_11_27_2018)&mc_cid=212e537f34&mc_eid=2cd79a4b6a

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The 7 most jaw-dropping ceilings around the world

EVERY TRAVELER KNOWS to keep their eyes wide open when visiting a new place, but some spots require that you be extra curious and crane your neck to look up. From mosques to churches to temples — religious buildings are often constructed to inspire visitors to cast their eyes heavenward — and even castles and more, these are the most jaw-dropping ceilings you can ever hope to have above your head.

1. Nasir al-Mulk Mosque — Shiraz, Iran

Photo: Fotokon/Shutterstock

One of the most stunning buildings in the world in every regard, the ceiling of the Nasir al-Mulk Mosque is no exception. Emblazoned with vivid patterns in every color and intricate muqarnas (ornamented vaulting), the mosque’s interior offers a daily vibrant kaleidoscopic light show through incredible panes of stained glass. The complex ceiling design, typical of Islamic architecture, draws the eyes upward and inspires a sense of awe and wonder in all who have the opportunity to view it.

2. Sistine Chapel — Vatican City

Photo: JurateBuiviene/Shutterstock

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City is one of the most famous in the world. Created by Michelangelo in the early 1500s, the hand-painted masterpiece draws millions of visitors each year. The ceiling depicts nine scenes from the Book of Genesis — including the “Creation of Adam,” with God reaching out to touch Adam’s finger — capstoned by a fresco of the Last Judgment to complete the biblical story. If you go, don’t plan to document your visit because photos are strictly prohibited inside the chapel in order to protect the integrity of the art for generations to come.

3. Sultan Ahmet Mosque (Blue Mosque) — Istanbul, Turkey

Photo: GTS Productions/Shutterstock

Nicknamed the “Blue Mosque” for its striking cool-hued interior, Istanbul’s Sultan Ahmed Mosque is a historic mosque dating back to the early 1600s. It’s located next to the famous Hagia Sophia. Lined with over 20,000 handmade tiles, the mosque culminates in colossal circular stained-glass windows and in cupolas so intricately adorned that you’ll want to lie on your back for a little while to take all its splendor in.

4. Castello di Sammezzano — Florence, Italy

Photo: Reflex Life/Shutterstock

Sammezzano Castle in Florence is one of the most colorful buildings in the world. Fanned with peacock-style rainbows of color and intricate details, the castle has 365 rooms — one for every day of the year — all adorned in an elaborate swirling and otherworldly technicolor style. It was built in the early 1600s as an Italian palazzo, served as a luxury hotel after World War II, and was recently sold to a Dubai-based company for over $18 million.

5. Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood — St. Petersburg, Russia

Photo: Art Konolovalov/Shutterstock

Elaborate and colorful from the outside in, St. Petersburg’s Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood is one of the most beautiful churches in Russia and one of the most visually striking architectural marvels on the planet. It contains over 80,000 square feet of detailed mosaic work from floor to ceiling and is ornamented in vivid colors and topped with gold-leafed domes to inspire parishioners to ponder the realms above.

6. Temple of Heaven — Beijing, China

Photo: fuyu liu/Shutterstock

The Temple of Heaven in Beijing is a complex of religious buildings where emperors used to visit to make annual prayers for a good harvest. Today, the religious site still stands as a breathtaking and popular place to visit. The temple is rich with Chinese symbolism; the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests has four inner pillars to represent the four seasons and the square structuring of the building represents Earth, while dark blue roof tiles and circular shapes throughout the temple represent heaven.

7. Shah Mosque — Isfahan, Iran

Photo: Richard Yoshida/Shutterstock

Construction of the Shah Mosque in Iran began in 1611 and today it stands as one of the most beautiful mosques in the world, so highly respected that it even appears on the rial, the currency of Iran. It’s inscribed with calligraphy from the Quran and coated in mosaic tilework in a palette of seven colors. Richly patterned octagonal domes and iridescent arabesque tiles are high above the heads of the faithful, encouraging a sense of heavenly transcendence.