Posts in the category "Museums":

Whether you’re home or on the road this weekend, check to see if an Obscura Day event is taking place nearby.

If there’s room in your travel plans for activities ranging from a guided tour of the world’s second largest particle accelerator to a behind-the-scenes tour of Alcatraz, then Obscura Day, on Saturday, April 28, is for you.     

Organized by Atlas Obscura, a website co-founders Dylan Thuras and Joshua Foer call a “collaborative compendium of amazing places that aren’t found in your average guidebook,” Obscura Day is a celebration of offbeat expeditions and behind-the-scenes tours at more than 100 cities in the U.S. and around the world. Ticket prices for events vary and many are already sold out.

“For our third annual Obscura Day, institutions, tour guides and individuals are going to lead tours, walks and adventures and show off spaces and parts of collections that people don’t normally get to see,” said Thuras, who recently returned from his honeymoon in Southeast Asia. (“I promised my wife it would be a ‘normal’ trip, but we couldn’t resist,” said Thuras. “We found a wonderful museum of taxidermy in Hanoi and an enchanting museum with cool medical specimens in Bangkok.”)

On Obscura Day, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Thuras plans to attend several events, including a tour of abandoned beach areas on Staten Island and a visit to Columbia University’s Rutherford Observatory. Also in New York, an urban foraging tour of Central Park will show participants how to identify edible plants and herbs.

Elsewhere, this year’s Obscura Day events include everything from a tour of the Fermilab particle accelerator in Batavia, Ill., to an expedition to Japan’s largest stone-carved Buddha and the 1,553 stone-carved monks of Nihon-ji. “They’re in a beautiful, crumbling ruin in a forest and you need to take a train and a boat and a bus just to get there,” said Thuras.

The worldwide schedule of Obscura Day events “will help raise awareness of some of the lesser known attractions and wonders around the world,” said Doug Kirby, publisher of the website RoadsideAmerica.com.

In San Francisco, Annetta Black, senior editor of the Atlas Obscura and vice-president of the Atlas Obscura Society, will be leading Bay Area events that include a tour of the USS Iowa, a WWII battleship leaving soon to become a museum near Los Angeles, and an evening salon talk at the Long Now Museum, where the discussion will focus on the importance of planning beyond our own lifetimes. There will also be an after-dark tour exploring the off-limits areas of Alcatraz.

(Photo: Neil Girling / Courtesy Atlas Obscura)

The Museum of Human Disease in Kensington, Australia, is returning as an Obscura Day participant, and this year it has added a workshop on human tissue preservation. Participants will get to preserve a pig’s heart in a hands-on demonstration.

“I just don’t think anyone else is really offering that kind of opportunity, which makes me very happy,” said Black, who sums up Obscura Day as a great way to “build curiosity about the places we live, which leads to cultural engagement and an interest in local history.”

Obscura Day is “really just fun field trips for adults,” said Thuras, “that will make you realize that the unusual sometimes comes in an unusual package.”

This story first appeared on msnbc.com’s Overhead Bin

Categories: Museums
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Aviator goggles 1920s–1930s metal, glass, fur, fabric, elastic. Courtesy of San Diego Air & Space Museum

Early airplanes had open cockpits and aviators needed special equipment and protective gear in order to do their jobs.

Examples of some of those items are now on exhibit at the San Francisco International Airport. Flight Gear: Pilot Equipment from the Open-Cockpit Era features more than forty examples of flight suits, jackets, helmets, goggles and other accessories dating from the 1910s to the 1940s. Also on exhibit are period photographs, advertising, and catalog illustrations featuring the artifacts displayed.

A. G. Spalding & Bros. "Aviators' Equipment" catalogue one-piece flying suits illustration 1930 ink on paper SFO Museum

Flight Gear: Pilot Equipment from the Open-Cockpit Era is on view through August 1, 2012 in the San Francisco Airport Commission Aviation Library and Louis A. Turpen Aviation Museum in the International Terminal Departures Level adjacent to the Boarding Area ‘A’ entrance.  Admission is free. Hours: 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sunday through Friday.

Categories: Air Travel, Airplanes, Airports, Exhibits, History, Museum Monday, Museums
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Last week I spent an hour in front of my closet trying to pick out the best suitcase for my next international trip.  Nothing seemed right, so I fired up the computer to go shopping for something new.

There are oodles of satchel stores out there, but I went home empty-handed because I didn’t get much past The Museum of Bags

Shopping bag by Andy Warhol

I thought the museum would be about baggage, but the on-line-only museum is focused more on paper sacks and related ‘carry-things-home-from-the-store”-type bags.

Which is fine with me.

Especially when I discovered this TWA (Trans World Airlines) bag filed there in the collection under “Other.”

Here’s the description of the airline and the bag from the Museum of Bags website:

“Founded in 1925 as Western Air Express, Trans World Airlines became one of the “Big Four” U.S. domestic airlines. In 1961, TWA became the first airline to introduce regular in-flight movies with By Love Possessed which starred Lana Turner and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. in first class. On December 1, 2001, Flight 220, using an MD-80, was TWA’s last flight. It flew from Kansas City, Missouri to St. Louis.”

Categories: Airlines, Museums
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What sort of souvenir do you search for in gift shops when you’re stuck at the airport or touring a town?

Some people pick up postcards, shot glasses or magnets.

Not David Weingarten.

On a two-week trip through Europe in the late 1970s, Weingarten received a miniature version of Germany’s Speyer Cathedral as a present from his uncle and tour guide, the noted architect Charles Moore, who also bought a souvenir-sized copy of the building for himself.

The small gift left a big impression. Weingarten, now of Ace Architects in Oakland, Calif., began collecting souvenir buildings in earnest. Today, with his partner, Margaret Majua, Weingarten owns the largest collection of three-dimensional architectural replicas of structures from around the world.

For a feature on msnbc.com’s Overhead Bin, I chatted with Weingarten about his collection.

Q: In addition to that original tiny cathedral, what types of structures are represented in your collection?

A: That cathedral has been joined by replicas of 5,000 other buildings, monuments and human-made places of all sorts and every description — famous and deeply obscure, special and mundane — from around the world. The collection is the most extensive of its type and includes some souvenir buildings made very recently and others made in the early 19th century, which are now 200 years old.

Q: 5,000 souvenir buildings! Where do you keep them all?

A: We used to keep all the little buildings in a small building outside our home. But several years ago, despite some aggressive editing, the collection threatened to spill out of the small building containing them. We made a bigger place for the little buildings.

Q: How do you organize the collection?

A: By place and type. Many of the world’s great cities possess a shelf or two or, in the case of New York, a cabinet. There are sections for the continents, for nations, for world’s fairs and expositions and for a range of arcana, such as American souvenir buildings made in Japan. There are also sections of little buildings turned out as salt and pepper shakers, lamps, coin banks, bookends, smoking accessories, lipstick holders and calendars. You get the idea.

Q: What is the attraction of souvenir buildings for you and for the rest of us who buy and bring them home from our travels?

A: Like some of their full-size counterparts, souvenir buildings work on our memories, very often in unanticipated ways. Miniatures of the Empire State, Chrysler, or Woolworth buildings or the Statue of Liberty make us think of these Gotham monuments; yet, also, more than this. We may remember our last visit, our companions on that trip, people and places seen, a subway ride or maybe a walk through Central Park. Memories prodded by architecture are seldom strictly architectural.

Q: Do you have a favorite souvenir building among the collection?

A: My most-esteemed miniature is a large, late 19th century, sterling silver model of the Bank of England in London. The full-sized building was designed, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, by the highly eccentric architect John Soane. Interestingly, the model shows the bank as Soane designed it, before some very disfiguring 20th century alterations. That illustrates another appealing quality of souvenir buildings: these slight tourists’ trifles very often outlast the substantial buildings and monuments they represent. This is especially the case with world’s fair souvenirs, which are miniatures of buildings designed with the intention that they would soon be demolished.

Q: And what happened to Charles Moore’s souvenir-sized copy of the Speyer Cathedral?

A: After Uncle Chuck died, in 1993, his house/studio in Austin, including his large collection of architectural models, folk art, books, etc., was transferred to the Charles Moore Foundation. I made off with his cast metal miniature of the cathedral and today, both [souvenirs from that 1970s trip] occupy the same glass shelf in the collection here.

Learn more about the world’s largest collection of souvenir buildings here.

All photos courtesy David Weingarten.

Categories: Exhibits, Museums, Uncategorized
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Flying lifts you above it all, offering a chance to take in the big picture from the sky.

But travelers who touch down at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) now have an opportunity to get down to specifics with a new exhibition exploring the history of microscopes.

Simple microscope with case 1673–1748; Courtesy SFO Museum

“From mid-seventeenth-century simple microscopes to the modern compound optical devices by German makers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these are the instruments that revealed the long-held secrets of the natural world—the existence of microorganisms, the structure of biological cells, and the composition and operation of a variety of previously unseen life forms. Nearly 350 years after Robert Hooke introduced a ‘newly visible world,’ we continue to rely on the microscope in our eternal quest to better understand the world we inhabit and the challenges posed by that which remains invisible to the unaided eye.”

[From the exhibition release]

If you can’t make it to the airport, you can view a selection of microscopes and other objects from the exhibition online.

Detail of specimen slides with seeds c. 1820; courtesy SFO Museum

A World Examined: Microscopes from the Age of Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century is on display pre-security in the International Terminal Main Hall Departures Lobby, at San Francisco International Airport through June 24, 2012.

Categories: Exhibits, Museum Monday, Museums
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