Sweet dreams…
Since 2002, “Bernd,” a young German, has been working in China (for most of those years, in Shanghai), and has spent much of his free time pursuing his hobby– photography… more specifically, taking pictures of his adopted countrymen (and women) asleep. The result, SleepingChinese.com, has over 700 somnambulant snaps (so far)…
As Berndt suggests,
Before you click through my large collection of photos, you should not forget, what you hear and read daily in of your home countrys’s media about China’s boom.
They talk about “The Sleeping Giant”. About “The Birth of the New Super Power” or “The Awakening of the Red Dragon”. Often with a strange kind of undertone, which is supposed to frighten us. The reality definitely looks more peaceful.
For years I’ve been fascinated by the country and the people. Whenever I linger through the boom town Shanghai, I carry my snap shot camera with me. Because at every corner you can discover people that either are napping in the strangest positions and situations, or are even snoring, while in a deep sleep. The missing mattresses and pillows are noteworthy!
The calmness, the flexibility and the adaptability of those, who are jointly responsible for the revival of China fascinate me.
See them all here.
As we stir our cocoa, we might send stately birthday greetings to Andrea Palladio, the Italian architect who led the Neo-Classical Revival (and who, as a result, is often cited as “most important person in the history of Western Architecture”); he was born on this date in 1509.
Palladio’s own constructions in Italy were relatively few. But the publication of his drawings (in such works as Barbaro’s Commentary on Vitruvius), then more impactfully, in Palladio’s own I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), influenced much of Europe, and inspired Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren, among many others.
Palladio’s plan for the Villa Rotonda (I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura, 1570)
