“The Lotus Temple is a Bahá’í House of Worship in New Delhi consisting of 27 structures resembling petals of the lotus flower that open onto a central hall around 40m high.”
“This particular building really has no competitors. Some places of worship are alike many others, but not this one. It has nine sides, nine doors, and can accommodate 2,500 people. Its surface is made of white marble from Mount Pentelicus in Greece, the same marble used to build the Parthenon! Amazing right?”
_
Now this is what I think of when I hear the word ‘castle’ …the Castle of the Teutonic Order aka Malbork Castle is a 13th century Gothic brick castle and the largest in the world with a surface area of over 51 acres, it was built by knights of the Teutonic Order and is situated in Malbork, Poland.
Comparable with the Marienburg (now: Marlbork Castle): a castle (Wasserburg) built in the typical architectural style of the German Order (a.k.a.: Teutonic Order). This castle belongs to Lithuania today:
_
The most unusual city in the world, a’la The Jetsons stylee…
Wikitravel: “Ashgabat is a showpiece capital. It has been designed, at the cost of billions of dollars, to show the world about the glories and accomplishments of the Turkmen. The city looks like none other on Earth – a thoroughly artificial collection of white marble buildings across a long, dry valley. At sunrise or sunset, there’s a beauty to this uniform, outsized ambition, as if the set of a science-fiction film suddenly became an actual human settlement. During the scorching days, when walking from monument to monument across the shadeless streets, or trying to locate anything resembling normal human life in the center, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil seems like the most accurate comparison”.
_ After Turkmenistan gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Ashgabat experienced a second birth. Today, modern Ashgabat is jokingly called the “city of the dead”, because it is almost impossible to see people in the new districts of white marble. The city holds the Guinness Book of Records title for most white marble on Earth. It holds several records, in fact: the world’s largest enclosed observation wheel, the largest fountain, the largest mural of a star. The new airport has the world’s largest image of a Turkmen carpet, adorning the main passenger terminal. Until recently, the capital even boasted the world’s tallest flagstaff. All of these new toys, these buildings, parks and roads, were supposedly built for the people. They paid for it with their silence.
I find the whole place intriguing… for me, it’s not about the architectural aesthetics of the buildings, but it’s history and unique design. I sometimes tend to subjectivity remove myself from situations, in favour of an objective view of some things… not all things.
I do find the futuristic highways and city-scape aesthetically pleasing, as I’d envisioned a world like that by now, so I’m quite pleased that this place exists.
Please call the city’s Planning Department’s complaints division for your architectural complaint, and the Presidential HR complaints division for your megalomaniac-ruler complaint.
In the meantime, I have experienced so many different kinds of madness in so many different people that nothing surprises me any more and I am practising ever greater serenity, tranquility.
