Video: Modern Babylon: New Tower of Books in Buenos Aires
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The spiral-shaped, 28-meter tower was recently built in the center of Buenos Aires. Now this city is Babylon. The steel structure erected in the Argentine capital is decorated with tens of thousands of books. The new tower is designed to show the whole world where the world book capital is located in 2011 (this title was invented and given to the city by UNESCO).
For the project entitled "The Books of the Tower of Babel" by Argentine Marta Minujín, more than 30,000 books were collected in 54 countries. It is not surprising: to get a real biblical mixture of languages, French and Nizhny Novgorod would obviously not be enough.
The author of the project, Marta Minukhin, in 1983 was already constructing a copy of the Parthenon from books. And now, after a long break, the architect insistently invites the audience to evaluate the results of the common work: people all together collected books for the new tower - now everyone together should rejoice at the results. So the Babylonian pandemonium is ready.
The essence of the project was to create a symbol of a single world culture, parts of which are books. The result is a pale shadow of the huge Babylonian library of Jorge Luis Borges - by the way, also an Argentinean.
The 30,000 books used in the construction of the new tower in Buenos Aires are a drop in the ocean of funds from the fictional Babylonian library. The model of culture invented by the great blind man is an incredible number of times larger than the Universe. So that visitors to New Babylon remember this, after the tour they are presented with a copy of the famous story.
Martha Minukhin's spiral book galaxy is expected to stay in the center of the Argentine capital until May 27. The new tower is open from 10 am to 10 pm, and in the evening you can watch it illuminate with lights and book covers shimmer and shimmer.
Here are collected books of all genres and directions, specially laminated before the installation of the structure (or you never know what?): From dictionaries and encyclopedias to fiction, from specialized manuals to journalism.
What artists do not do with second-hand publications: they create drawings on books, then they sew evening dresses from them. The authors of this project treat books with love and care. Some of the volumes after the tower is dismantled will be taken by the owners, the rest will form the fund of the First Multi-City Library of Buenos Aires.
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