LXRY LIST
LXRY List: Geotreasures
Art underground. Finland offers more than the Northern Lights and endless forests and lakes. You will also find innovative places there.
Art underground
There is more to Finland than just Northern Lights and endless forests and lakes. You will also find innovative architecture there. Such as the Amos Rex art museum, which is partly located underground. It is located in the center of Helsinki and is part of the iconic Lasipalat. Because this 'glass palace', which has served as a culture and media building since 1998, turned out to be unsuitable to house a large exhibition space and is also a protected building, and so it was impossible to build a new building behind it, JKMM Architects chose to excavate the ground under the adjacent square and create the 2.200 square meter exhibition space there. The square is now decorated by domes of different sizes, culminating in windows for much-needed daylight. These periscopic skylights also give the public space new qualities: people can climb on them to their heart's content. Studio Drift, among others, has already given an exhibition in the Amos Rex.
Ant-Man
It is the most beautiful cave in the world. But not accessible. In Naica Crystal Cave in the Chihuahuan Desert in Mexico you will find the largest crystals. The cave, discovered in 2000, is located at a depth of 290 meters and contains crystals of 11 meters long with a diameter of 2 meters and a weight of approximately 55 tons. The conditions are very unfriendly, with an average temperature of 48,8 degrees and a humidity of more than 80 percent. Without special suits and equipment you will be dead within minutes. That is why the Cave of Crystals (Cueva de los Cristales), as it has now been baptized, remains inaccessible. Although there are plans…
Giant steps
The Irish call Giant's Causeway, a rock formation on the northeast coast of Northern Ireland consisting of about 40.000 basalt columns, the Eighth Wonder of the World. According to legend, the Irish giant Finn McCool built a causeway through the sea to Scotland to fight his counterpart Benandonner. When he arrived there and saw that his rival was even greater than himself, he quickly fled back to Ireland. With the Scottish giant hot on his heels… McCool instructed his wife to disguise him as a baby. When Benandonner saw the woman with the infant in her arms, he was shocked by the size of the child. How big and strong did the father have to be? He in turn fled back to Scotland, destroying the path along the way. Only the beginning in Northern Ireland and the end in Scotland (Fingal's Cave on the island of Staffa) still exist. Nice story of course, but we now know better: the perfect hexagonal columns were created about sixty million years ago by volcanic pressure. We think we understand the world, but it never ceases to amaze us.
