A last ray of sun…
Gone With the Wind
A last ray of sun…
Travel
Thank You All – And, Have a Great Weekend!
I Just want to send a heartfelt Thank You to WordPress Discover and to all my readers and followers, old and new, who faithfully support this blog (and me!). Without you, life would lose this silver lining called blogging. Connecting worldwide, the possibility of meeting friends live, and helping each other to stay positive despite a troubled world. Thank you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
Thursday’s Special: Fall
For Paula, at Lost in Translation – my fall is an underground one. Maybe not that beautiful, but at least special…
Thursday Thoughts – Framed
Why do many/most people like…frames? (Or maybe not?) And what defines a frame?
This window photo displays some frames – photographed when I was looking out of my own hotel window. I like it, despite its drabness and ordinariness.
Many city windows look just like the one above…or like this one…
But a frame does not have to look like a window frame or a door frame…or a painting frame – it can be…different.
How many frames can you find in this photo?
And frames can be – very different!
It can stare at you in night light…
…or give you an irregular, sunlit moment.
So – what do you think about frames? Are you a compulsive frame user, or not? Do we need them at all?
WPC: Glow
Most people love things that glow. Who can resist… a sunset? My choice for this week’s challenge is a photo from Iceland and the winter sun’s last glow after a glorious day.
CFFC: Letter I – Needs to start with the letter I
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Letter I – Needs to start with the letter I
The letter I, from Cee’s challenge, meant some memorable moments – In the header: Icehotel, Jukkasjärvi, Sweden.
Ice cold Iceland
Icelandic horses
Icy Tännforsen, Sweden
The City’s Country Road
Of course there were colours in Łódź as well. And, when I think of the country road in my post this morning…with the oak trees on parade…These city alleyways seem truly related – even the one without trees. Somehow the urban equivalents?
Black&White Sunday: Shape
Paula, at Lost in Translation, asks us for a black and white shape, this Sunday. I hope it is OK with two. From an outdoor exhibition where the artist’s name was missing.
The Unicorn Stable
Łódź is a tram city since 23 December 1898, and was the first city to have electrified trams in Poland.
In the years 1910-1931 suburban tram lines connected many important places around the city, creating the largest such network in Poland, unchanged until the end of the 1980s. In the first half of the 1990s, some of them were closed down, but Łódź is still the only city in the country to have such a system of commuter trams.
Personally, I love trams – the narrowness, the on-and-off and the streetscape they create. I am glad they kept them – and developed them as well!
According to Wikipedia, the Municipal Communication Company of Łódź (MPK), currently operates 16 urban and 4 regional (or suburban) lines. The longest of these, and in fact the longest of all of Poland, is number 46, which has a length of 38 kilometres.
Trivia: Łódź once boasted a small cemetery where tram drivers were buried. Sadly, nothing remains of this graveyard, which was situated on Lindley Street near the aptly named Tram Street (ul. Tramwajowa).
When looking for more facts about the beautiful rainbow station, I came across this interesting blog by Daniel Wright, a freelance transport writer. And he describes it so well:
The Unicorn Stable (Piotrkowska Centrum tram station, Łódź, Poland)
Designed by Warsaw-based architecture practice Foroom, Piotrkowska Centrum is an unusually dramatic piece of tram architecture. If you like Santiago Calatrava’s work on railway stations, then you’ll like this. It has something of the same adventurous spirit and ostentatious engineering, but scaled down to the dimensions of Łódź’s narrow gauge (1,000mm) trams.
Wright claims the design of the station is drawing on the Art Nouveau details to be found on nearby buildings, but also the fact that it remains a practical piece of transport infrastructure.
The original plan had been to use glass panels in the roof, but instead a translucent plastic fabric, ETFE, was used – the same as in the roof at Southern Cross station in Melbourne. It is very light, but also very strong across a wide range of temperatures, making it ideal for Poland’s harsh winters.
This tram station has its own special beauty and a very suitable nickname: “The Unicorn Stable”. When I was a child, unicorns were all-white. These days, for some reason, most unicorns are represented with rainbow tails, and possibly manes, and some even have wings. So if they ever needed stables, this ethereal white structure with multi-coloured ‘glass’ roof would, I admit, be just the thing. In fact…I think I just caught a glimpse of…
Fresh Air and Art – The Modern Łódź Fabryczna
Vivi entered the B&W Challenge in my recent post…and if you look closely, you can see she is very impressed by this new railway station – and so was I – exploring it for more than an hour. Originally it was meant for high-speed-trains, but due to the latest estimated cost of 10 billion Euro, the high-speed line was put on hold.
Anyway, air and space, light and art – you cannot but feel good here!
Łódź Fabryczna is the largest and most modern railway station in the city. According to Wikipedia, it was originally constructed in the centre of Łódź, at the initiative of industrialist Karol Scheibler in 1865.
Art exhibition in two levels!
The old station was closed on October 16, 2011, and in June 2012 it was demolished to make way for the building of a new station below ground level. It reopened on 11 December 2016.
Today, we also noticed that our Swedish company, SKANSKA, is working the construction site nearby. What they are building? I have no answer to that.
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