Pictures from last Saturday

Last Saturday afternoon, I headed up Avenida del Libertador with a rough plan to check out a few museums. The day started off nice and cool for one of the first times since I've been here, so I stopped for a while to wander around the crafts fair in the plaza near the Recoleta cemetery. I had already been there exploring with Jake, but it's huge and was worth seeing again.

I hadn't really taken note of the steeple and bell tower of the church at Recoleta the other day, but it's pretty cool. Is it just me, or does the clock look a bit lopsided?

I wandered around the Recoleta Design center for a while, which is a pretty large mall with all sorts of interior design stores. Light fixture in the window of one store:

I went into the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes for a bit, but apparently failed to find my way up to the second level, where I imagine the "world's largest collection of Argentine sculptures and paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries" (according to Frommer's) must have been hiding--all I saw was European art.

I continued up a few blocks to the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo, passing this sign on the way:

hehe.

The decorative arts museum was pretty cool. I stuck around for the 4:30 tour, which turned out to be worth the wait since I got to hear about the mansion that the museum is in.

It was built between 1911 and 1917 for a rich family that was living in France at the time. I believe the husband was the Chilean ambassador. The house was designed by a French architect and basically all the materials to build and decorate it were shipped from France. The guide pointed out how carefully designed it was, with the kitchen on the top floor instead of in the basement as is typical for many houses of the period so that the rest of the house would not get too hot. The house was fully wired for electricity and had a sort of central heating system via grates in the floors, as well as central vacuum. It was a family of collectors, so the dimensions of the main room were determined by their tapestry collection, and the house was designed to display their art well.

I wasn't sure if I was allowed to take pictures, so I only got one good one of the main room.

The story behind the fireplace is interesting. In the picture you can see a dark lump just to the left of the big fireplace, which is a model of the fireplace they had planned to have. The family had originally commissioned Rodin to design a fireplace for them (in a very different style than the one they ended up with), but then World War I interrupted things in Europe and they never could quite agree on a price, so they just kept the mock-up from Rodin and ordered a fireplace from a catalog. Yes, that huge stone firplace whose opening is taller than I am came from a CATALOG.

I really wish I had pictures of the dining room and ballroom because they are quite impressive. The walls of the dining room are completely covered in marble. I think the tour guide said there are 6 different colors. The ballroom looks like the kind of place that you would see ladies waltzing in huge ballgowns, but the guide pointed out that the family was living there in the 1920s, so they actually would have been dancing things like Charleston and swing.