museums – Life In A Word

Technology birthed the self-guided tour. More and more often, an admission ticket to sights worth seeing grants you a pair of headphones and a wearable device instead of a name-tagged human to show-and-tell you the way. Self-guided touring allows for a more convenient and less distracted experience. But it also removes the storyteller, and that, my friends, makes all the difference between a memorable tour and a forgettable one.

Viking River Cruises, one of which we completed on the Danube River in early June (see Going With the Flow), provide a plethora of tour guide experiences. On any given day of the cruise, you disembark to one or two “land-based” locales, in the (sometimes) capable hands of a personal tour guide. Viking contracts with local agencies to provide these guides for small groups of its travelers. For example, having a Hungarian show you the sights of downtown Budapest is so much more satisfying than hearing someone drone on about it on a headset. Sharing a beer with a German on a tasting tour is almost like being invited into his house.

If I ask you to share one of your own memories involving a tour guide, you’ll probably recall a particularly good one. Maybe you’ll even remember a bad one. Regardless, your stories would support my theory: a top-notch guide can make the what or the where of the tour almost irrelevant. The guide himself or herself can make the difference between a memorable experience and a forgettable one.

Consider, I still remember a tour of a southern plantation with my family from almost fifty years ago. Why? Because the tour guide presented herself in a way that made me think we were being welcomed into her own house. She also had this soft, syrupy unforgettable Southern accent that had me hanging on her every word. Do I remember anything about the plantation? No, but I sure remember the tour guide.

So it was on the Viking cruise. We had good guides and we had outstanding ones. The very best of the dozen or so – ironically – was a young woman working on contract with Viking for the first time, as a stand-in for our scheduled guide in Munich. She was, in every respect, delightful. She started our tour with a greeting and a smile, then a little conversation and questions to break the ice. As she led us from one sight to another, she spoke with an energy and pride in her city that can only be described as vivacious. By the end of the tour, as the saying goes, she had us feeding out of her hand. I was so enthralled I forgot to take a picture of her.

But we also had a lesser guide a few days earlier in Vienna, who I’d describe as a speed-walking encyclopedia. He led us on a many-thousand-steps rush through the sights, filling our heads with facts and figure as he went, in a pretty thick Austrian accent. He never smiled and I don’t think we ever stopped walking. Can’t remember much about that tour (or him for that matter) because it was a rush-rush blurry overload of the senses. I need to go back to Vienna again someday so I can (literally) stop and smell their famous roses.

Courtesy of Viking and those many tours near the Danube, I present to you, therefore, the attributes of the consummate tour guide:

A local, familiar with the city or sight at hand through regular exposure.
A personality; warm, friendly, energetic, and engaging.
An overflowing font of knowledge on his/her subject, able to answer just about any question thrown their way.
A storyteller, able to weave anecdotes at will into the facts and figures to keep it interesting.
In tune with his/her audience, making adjustments to the tour as necessary (ex. “Am I going too fast for you?”)

If you take enough sightseeing tours, you’ll know whether your guide is missing one or more of the above within the first five minutes. You’ll also know whether the next hour or two will fly by or drag on for all eternity. If your guide checks all five boxes, consider yourself lucky. Most of us aren’t cut out for the job (myself included), whether we like to think we are or not. It takes a special set of skills to be the leader everybody wants to follow.

One of the must-sees on a visit to Colorado Springs is the campus of the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA). Besides a training ground for our future servicemen and women, the Academy hosts a high school, an airfield, two golf courses, and a cohesive campus of modernist buildings spread across 18,500 acres of the Rocky Mountain Front Range. But one structure stands prouder and taller than anything else on the property. Welcome to the USAFA Cadet Chapel.

If you’re following my blog posts on architecture (as I complete my LEGO Fallingwater model), you’ll recall Thorncrown Chapel from a few weeks back. The USAFA Cadet Chapel is a much bolder animal, dominating the academy campus skyline and easy to see from miles around. Instead of Thorncrown’s wood and glass, the Cadet Chapel boasts an impressive open structural steel frame, married with tall triangular stained glass windows. The main sanctuary is big enough to seat 1,200 (or about 25% of the USAFA student body); more like a church than a chapel. Frankly, the only thing the Cadet Chapel has in common with Thorncrown is its design inspiration: France’s Sainte-Chapelle.

The distinctive feature of the USAFA Cadet Chapel is its seventeen spires, marching from one end of the building to the other. The bold design, by architect Walter Netsche, took a little getting used to when the doors opened in 1962. Visitors described the structure as a giant accordion made of triangles. I describe it, more fittingly, as a series of fighter jets standing on their tails.

If you haven’t visited the Cadet Chapel you probably don’t know its biggest secret. It’s a chapel for all faiths. The main sanctuary is just the top floor of a multi-level structure. Hidden below, you’ll find individual chapels for Catholics (500 seats), Jews (100 seats), Muslims, and Buddhists. You’ll even find two “all-faiths rooms” and an outdoor area for “Earth-Centered Spirituality” (reserved for you Pagans and Druids). It’s safe to say your acceptance into the Academy has nothing to do with who or how you choose to worship.

The Cadet Chapel is a structural marvel, assembled from precisely one hundred prefabricated tetrahedral panels. Over the years its popularity has grown to where it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2004. That’s the good news. Now for the bad. The original design called for a series of gutters to transfer water away from the building, instead of streaming directly down its panels. But the gutters were scrapped due to budget constraints…

Mistake.

Sixty years of caulking and recaulking leaks finally forced the Academy to close the chapel for remodeling in 2019. Now for the really bad news… they’re still not finished with the repairs. In fact, you won’t be able to walk through the doors for another four years. What’s taking so long? Adding all those gutters, the ones that were supposed to be there in the first place.

One more bit of bad news (the fighter jets are really nosediving). Getting construction workers to the tops of the chapel spires meant building an entire hangar-like structure around the chapel. No joke – they put the whole building in a box. In other words, not only can you not walk through the doors, you can’t even see the Cadet Chapel today. Trust me, absence makes the heart grow fonder. Mark your calendar for 2027, because you really need to see the USAFA Cadet Chapel. It’s the only place I know where a (jet) wing and a prayer can be found in the same place.

Now for the latest on LEGO Fallingwater…

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LEGO Fallingwater – Update #4 (Read how this project got started in Perfect Harmony)

I’m starting to wish I’d built Fallingwater before the LEGO Grand Piano, so you’d see me taking on a greater challenge versus the other way around. 30 pages (or 33%, or 118 minutes) into the build, this is what we have:

Pretty much the same as last week. We added some landscape to the left side (the green/brown pieces), more landscape along the back, and we raised the foundation a little higher up off the water. We have yet to see any of the distinctive house itself. Not so adventurous.

What IS adventurous is sifting through 800 tiny pieces. There’s no logic in how they were bagged (thanks, LEGO!) so I end up just spilling everything out onto the desk, searching for a lot of minutes followed by building for a few minutes. Tedious? Heck no, this is a blast. If “tedious” entered my brain I’d have no business building LEGO models.

LEGO Gamble House by Grant W. Scholbrock

Props to my college buddy Bruce for sharing this photo, an example of a custom LEGO build… and one you can’t buy. It belongs in a museum if you ask me. There are pedestrian model builders (yours truly) and then there are professionals. Way to go, Grant!

Tune in next Thursday as construction continues! Now for another nod to Frank Lloyd Wright…

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

I’m not a big fan of museums. Maybe that’s because, as Frank Lloyd Wright said, a lot of them look like “Protestant barns”. No wonder New York City’s Guggenheim Museum is radically different. When Wright set out to design it in 1943 he vowed to “make the building and the paintings a symphony such as never existed before in the World of Art”.

I can’t describe “The Goog” any better than the website of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Their words: “… a white ribbon curled into a cylindrical stack that grows continuously wider as it spirals upwards towards a glass ceiling.” In other words, you the visitor climb in circles ever-ascending, enjoying the art as you go. The Guggenheim was the first museum design where the “physical home” played an important role in the experience of the art itself. If you’ve ever been to a museum that deserves a similar description, you have the Guggenheim to thank.

In closing I ask, is the Goog significant enough to earn a spot in the LEGO Architecture series of models? Why yes, it is!

Some content sourced from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation website, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Tag: museums

Following the Leader

Wings and Prayers