Day Three-The V&A Museum

This day was mostly spend at the conference, but during one of the afternoon sessions when there were no interesting talks, I decided to go to the Victoria and Albert Museum which was adjacent to Imperial College where the conference was being held.  

 

The building is again pretty interesting architecturally, but what I found most interesting was the holes left from the German bombing.  

 

 The V&A hosts a wide number of collections and exhibits.  Here are some of the ones I found fascinating. 

  For JA sake, I was drawn to an exhibition on the Lolita look in Japan (a cross between Hello Kitty cuteness and the punk rock movement, go figure!) 

 Samurai warriors, which turn out to be kind of short.

Various Japanese vases

The music room below was taken wholesale from the house of the Duke of Norfolk when it was being torn down.  The room was really quite incredibly beautiful and clearly required enormous amounts of wealth to built.  So like many things in London, there is a sense of ambiguity about its treasures. Amazed at the beauty we humans can create, but balanced by a recognition of the societal cost that such concentration of wealth by the ancient class system incurred. King George III was born at the Norfolk house. So perhaps the room serves as a reminder that simply being able to accrue great wealth and power does not in any way indicate whether one can govern effectively.  Although in fairness to HRH George III, he was only clearly insane in later years after the American Revolutionary and Parliment probably bears the greatest responsibility for driving the American colonies from the British Empire.

 The British rooms also had these incredibly beautiful stain glass windows.  I have become a big fan of stained glass and am wondering how we might add some to our home.

I took a picture of the ceiling art below for Jonathan.  All of the instruments were once working instruments that were smashed flat by the hydraulic pumps of Tower Bridge.

Dale Chihuly glass art is everywhere! This artist first came to our attention at the Indianapolis Children's Museum, but I have now seen his art all over the world...

 This heart looks like lace, but its actually made of etched metal.  I found the metalwork section particularly interesting.

 

Your standard Renaissance lawn decor for the upper class.

 The casting room.  I guess in the old days, the way that art students learned was on cast of the original art objects.  So this is not the real David, just the cast that London's aspiring artist would learn from.

 These Morlaix stair cases were retrieved from French mansions of the 1500s.

Some other sections I didn't take pictures in because I wasn't sure if I was allowed to after being called out by the museum staff while taking a picture of this really interesting temporary collection by a guy in a lunatic asylum.   There was a whole collection of dresses from Elizabethan times and then ball gowns from the 1950s to current day.

After returning to the conference and the remaining sessions, I went to dinner with a colleague from France.  The streets were more crowded at 10 pm than they were at 8 pm.  Lots and lots of people.