Special places: New Zealand
Hundertwasser weblog
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Dutchman Rogier van den Berg is the author of this weblog that records the work of the artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000). Hundertwasser’s quirky architectural work is to be found in his native Austria, elsewhere in Europe, in Japan, and in New Zealand where he settled late in life.
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Rimutaka incline railway
This website celebrates a remarkable New Zealand railway, and promotes a scheme to reconstruct it.
The steep Rimutaka Range was a barrier in the way of the railway line from Wellington to Napier. In the 1870s the engineers adopted a ‘temporary’ solution — special locomotives with extra horizontal driving wheels on both sides of a central rail. The system was designed and patented by English engineer John Fell.
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Wellington cable car museum
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In the 1890s in Wellington, entrepreneurs built a cable tramway to connect the port city to newly subdivided building lots on the hills above. It was a great success. It operated until the 1970s, when a new cable tramway was built on the same right-of-way.
»more»Art Deco Napier
The port and resort city of Napier, on the east coast of the North Island, was heavily hit by an earthquake in 1931. 162 people died in Napier, and another 93 in nearby Hastings. Most of Napier’s commercial and institutional building stock was destroyed. A few skillful local architects designed a suite of new buildings in then-fashionable styles — Art Deco, Spanish Mission, Stripped Classical. Within a few years the city had been rebuilt.
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