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The E-Sylum: Volume 11, Number 7, February 17, 2008, Article 33 LITHUANIA'S BIG BANKNOTE BUILDING [The Baltic Times this week published an article about a building designed to look like one of the country's banknotes. I've heard of money art, but money architecture? Plenty of buildings have decorative elements that may mimic coins of money symbols, but until now I'd never heard of an entire building. Who built it, Scrooge McDuck? Read on to find out, and be sure to click on the article link to see a picture of the building. -Editor] They say that money doesn't grow on trees. Well, in Kaunas it grows on buildings. Earlier, if tourists ever bothered to visit Lithuania's dog-eared interwar capital at all, it was to see the Italian Baroque majesty of Pazaislis or quirky Old Town highlights such as the Thunder House and the White Swan. Now, however, a contender for the title of oddest Kaunas tourist attraction of 2008 is Office Center 1000. A curvaceous, luminous, 10-floor office building designed in the form of a LTL 1,000 banknote, Office Center 1000 is being touted locally as one of the Baltic region's most daring and original construction projects. The exterior is virtually finished, but the interior will only be fully completed in June. That's when the lucky companies that have signed up for this Class A office space will be able to move in. Jonas Plenta, marketing manager of Urmas, the company behind the project, insists that the new structure is not simply a mighty monument to the power of money. “At around the same time we were assessing some of the design projects for a new office building in 2005, Lithuania was one of two new EU member states applying to join the euro zone. We happened to come across a very elegant banknote dating from 1926, and decided to use it as our overall theme.” The exterior consists of 4,500 different pieces of glass with enamel designs, which are being slotted together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. The glass was made in the Netherlands and shipped over, and it can, Plenta assures, withstand even the most extreme Lithuanian weather. Acclaimed Dutch artist Rob Borgmann, managing director of Glass Printing International and a specialist of the “screenprinting” technique of placing images on glass for use in building facades, gave valuable advice on the Kaunas project. He previously worked on bold architectural projects such as the multicolored Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision near Amsterdam. To read the complete article, see: Full Story Wayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@coinlibrary.com To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum | |
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