The Model 3107 Chair

Today I got fed up with looking for flats, so I got on a tram and went to Strünkende Castle which is at the end of the line. It's several hundred years old and now houses a museum. The museum has lots of the usual stuff (armour, weapons, axes, pots, bones etc) and also a collection of 20th century chairs.

Possibly the most famous chair of the 20th century is now in the hands of the Victoria & Albert Museum. It belonged to the photographer Lewis Morley and was used in 1963 (the year that sexual intercourse began) for a photograph with Christine Keeler, who was then embroiled in the Profumo affair.

The museum in Strünkende Castle explained the appeal of this chair, which is a copy of the model 3107 chair by Arne Jakobsen. So if you ever run into this photo again, be sure to gaze at it with an open jaw and dribble "Phwoooar, that's a model 3107 chair".

Tumblers and other old stuff.

I decided to make use of my excess leisure time and look round the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.

I only saw less than half of the stuff as it is a big museum and I have a limited attention span for historical relicts. After a while I got a bit depressed by the exhibits: it seemed that the extent of human achievement over the millennia has been finding new ways to kill each other (axe, dagger, sword etc.) and finding new ways to depict the death and torture of Jesus. My favourite was one which had the crucifixion in the foreground and a lovely harbour scene in the background. Most picturesque, although it is a shame that Jesus was looking the other way, probably at something much less soothing.

For me, the "I wonder if I could steal this" exhibit was a 7th century franconian drinking pot. The great thing is that it had a rounded bottom so that it wouldn't stand up and you had to down the contents. I just looked around the internet to see if you can buy such a thing, but I can't find any. I did however learn the following quite interesting fact: a tumbler is, according to the Merriam-Websters dictionary, "a drinking glass without foot or stem, and originally with pointed or convex base". At some point people must have gone all puritanical, and designed the flat-bottomed tumbler which no longer tumbled. For years I've drunk out of these things, and never asked why we called the most stable of all glasses a tumbler. For some reason the name has stuck, though, so here's to franconian drunkards. Cheers.



For comparison, a raucous 7th century tumbler (top) and a sober 20th century tumbler (bottom). The tumbler in the picture is not the one in the museum, I just borrowed the image from wikipedia