“Lego® Opens New Flagship Store in Amsterdam that Honors Dutch Culture,” by S.M. O’Connor

On Friday, November 29, 2019, Lego A/S, doing business as The LEGO® Group opened a flagship LEGO® Store for the Netherlands in time for Advent. [Back in August, I wrote about the announcement that the first LEGO® Stores in the Kingdom of the Netherlands were set to open in Amsterdam and Utrecht in time for Christmas.] Before the doors opened, hundreds of people waited on and around the Kalverstraat (“Calf Street”), a busy street in the Dutch capital that is lined by shops.

Foto: Diederik van der Laan / Photo Republic Figure 1 Credit: The LEGO® Group Caption: This is a picture from the opening of the Dutch flagship LEGO® Store in Amsterdam on Friday, November 29, 2019. The archways of the Bridge of Innovation & Brick Floor Canal in the flagship LEGO® Store in Amsterdam has built-in panels that reference Dutch innovations, such as the microscope. Several customers in the que to purchase sets are holding the new LEGO® DC Super Heroes 1989 Batmobile™. This set is for adults and teenagers sixteen-and-up. It is a LEGO® Store Exclusive, meaning it cannot be found at other toy shops. It has a list price in the U.S.A. of $249.99.

The flagship store honors Dutch culture. Large models on display reference Amsterdam and the Netherlands as a whole, including the Amsterdam’s famous Munttoren (“Mint Tower”),[1] a Dutch windmill, and a canal bridge sporting Dutch innovations such as a microscope, cassette, and artificial heart. The 3.35-meter-high LEGO® model windmill has a rotating propeller, lights, and sound effects. The flagship store also boats a LEGO® staircase inspired by M.C. Escher (1898-1972). The walls are lined by LEGO® replicas of masterpiece paintings by the Dutch Masters. Visitors will also encounter interactive LEGO® models, construct boats in the Build a Boat corner and float it on models of the canals of Amsterdam around the LEGO® model of Munttoren. Dynamic lighting effects allow the store to mimic Dutch weather conditions.

With the LEGO® Mosaic Maker, visitors can turn a photo into a LEGO® Portrait in minutes. In the LEGO® Minifigure™ Factory, visitors can personalize their own Minifgures™.

Claud Flyger Pejstrup, Executive Vice President, LEGO® Retail, stated, “It’s a very proud moment to open our first flagship store in the Netherlands and to bring fun and creative LEGO play to even more Dutch children. In our LEGO stores we aim to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow through creative LEGO play experiences by delivering the ultimate LEGO shopping experience, where people of all ages can enjoy hours of fun and creativity.”

Figure 2 Credit: The LEGO® Group Caption: Inspired by Maurits Cornelius Escher’s *Relativity*, the LEGO® Escher Staircase allows customers to go from the bottom floor to the top and take some surrealistic pictures while they do it.

Figure 3 Credit: The LEGO® Group Caption: The gabled roofs of the LEGO® model houses on the right are characteristic of Dutch Baroque domestic architecture. As in Venice, affluent families in Amsterdam historically built tall, narrow houses.

Figure 4 Credit: The LEGO® Group Caption: This picture is from the opening of the flagship Dutch LEGO® Store in Amsterdam. A LEGO® model of Amsterdam’s famous *Munttoren* (“Mint Tower”) on the left, surrounding by a moat that is supposed to evoke the canals of Amsterdam.

Figure 5 Credit: The LEGO® Group Caption: This picture is from the opening of the flagship Dutch LEGO® Store in Amsterdam. A LEGO® Mosaic Maker can be seen on the left.

Figure 6 Credit: The LEGO® Group Caption: The walls of the flagship store are graced by LEGO® reproductions of masterpieces by Dutch masters, including **Rembrandt van Rijn** (1606-1669), **Johannes Vermeer** (1632-1675), and **Vincent Van Gogh** (1853-1890). The eyes of the super-sized built Minifigures™ in these faux paintings follow visitors around.

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[1] The Munttoren started out as one of two watch towers that were part of one of the city’s gates, when Amsterdam was a medieval walled city, around 1480. However, after a fire consumed everything but the east tower and part of the guardhouse in 1618, the tower was rebuilt and re-purposed in the Renaissance style as a clock tower with a carillon in 1620.

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The Field Museum of Natural History in March, 2018

The Field Museum of Natural History’s entrance pavilions are at opposite ends of Stanley Field Hall, which has a north-south axis. The two porticos (porches) are each reached by two successive flights of stairs.

Both porticos of The Field Museum of Natural History are flanked by two small porches, which each have two caryatids (columns in the shape of maidens). On the facade, the wings are adorned with a colonnade of attached fluted Ionic columns. The building’s fluted Ionic columns have volutes (spiral-scroll-shaped crowns).

Each portico of The Field Museum is tetrastyle in antis with double-ranked fluted Ionic columns capped by volutes. An entablature crowned by a pediment rests atop the columns. The continuous frieze in each case is relatively plain. The wave-themed acroteria that crown the pediments are borrowed from the Palace of a Fine Arts, which housed The Field Museum until 1920 and now houses the Museum of Science and Industry.

The Field Museum of Natural History isn’t “just” a museum. Visitors can watch scientists at work through windows at the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice DNA Discovery Center’s Pritzker Laboratory.

Mrs. Charles (Laura) Schweppe, a daughter and co-heiress of John Graves Shedd, the former partner of Marshall Field I who succeeded him as president of Marshall Field & Company, and who, under the guidance of Stanley Field founded the Shedd Aquarium, donated an exhibit of 100 bronze sculptures by Malvina Hoffman to The Field Museum. They represent every race, nation, and tribe in the human family (more or less). On January 9, 1933, the first group, Unity of Man, went on display.

In addition to the four figures Henry Hering (1874-1949) made for the corners of Stanley Field Hall, he also made the twelve plaster round lion head shield escutcheons that line it. These are replicas of the marble round lion head shield escutcheon he made for the pediment of the facade of The Field Museum of Natural History.

Christmas at Chicago’s Union Station

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a POLAR EXPRESS display in the Great Hall of Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a closeup of the THE POLAR EXPRESS steam locomotive mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is the headlamp of THE POLAR EXPRESS steam locomotive mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This Union Station Company rail car loaded with super-size gifts is part of THE POLAR EXPRESS mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a Christmas tree in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This Christmas tree in the Great Hall of Union Station in downtown Chicago has emblems of Amtrak, Metra, and historic railroad companies whose routes they now operate like Burlington.

Cinemas sculptor Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) Helped Design

This is the Pickwick Theatre Building, an Art Deco movie palace and office building erected in downtown Park Ridge, Illinois in 1928.

The architects were Roscoe Harold Zook and William F. McCaughey. Sculptor Alfonso Iannelli, who also worked on the Adler Planetarium, contributed to this building.

In recent years, the Vlahakis family, who’ve owned the building for 50 years, have been able to turn the building into a multiplex by adding smaller theaters around the original auditorium. The latest one, with a screen four times the size of the one in the auditorium, will open in time to screen INFINITY WARS in May, if all goes well.

The Catlow Movie Theater is a cinema that opened in downtown Barrington, Illinois in 1927. The Tudor Revival style of architecture is not confined to the facade of the cinema. As with the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge, Illinois, sculptor Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) played a role in the design and decoration of The Catlow Movie Theater.