Life with Andrea

This post is out of order, but that's life.  ?Life with Andrea?  Anyway, Saturday we went to the Hedyar Aliyev Center.  The people I work with had said I NEEDED to go there.  The architect is famous, Zaha Hadid,  it represents sand dunes,  it's beautiful, and I'd better go.  So, I made Anne and Marc take me there.  (Raphael drove, again, but this time he just dropped us off and picked us up).

Don't you hate it when someone else is right?  But, it was gorgeous.  We walked around outside for about 40 minutes, taking pictures of the beautiful building and the artwork outside.  They've got these candy wrapper-shaped things, which were each in the design of a country's flag.  They've got Gazelles by many artists.  And it does sort of look like sand dunes on the outside.

We walked all around, I'll put a picture of it on the bottom.  And then we went inside and it had a GREAT exhibit about history of the country.  I especially liked the musical instruments, Anne especially liked the jewelry and the carpets.  Marc likes everything (just like Mikey).
But the most fantastic thing was the shape of the building.  Even on the inside, it's like being IN a sand dune.  The sides curve up.  The stairs slide into the sides of the building. The stairs are of differing widths, so you feel like you're moving through a natural environment -- but it's all out of white marble.  The walls are rounded.  The glass windows stretch up about 8 stories, maybe further, in loose folds.  Marc initially thought it was like fabric - because that is something they're known for in this area.

The Center is a museum and a performing arts hall.  The central area is for concerts, ballet, stuff like that.  They have LOTS of theaters in Baku.  But around the edges - in the external hallways - they have museum exhibits.  As the building is huge, these external hallways are each as big as the exhibit space Portland Art Museum might allot to the Egypt exhibit or the Venice exhibit.  We spent an hour on ONE of the exhibits - they had four.  I expect the acoustics in the building to be fantastic - as far as I could tell, everything else was.


It's so cool you should go and look it up and look at some professional pictures on line.  It really is a fantastic building.