Contributed by Dien Ho
ARoS Museum (Denmark): Inspired by Dante’s Comedy
“On the roof of a museum inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, a sculptural walkway resembling a many-colored halo is attracting record-breaking crowds. It offers a 360-degree view through multicolored glass of Denmark’s second-largest city and by night it lights up, the brightest illumination in western Denmark.” [. . .] –Nicolai Hartivig, The New York Times, October 14, 2011
Contributed by Hope Stockton (Bowdoin, ’07)
Palacio Barolo, Argentina
“It was built by the Italian architect Mario Palanti (1885-1979) for his compatriot a powerful textile executive Luis Barolo (1869-1922), in the 1910’s decades, who used to think, as all Europeans settled in Argentina, that Europe would suffer numerous wars that would destroy the entire continent. In desperation to preserve the ashes of the famous Dante Alighieri, he wanted to construct a sanctuary on 1300 May Avenue, inspired by the work of the poet, The Divine Comedy.
[. . .]
“The building has plenty of references to Dante. The bulbs in the cupola represent the nine angelical choirs and the mystical rose. [. . .]
“The general division of the building and the poem is done in three parts: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. The ground floor is Hell, the first 14 floors are Purgatory, and following floors are Paradise and the cupola represents God.
“The number of Hell hierarchies is nine, and nine are the arches of access to the building which represent initiation steps. Each arch has Latin phrases taken from nine different works from the Bible to Virgil. The cupola resembles that of the Budanishar Hindu temple dedicated to Tantra, representing the union between Dante and Beatrice.
“The songs from Dante’s work are a hundred just as the height of the building is a 100 mts. The majority of songs in the poem have eleven or twenty-two stanzas; the building has eleven modules per front, and twenty-two modules per block. The height is twenty-two floors. This set of numbers represents the circle which was, to Dante the perfect figure.” —Buenos Aires Travel
“. . .One of many buildings at risk of demolition, preservationists say, is the 1923 Palacio Barolo, a mansion commissioned by a self-made millionaire and designed in accordance with the cosmology of Dante’s Divine Comedy.” [. . .] –Emily Schmall, The New York Times, April 15, 2013
See the Palacio Barolo website for more information and history.
See also Sebastián Schindel’s 2012 documentary El rascacielos latino, available to view on YouTube (in Spanish; last accessed March 20, 2020).
Contributed by Juan Vitulli (University of Notre Dame)
Inferno Enterprises Architects
The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
“…Inside the building that tranquillity gives way to a comic-book version of Dante’s Divine Comedy, with strict divisions between various worlds. Visitors enter via an internal bridge that crosses over an underground atrium. From here, a vast hall conceived on the scale of a piazza leads to a cafeteria overlooking the calm surface of a reflecting pool. On one side of the hall looms the ziggurat form of the museum; on the other, a wall of glass-enclosed offices. Here the spectral glow of the interior of the cast-glass skin evokes the stained-glass windows of a medieval cathedral.” –Nicolai Ouroussoff, The New York Times, May 26, 2007
Contributed by Darren Fishell (Bowdoin, ’09)
