Urban Art: Useful Hint 2
Could be the same sprayer as in the picture of the blog entry by Johannes.
location: Lessingstraße
Archive for October, 2006
This is not …
office paper? magazines? maybe soon!
location: stadtpark
Graz celebs: Otto Wanz
Otto Wanz was born on June 13, 1943 in Graz.
He is a former professional wrestler. He is a one time American Wrestling Association champion and former operator of the Catch Wrestling Association. He appeared in various TV series and movies.
“Obsessed With Wrestling” reports:
Otto Wanz started his career as Boxer and he won the Austrian boxing Title several times..
Early 1980: Big Otto was a very big name wrestler in Europe and in the United States..
August 29, 1982: Otto Wanz defeated Nick Bockwinkel for the AWA World Heavyweight title..
October 9, 1982: Nick Bockwinkel defeated Otto Wanz to recapture the AWA World Heavyweight title..
1983: Otto Wanz was part of the big New Japan tournament to crown the very first IWGP Heavyweight Champion..
1990s: Otto Wanz was the operator of a Germany-based promotion called Catch Wrestling Assocition..
Otto Wanz is a celebrity in Austria, appearing in many commercials, and is an actor..
Otto Wanz made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for destroying telephonebooks with his bare hands..
Hand-drawn?
There is a hand-drawn map of the street car transportation system on the Graz wikipedia site.
How *sweet*!
(I guess that’s for copyright reasons…)
From Mumbai With Love
Arzan Sam Wadia (Mumbai metblog, India) welcomes the Graz metblog and tells us about his lifelong love affair with Graz.
How can we describe a city?
Graz in Real-Time was an MIT SenseLab project in early 2006 that tried to find new ways to “understand” and “cartograph” a city…
>>Today the experience, infrastructure and morphology of the city are more closely related than ever before. The profusion of handheld electronic devices with increasingly powerful networking capabilities offers its users new modes of interaction within the urban environment. It also provides designers, artists, and theoreticians a new means for engaging and understanding the city. Therefore, forget old ways to describe cities!The project focused on cell-phone activity.
Here’s a plan view of cell-phone activity in Graz.
Urban Art: Oldtimer
Found this nice picture of a painted oldtimer on Flickr.
The comment says it is painted on a car repair shop in Graz. Does anybody know where that shop is?
Source: Picture by Cornettino.
A couple of lines about the history of Graz (Part 2)
Despite its medieval standing, the buildings constructed during the time the Habsburg dynasty dominate the inner city’s landscape.
In the 19th century, Graz became had a big enough population to call itself a city. As the 19th century progressed, the divide between the city’s left and right (represented in the working-class districts of Gries and Lend) became ever more apparent. At the same time, Graz was also described as a “Pensionopolis” because many retired imperial civil servants and artists moved to the city.
When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, the city was given the …well.. “honorary title” of “city of the peoples’ uprising”. Just recently Wolfram P. Kastner and Martin Krenn, two Austrian artists, attached a sign to a “honorary grave” of a “SA-Sturmbannführer” on a Graz cemetery, dealing with Graz’s pre-Nazi and Nazi past… and present.
World War II brought heavy bombing and destruction to Graz. The British took control of the city in 1945 and began reconstruction. Since then, Graz has slowly rebuilt itself into a prosperous, economic city. It has also emerged as the center of art and academia.
A couple of lines about the history of Graz (Part 1)
Graz sits in a valley, surrounded by mountains, with the river Mur flowing through its center. Its geographical location is one of the main features in the development of the city.
Graz is Austria’s second largest city. Graz is the capital and largest city in Styria, a green and heavily forested area. Graz is composed of a number of smaller villages, which were once independent.
Graz was originally the site of a Roman fort. But archeologists have found artifacts from the early stone ages. The earliest advanced settlement is traced back to the Slaws in 800 AD.
In the Late Middle Ages, Graz became an important center of commerce and trade. The city centre then (as now)was the area around the Sackstraße, the Murgasse, the Sporgasse and the Hauptplatz (main square). There was also a Jewish Ghetto in the south of the city pogroms in the 15th century forced Jews to go elsewhere.
