Tag Archives: global puzzling

Doing Crosswords at Home: The Artistic Way

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A few years ago, I wrote about one of the biggest crossword puzzles in the world: the 100-foot-tall Lviv, Ukraine, crossword painted on the side of a building.

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But as it turns out, this isn’t the only supersized crossword to grace the side of a building in Europe. In a book about German street art, I saw a picture of a house with a facade painted to resemble a crossword puzzle.

Doing a bit more research, I discovered that the house was located in Dusseldorf, Germany, on a street called Kiefernstrasse, which is one of the world’s largest graffiti walls. Residents use the walls of their homes and neighboring buildings to make artistic and political statements.

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[Image courtesy of CherylTiu.com.]

It’s a vibrant, fascinating part of the city — one where personal expression trumps traditional aesthetics. Be warned, though: Travel and lifestyle blogger Cheryl Tiu advises tourists to visit only in the daylight hours, and in the company of others. In the 1980s, Kiefernstrasse was home to gangs, political dissidents, and squatters, and it retains some of that anarchic spirit to this day.

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[As a Tsuro fan, I appreciate this work in particular, one of hundreds of works in an overlapping, constantly changing canvas. Image courtesy of CherylTiu.com.]

But the crossword house, located at #31, is what brings us to Kiefernstrasse today.

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[Image courtesy of Daily Dose of German.]

The artists (and residents) of #31 view the house as a microcosm of the world; all of the overlapping, interconnected entries — many of which are political — representing the complexity of our world.

It’s kind of interesting that such a layered statement literally appears in black and white. It feels quite apropos, though, since crosswords are both a cultural barometer — updating and evolving with the times — and a cultural artifact from another time, building upon the knowledge of the past.

As of writing this blog post, it’s unclear whether the piece is actually finished, since the artists said that the final words and clues for the grid were going to be painted on a gate or fence nearby.

Nonetheless, they’ve created a striking and intriguing work of art, one that says as much about crosswords as it does about the world.

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Night at the Museum (with giant crosswords!)

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[All images courtesy of Robert Mordzon.]

The National Museum in Warsaw is taking an intriguing approach to introducing children to the value of museum-driven learning.

They’ve launched the “Anything Goes” museum, an educational experiment wherein children select, develop, and curate the museum’s main exhibit for a period of time.

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According to the announcement on the National Museum’s website:

A group of 69 children aged 6–14 was divided into six curatorial teams. Over six months, the participants got to know the Museum and worked on the exhibition during weekly 4-hour meetings. The teams of junior-curators prepared the scripts and selected almost 300 works to be displayed….

The exhibition, which is divided into six individual segments, features works from all museum collections: ancient and Oriental artefacts, craft objects, old and contemporary sculptures, photographs, drawings and prints, coins and medals, clothes and paintings created in various periods. Many of these works have never been presented to the public. The children say that they “found and liberated them from the museum’s storeroom”.

And part of the “Anything Goes” museum is a dazzling audiovisual creation of technology pro Robert Mordzon: a giant interactive crossword puzzle.

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Clues are placed in front of light-up blocks in the grid which indicate the number of letters in each answer.

When a letter is placed correctly, the space will turn green. If a letter is placed incorrectly, the space turns red. And when a word is completed, an animation related to the word is projected onto the wall.

If all 130 boxes are filled in and the grid is completed, sounds and a celebratory “disco light show” are played.

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Not only is this an awesome way to bring puzzling to a newer audience, but it’s an impressive meld of science, technology, and wordplay. The fact that industrious children were behind bringing it to life is just the icing on the cake.

This is accessible puzzling at its most vivid and inspiring. Clearly when “Anything Goes,” anything is possible.

[A big thank you goes out to Kathy Matheson, aka Crossword Kathy, who brought this story to my attention.]

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