Walk of Ideas

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40ft stack of books sculpture at the Berlin Walk of Ideas.
40ft stack of books sculpture at the Berlin Walk of Ideas.

The Walk of Ideas is a set of six sculptures made for the 2006 FIFA World Cup football event at Berlin in Germany. The set of sculptures was unveiled on April 21, 2006 at Bebelplatz, a square near the Unter den Linden, at the entrance to Humboldt University. The exhibition was part of the event entitled, Welcome to Germany, the land of ideas and the opening of the exhibition was covered by reporters for the international mass media. The sculptures were displayed until September 2006.

Contents

[edit] Books

The stack of 17 books, shown adjacent, is more than twelve meters in height (forty feet), 35 tons in weight and took almost three days to build on the Bebelplatz; the construction began at the 21 April 2006. The artwork's name is "Der moderne Buchdruck" (English: "Modern book printing") and it commemorates German writers, poets, and especially, Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the modern book printing process c. 1450 at Mainz. Here is the full list of people, which are on each spine, beginning with the topmost:

[edit] Einstein

The following sculpture of his famous formula honors Einstein’s works on relativity, which revolutionized our perception of time and space. The sculpture consists of three segments, weighs a total of ten tons, is almost four meters tall, and is twelve meters long.

[edit] Medicine

The pill sculpture that follows has a diameter of ten meters and commemorates pharmaceutical researchers such as Felix Hoffmann, Robert Koch, Emil Adolf von Behring, Paul Ehrlich, and Gerhard Domagk.

[edit] Music

The musical note sculptures shown below, symbolize Germany as a nation of music, home to composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner. Some are dedicated to pioneers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and interpreters such as Anne-Sophie Mutter.

[edit] Automobile

The automobile sculpture that follows has a length of ten and half meters, is three and a quarter meters high, four and half meters wide, and weighs approximately ten tons. It was designed by a team from Audi. More than one hundred people worked on it, from planning through construction and production.

The automobile sculpture was chosen to represent Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach, August Horch, Ferdinand Porsche, and Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine.

[edit] Football

The following boots are twelve meters long and commemorate an invention by Adi Daßler, the founder of Adidas. In 1953, he developed football shoes that provided a particularly firm grip on soft, rain-soaked ground, which revolutionized football equipment with the flexible screw-in stud shoe: