Return trip to the world’s best public aquarium (in Lisbon)
As part of this year’s trip to Portugal we bought a family membership at the Oceanário de Lisboa, which I think has a legitimate claim to being the world’s best public aquarium. The typical public aquarium is “one damn tank after another”. This was tweaked to “one damn tank after another plus a big tank in the middle” due to the work of Peter Chermayeff (fans of The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications will be cheered to learn that this accomplished architect is the son of Serge Chermayeff, an accomplished architect). Chattanooga is also a strong contender and is also a Chermayeff design, but the planted aquarium exhibit designed by the late Takashi Amano puts Lisbon over the top. (Atlanta, funded by Trump-supporter Bernie Marcus, has whale sharks, but lacks a unifying theme). Here are some photos from June 2024:
The “one ocean” theme is moderately persuasive, but the younger members of our party preferred the phrase “otter fight.”
I like the aquarium so much that I tried to book an apartment at the nearby Martinhal hotel, but I am glad that we didn’t. The #Science museum next to the aquarium is also great, but there isn’t enough going on in the Parque das Nações at street level. It would be a good hotel for someone who intended to be entirely car-based, but not for someone who wanted to walk to restaurants and shops. The Myriad, which is in the same new area of the city, is much better located for access to a lively pedestrian area (a riverfront restaurant row) and a massive shopping mall (as well as a big train/bus station). The failure of this neighborhood to be a pleasant walkable lifestyle, as most cities and towns in Portugal are, is a sobering reminder that humans don’t seem to be capable of building decent new neighborhoods. The countries that are addicted to population growth (e.g., the U.S., via low-skill immigration) are thus doomed to have an ever-larger percentage of the population living in lonely lifeless suburbs. Parque das Nações has moderately high density and is in a country with a rich tradition of urban planning (going back at least to reconstruction from the 1755 earthquake) and still it doesn’t come together.
Full post, including comments