LÜBECK: It's Façade

Of all the cities to have one, distinct façade, it's Lübeck. The most important town in the Baltic basin by the end of the Middle Ages, it is now a magnet for fans of Gothic brick architecture. It's everywhere: in its churches, city gates, town hall, hospital and houses.

So in this post, which is not about the Town Hall or churches (next post!), check out some examples of façades. Like the steeples of churches, I am very drawn to the rooftops of even the most ordinary of houses/buildings. Some of them, as you can see by the guy wires that hold them up against the winds, truly are façades: "1 : the front of a building; also : any face of a building given special architectural treatment; 2 : a false, superficial, or artificial appearance or effect."

Also, just for the halibut, I've made a special album of some windows and doors that caught my eye throughout our Saturday walk around Old Town. They're their own kind of façade, like the one above right.

You can't talk about Lübeck, of course, without the River Trave that surrounds the Old Town, making an island of it. In one day, Saturday, we walked from side-to-side and end-to-end of Old Town, inside the river's banks. We were supposed to have 80% precipitation throughout the day, as you can tell by the lowering skies in many of my photos, but we were rain-free for all but 30 minutes of our actual walk. On Sunday we took a little river tour, in and out of sun and rain, to round out the river views.

What a wonderful little town. Lübeck, "the Lovely." Today it's on UNESCO's list as a World Heritage Site of Mankind. I like that. (And I haven't gotten to the Town Hall and Churches!)