All The Rage Museums

Rage against the  All the rage Museums

It’s not a new story, of course, and most of us assume we know enough about wine and its history to patch a narrative together. But the puzzle is far more wondrous and disparate than we’ve come to believe. So trust the innovative team at Babylonstoren to come up with an engaging and innovative way of bringing the various pieces together in an entertaining and informative – and insanely enjoyable – manner, creatively filling their new two-level wine museum with curious details and marvellous curios.

The Story of Wine may be a museum in the traditional sense, but it is by no means an ordinary one, and it is thrillingly experiential, full of delightful ideas, and packed with engaging bits and pieces. By design, it is a stunner, more a kind of interactive artwork, an object of beauty in and of itself, than merely a repository of information and artefacts.

Each component of the exhibition space has meticulously thought through to bring a different angle to the tale, and each component is told in a different way so that even the most likely-to-be-distracted youngsters will be challenged and engaged.

There are collections of corkscrews that will make you giggle and gasp, there are recorded interviews delivering sometimes astonishing and emotional soundbytes, and there are audio guides that tell the history of wine and winemaking in South Africa like never before. We loved the fact that, for example, it illuminates the reality of corruption at the Cape happening hundreds of years before our current endless succession of scandals.

And we loved the openness of the storytelling – it’s definitely not just about Babylonstoren, but about the entire South African winemaking industry, and it doesn’t shy away from talking about the negative impact of alcohol, either. It’s a robust contemporary museum that is a great addition to the Cape Winelands experience.

babylonstoren.com.

Utterly bonkers: Dubai’s latest jaw-dropper

The future is already here

Many of the world’s most astonishing architectural designs happen to be museums and art galleries. It’s these edifices that are showcasing the design savvy of the greatest creative minds, and often, since they are vanity projects of the super-wealthy, they get limitless funds thrown at them. Case in point is Dubai’s new Museum of the Future, which features 1 024 stainless-steel panels – many of them made by robots. The exterior is an artwork in itself, gleaming and curved, it features large-scale Arabic calligraphy, quoting Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. The museum will feature ever-changing exhibits celebrating human novelty and innovation with projections about what lies in store for our species as we create the future.

museumofthefuture.ae.