asianculturalfestival.org

‘Weeds: Season 7′

This season of the Showtime series begins in an unusual way—three years after Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) was arrested by the FBI for manslaughter, covering for her son Shane. The other Botwins have been passing the time safe in Copenhagen and return to the U.S. when Nancy is released to a halfway house in New York City. She fights her sister for custody of her baby son and continues to wreak havoc whenever she’s given a half a chance. Season 8 is on the way.

‘Nurse Jackie: Season 3′

Gbenga Akinnagbe (“The Wire”) joins the cast as a new nurse and former addict, and Jackie’s sister-in-law gets involved with Jackie’s former lover from seasons 1 and 2, Eddie. One of the better comedic moments of the season is when a rat falls from the ceiling and disturbs Zoey’s lunch break. Steve Buscemi directed the first two episodes. Season 4 premieres April 8.

‘Borgia Faith and Fear: Season 1′

The Borgias, Renaissance ancestors of the murderous Sopranos, have inspired two recent series. From Tom Fontana, who also created HBO’s “Oz,” this European version of the Borgia story (which was aired in some Continental countries and has an English soundtrack) features more gouged-out eyes, chopped-off ears and nudity than the Showtime version. John Doman (“The Wire”) plays ruthless Rodrigo Borgia, who wants to be Pope. Among the extras: a segment on how the production turned Prague into 15th-century Rome.

Note: DVDs are released Tuesday.

—Monika Anderson

By KAREN WILKIN

Courtesy of the Morgan Library & Museum

‘A Peasant Playing Skittles or Lawn Bowls,’ by Adriaen van Ostade.

New York

Eccentric private collections can be appealing. The erratic shifts in focus and the dizzying swings in quality that distinguish, say, Isabella Stewart Gardner’s or Albert Barnes’s amazing hoards are part of their fascination and charm. But there’s a lot to be said for obsessed art lovers who collect with a sense of larger purpose, concentrating on particular themes, mediums or periods, and gaining expertise as they do so, so that the resulting group of works has the coherence and, often, the excellence of a respected museum’s holdings. “Rembrandt’s World: Dutch Drawings From the Clement C. Moore Collection,” on view now at the Morgan Library and Museum, is paradigmatic of the second type of approach: single-minded and informed by knowledge and connoisseurship. (The Moore Collection is a promised gift to the Morgan, which will at once provide an excellent context and be enriched by these additions.)

As Mr. Moore tells the story, in his preface to the exhibit’s handsome, scholarly catalog, he was first “completely hooked” by the 17th-century Dutch paintings in the Wallace Collection, during a visit to London more than 20 years ago—”so much so,” he writes, “that I began to explore Dutch art straightaway.” Golden Age Dutch works on paper, which spoke to him from the start, proved affordable. Mr. Moore’s first purchase, Rochus van Veen’s poignant watercolor “Study of a Dead Eurasian Otter” (1673), was soon joined by landscapes and other nature studies. As Mr. Moore’s ambitions for the collection grew more serious, so did the scope of what he acquired.

The more than 80 works at the Morgan include landscapes, marine images, cityscapes, portraits, genre scenes, religious subjects and (keeping the otter company) scrupulous representations of exotic birds, tulips and animals, both domestic and fierce. There’s even an undated drawing by Jan van der Heyden detailing “The Courtyard of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange With Suction Pump and Fire Extinguishing Equipment,” a remarkable image that announces its author’s multiple roles as a painter of cityscapes, engineer and inventor. The Moore Collection ranges from highly finished works, some with color, intended for collectors of drawings when they were made—a new phenomenon in the 17th century—to rapid working sketches and private notations, to preparations for engravings. The approaches range from earthy naturalism, to sparse elegance, to Italian-inflected Mannerism, although the emphasis is on Dutch artists who remained in the Netherlands and concentrated on recognizably “Dutch” images most appealing to the Dutch market.

That notable stay-at-home Rembrandt is represented by four economical but vivid figure studies spanning his career from the 1620s to the late 1640s or early 1650s. The most spectacular is the intimate, casual “Study of a Sick Woman for the ‘Hundred Guilder Print’ and an Alternative Sketch of Her Head” (c. 1647-49), a vigorous characterization of a weary supplicant conjured up with rapid, fluid pen strokes. The Morgan’s version of the monumental etching “Christ Healing the Sick” (c. 1647-49)—nicknamed the “Hundred Guilder Print” for the exorbitant price it fetched only a few years after its publication—is hung beside the drawing, to underscore the transformation of the scrawled figure in the sketch into the print’s impassioned worshiper.

Works by members of Rembrandt’s circle, such as Govert Flinck and Ferdinand Bol, bear witness to his influence, while fine examples by other significant practitioners of the Golden Age, such as Hendrick Goltzius and Adriaen van Ostade, suggest the richness of the period; the Van Ostade, a tiny, lively watercolor of a peasant crouching to play lawn bowls, is a standout. Works by less familiar but no less accomplished artists complete our sense of what 17th-century Dutch draftsmen were capable of, from Roelant Roghman’s light-filled drawings of urban and rural buildings to Cornelis Saftleven’s near-life-size “Head of a Growling Bear,” russet fur, savage teeth and red tongue suggested with colored chalk overlaid with rhythmic strokes. That characteristic touch is the only thing connecting the large, angry bear with a more typical Saftleven, a monochrome of two placid, slightly shaggy cows with dopey expressions. In the animalier category, though, Simon de Vlieger’s chalk, brush and ink study of an exceptionally doggish dog, awake and asleep, is hard to beat.

“Rembrandt’s World” is installed in thematically related groups, rather than chronologically, which allows us to approach the exhibition from multiple starting points and, at the same time, encourages us to make comparisons among related works, perhaps in the same way that the original collectors of these drawings did, at a kunstbeschouwing—“art showing”—when carefully stored images were brought out and passed among a gathering of amateurs seated around a table, for admiration and discussion. Wherever we start, we find drawings that compel our attention. Don’t miss a delightful Hendrick Avercamp of fishermen on a riverbank, an unusual summer scene by a master known for his skaters on frozen canals. Then there’s Gerbrandt van den Eckhout’s drawing of a young man seated on a barrel, a celebration of black and white chalk’s potential for tonal complexity in the hands of a virtuoso. An informal pen-and-ink coastal scene by Willem van de Velde the Elder seems to test how few lines are needed to evoke a specific place. And a personal favorite: Abraham Bloemaert’s “Interior of a Barn” (1600-10), a tightly packed celebration of pattern and texture that transcends its century. Next stop, Piet Mondrian’s cathedral facades—modern, more abstract manifestations of Van de Velde’s impulse to distill the geometry of architecture into a complex expanse of shifting marks.

Ms. Wilkin writes about art for the Journal.

By TOBIAS GREY

Agence Ricciotti

A rendering of the future Mucem

The fresh mistral breeze, the setting sun with its pinkish hue and the bustling energy of Marseille’s Old Port have seduced legions of Mediterranean voyagers down the years.

Perhaps none more so than Alexandre Dumas, who used his classic novel “The Count of Monte Cristo” (1844) to hail France’s most ancient city as “always younger the older she grows.”

James Reeve for The Wall Street Journal

Zaha Hadid’s 147-meter tall CMA CGM Tower

Dumas’s words still ring true today. More than 2,600 years after first being discovered by Greek sailors, Marseille, once famed as the port of the French empire, is undergoing a cultural renaissance. The city’s extensive waterfront and harbor zones, many of which had lain dormant since the oil crisis of the 1970s, are now teeming with construction sites for new museums, concert halls, galleries and contemporary art foundations.

According to the city’s longstanding mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin, 50 new cultural poles throughout Marseille and Provence are being created with a cost in the region of €600 million. The race is on to have everything ready in time for when Marseille will join with Provence to become European Capital of Culture for 2013 (the Slovakian city of Košice will assume the honor at the same time).

Most of the new cultural areas will be conveniently grouped in La Cité de la Méditerranée, a nearly five-kilometer swathe of seafront that stretches from the 17th-century Saint-Jean Fort, at the northern entrance of the Old Port, to the dockland area of Arenc.

Access to La Cité, where upmarket neighborhoods and office blocks have also sprung up, is being made easier by rerouting parts of the coastal road to expose the city center to the waterfront.

“Our example was Barcelona,” says Jean-François Chougnet, managing director of Marseille Provence 2013. “We were encouraged by the wonderful impact opening up the waterfront had on that city.”

The city’s skyline has also begun to be transformed. Unlike Paris, where the law states that all buildings must not exceed 36.8 meters, Marseille has no such restrictions. One of the most impressive sites to be seen off the large of Marseille is the shimmering blue-glass of Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid’s 147-meter-tall CMA CGM Tower. The skyscraper, which was completed at the end of last year, is the headquarters for the French shipping firm of the same name. Ms. Hadid is one of several internationally renowned architects (others include Massimiliano Fuksas, Jean Nouvel, Stefano Boeri and Rudy Ricciotti) who are bringing a new central focus point to a city already blessed with a world famous opera house, national ballet and vibrant theater scene.

Marseille’s strong repertoire of performing arts has traditionally overshadowed what has tended to be been an underwhelming museum circuit. Marseille’s 13 existing museums only welcome about 300,000 visitors a year, a tiny amount when compared to a museum like the Louvre, which attracts more than eight million visitors annually.

The city’s Musée d’Art Contemporain (MAC), which was created in the 1990s, epitomizes what has, up until recently, been the City of Marseille’s rather haphazard organization of the visual arts. Despite the museum’s impressive collection, its suburban location has meant that it might as well not exist for day-tripping tourists descending the cruise ships moored in the Old Port.

“One of the local criticisms has been that the MAC’s location should have been changed before creating the new museums,” says Mr. Chougnet. “It’s very often the case that the geographic location of a museum is more important than anything else.”

Perhaps it’s too late for the MAC to make up lost ground, but Mr. Chougnet is hopeful that by creating several museums, galleries and art foundations around the same seafront location there will be an effect of mutual benefit.

Many hope that Marseille’s museum attendance will be considerably boosted by the creation of the city’s first national museum, the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (Mucem), which will open at the end of 2012.

La Cité de la Mediterranée, where the Mucem is currently under construction, will also be home to a new Centre Régionel de la Méditerranée (Cerem), which will hold cultural exchanges, art exhibitions and concerts.

Italian architect Stefano Boeri’s symmetrical C-shaped building, which will open at the beginning of 2013, will notably feature a submerged, aquarium-like conference hall.

In the nearby Joliette district, a new building to house the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC) has been designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. The glass-facaded building, which began construction last January, will display pieces from the FRAC’s extensive contemporary art collection.

Not far away, Regards de Provence, the only privately run art foundation in Marseille, will also be opening a contemporary art museum. Renovation work recently began on the city’s former maritime sanitary station, where the new museum will be housed.

“Up until recently, we felt quite alone in Marseille,” says Adeline Granereau, Regards de Provence’s creative director. “Hopefully now there are other cultural alternatives being created. People will be thinking of coming to Marseille for its art and culture, not just for the seaside.”

Ms. Granereau is hopeful that the new cultural developments will encourage local business to invest in the arts. “This might lead to a new patronage system, which could lead to more foundations being created,” she says.

Slightly farther north, work is complete on another symbol of Marseille’s industrial past: the Silo d’Arenc, a former cereal silo built in 1926 and listed in 2004 as a heritage building. The new silo, inaugurated last September, houses a 2,000-seat concert hall, offices for technology companies and a panoramic rooftop restaurant overlooking the sea.

Impetus began to build for many of these projects in 2008, when Marseille and Provence successfully bid to become European Capital of Culture for 2013. Forty percent of the €600 million being invested in these poles is being provided by the city of Marseille; the rest is split between the government, private donors and the outlying regions. Some of the larger and more expensive projects, such as the Mucem and the Cerem, had long been in the offing, but a lack of potential funding had kept them in the development stage.

“Marseille is a city which is waking up,” says Mr. Chougnet. “There are a lot of art galleries opening, which is a complete change from 10 or 15 years ago. For many, Marseille Provence 2013 has provided the accelerator they needed to bring their projects to fruition.”

One of the most attractive ideas contained in the region’s bid, originally shepherded by Mr. Chougnet’s predecessor Bernard Latarjet, was for the creation of dozens of Ateliers de l’EuroMéditerranées (Euro-Mediterranean workshops), involving internationally respected artists working on projects with the help of local business know-how.

“It’s a very unique approach, one which is not motivated by money but about implicating businesses in artistic projects,” says Parisian artist Alexandre Perigot. “It’s not popularity-seeking. It obliges the business world to open up and interact with this massive event.”

Mr. Perigot, who is working on an installation inspired by Le Corbusier’s famous Marseille housing block La Cité Radieuse, has based himself in Aubagne, a commune 17 kilometers east of Marseille, where Marcel Pagnol was born. Mr. Perigot is being helped in his project by two local companies: Mota, one of only a few companies in the world to cool diesel motors with sea water, and Arnoux, which specializes in metal work.

“I think it’s a huge opportunity for Marseille,” he says. “I’m not an idealist who thinks you can change things with a magic wand, but it’s already been proven by a city like Lille that being European Capital of Culture can provide a complete change of image”

Perhaps the biggest challenge Marseille faces is to change its image as a city that often seems to be at the mercy of organized crime. Over the past few months, a spate of gang-related killings, possibly related to drug-racketeering, has underlined that a lot of work still needs to be done in this area.

But for Jacques Pfister, Marseille Provence 2013′s bullish president, culture can only help to soften his southern city’s sometimes scurrilous image. “It’s a big gamble,” he says. “But we’re confident it will pay off.”

So confident, in fact, that Mr. Pfister has set a goal of attracting three million more tourists per year to the region on the back of Marseille Provence 2013, about a 30% increase on the current number of visitors.

“Marseille on the Move,” trumpets the latest slogan from the city’s tourist board, and it’s hard not to disagree.

Write to Tobias Grey at wsje.weekend@wsj.com

By JOEL HENNING

Chicago

On D-Day, June 6, 1944, 23-year-old Staff Sgt. Walter D. Ehlers’s landing craft took him only as far as a sand bar more than a hundred yards off Omaha Beach. From there he led his unit of 12 men into cold water over some of their heads. The beach was supposed to be secured. That was the plan, but it wasn’t. Nearby his brother Roland, in another unit, was killed that day, along with 2,000 other Americans.

Staff Sgt. Ehlers, however, led his unit up the beach and eight miles inland, destroying several machine-gun nests along the bloody way. Even after he was wounded, he refused to abandon his troops. At one point, he stood up to cover the withdrawal of his men, diverting heavy fire to himself and saving his squad. While wounded, he carried an injured rifleman to safety. President Harry Truman awarded him the Medal of Honor.

In 1994 Mr. Ehlers returned to Omaha Beach on the 50th anniversary of the invasion. There he met a German machine gunner who had been firing on him and other Americans from a pillbox as they tried to move up the beach. “He told me that he was shooting and crying,” Mr. Ehlers, now in his 90s, recollects. “He was crying because he had to shoot so many Americans. He was just a normal German soldier, not SS or Nazi. It happens both ways. They have mothers and fathers and children, too.”

High-definition video interviews with Mr. Ehlers and other Medal of Honor winners are available online without charge (pritzkermilitarylibrary.org). They are among the scores of programs recorded in the Pritzker Military Library’s two-story, high-tech lecture hall and broadcast center. Twelve hundred videotapes and DVDs constitute only the electronic part of a collection of about 36,000 books, 1,500 prints and posters, 7,000 photographs and 1,500 artifacts housed in the 40,000-square-foot library in downtown Chicago.

But the Pritzker Military Library is not just another repository of war stories, battered flags and medals, interesting only to veterans and Civil War re-enactors. Among the striking materials on display is the handwritten diary of a New Hampshire militiaman, written during the American Revolution, and the Medal of Honor earned by Hershel “Woody” Williams for his service on Iwo Jima during World War II.

Nearby are letters containing vividly evocative drawings by the artist Franz Altschuler written to his family during World War II. Before he was drafted, Mr. Altschuler immigrated to the U.S. from Germany to work under the artist László Moholy-Nagy and later became one of Playboy magazine’s first illustrators for articles by Nelson Algren, Ray Bradbury, Vladimir Nabokov and other important writers.

Founded and supported in significant part by retired Col. James N. Pritzker, the library’s collections began with books and artifacts donated by the colonel and his family. “This country spends at least $500 billion a year on defense,” Col. Pritzker said. “I think there is a need for a private-sector community-based institution that can help citizens gain insight on military affairs. If we are to have civilian control of the military in our American system of constitutional democracy, we need to explore ways and means of enabling civilians to gain information on military affairs.”

Col. Pritzker opened the library in another, smaller site in 2003 and led the move to its present space in 2010, where it now occupies three dramatically redone floors of a 99-year-old office building designed by the architectural firm Holabird and Roche, just across from Millennium Park. The renovation by design firm tvsdesign includes coffered ceilings, elegant woodwork and the gracious atrium lecture hall and broadcast center. Low library shelves allow unobstructed views of Millennium Park.

The videotapes go well beyond those featuring war heroes. Recently, the library hosted Marvin Kalb and his daughter, Deborah, discussing their new book, “Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama,” in which they report on how our “loss” of South Vietnam continues to have a profound impact not only on U.S. military policy but foreign policy.

Online, Sir Max Hastings’s lecture based on his 2010 book, “Winston’s War: Churchill 1940-1945,” makes a convincing case that Churchill’s critical contribution to the war was as “the greatest actor in the history of the English stage,” providing inspiration for Britain’s demoralized citizenry and cover for its hopelessly amateurish military bereft of competent field commanders until 1942. He characterizes Churchill as the “Henry V of the 20th century.” Yet Hastings suggests that even though Britain was blessed with Churchill’s ability to lead with a performance of “sustained magnificence . . . imagination and theatricality,” that nation would have been lost had Hitler not made the grievous mistake of taking on the Soviet Union.

The library’s broad reach includes such programs as “Prisoner of Her Past,” a fascinating interview with the Chicago Tribune journalist Howard Reich about his mother, Sonia. She came from Dubno, Poland, a village of 12,000 Jews, only 200 of whom survived the Holocaust. Beginning in her late 60s, she suffered from late-onset posttraumatic stress disorder, no longer able to distinguish her nightmarish childhood memories from real life in suburban Skokie, Ill.

On Nov. 19, the library will feature Col. Jack Jacobs. In 1968, then-1st Lt. Jacobs was an advisor in the Mekong delta to a South Vietnamese infantry battalion that came under a devastating Viet Cong attack in which its commander was badly wounded, and their defenses were thrown into chaos. Although badly hurt and barely able to see, Lt. Jacobs took command and withdrew the unit to safety. He returned several times, despite intense fire, to rescue the wounded and perform first aid. That day, he saved the lives of 13 soldiers and another U.S. adviser, and stopped only when he was no longer able to move. He has never regained his senses of taste and smell. He received the Medal of Honor in 1969.

Although the library normally charges a $5 admission fee, it will be open to the public free of charge on Veterans Day.

Mr. Henning writes about the arts and culture for the Journal.

By KELLY CROW

Bjarke Ingels Group/BIG

Bjarke Ingels’s plans for overhauling the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah, involve an 80-foot tower, seen in a rendering.

Park City, the Utah mountain town best known for catering to skiers and the Sundance Film Festival, now wants to attract art lovers by housing its local art center in a towering, half-twisted log cabin.

The Kimball Art Center, a 35-year-old art nonprofit now in a former garage, has hired the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels to design its new home, according to its board. The $10 million-plus expansion project, which incorporates the garage, will create larger galleries for the Kimball’s art exhibits, a sunken theater for dance performances and a sculpture park located atop a grassy roof terrace.

The Kimball has no permanent collection, but its show of Ansel Adams’s early landscape photographs attracted large crowds a couple of years ago, as did an exhibit of works by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol lent by major local collectors.

The design by Mr. Ingels, a protégé of the famed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, will be hard to miss: He plans to build an 80-foot-tall tower by stacking former railway planks at a slight spiral so that the entire structure will appear to change directions midway up, like a game of Jenga gone askew. Inside, a restaurant will sit on the building’s lobby floor while a cantilevered, wooden staircase will lead visitors to the various white-cube gallery floors above.

Mr. Ingels has a reputation for creating eco-friendly spaces with playful design touches. In 2008, he designed a condominium called “The Mountain” in Copenhagen whose facade of perforated metal features an enormous black-and-white photograph of Mount Everest. In New York, Mr. Ingels has designed a West 57th Street apartment building, still under construction, that will contain its own 25,000-square-foot private park.

“The designer found inspiration in a storage depot that’s part of Park City’s history.”

Mr. Ingels said that he found inspiration for the new Kimball space in Park City’s history. In 1901, local silver miners built an 80-foot-tall wooden storage depot in the town center called the Silver King Coalition Mine Building; it was the town’s tallest landmark until a fire burned it down three decades ago. Mr. Ingel’s Kimball expansion will sit three blocks away from the site of that depot and will echo its height and wooden materials.

Robin Marrouche, the Kimball’s executive director, said that longtime residents still mourn the loss of the Coalition building in their skyline, so Mr. Ingel’s thoughtful nod won them over. “He’s captured the spirit of the Coalition building, and our history, without repeating it,” Ms. Marrouche said. Construction, pending city approval, is expected to begin next spring.

Meantime, Mr. Ingels said that he plans to visit the site often: “I also really love to ski.”

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

By BENJAMIN MOSER

Edel Rodriguez

One of the first things I learned on my first trip to Brazil, in 1996, was how to make a phone call.

First, you made yourself comfortable. Then, with hope and a prayer, taking a deep breath, you lifted the phone off the hook, and placed the receiver to your ear. You heard nothing, so you hung up. A couple of seconds later, you dutifully tried again, waiting for the dial tone that never came. What else could you do but repeat the procedure once more, twice more, growing increasingly despairing until finally—sometimes hours later—a dial tone deigned to appear?

Ben Moser on Lunch Break discusses the unique charms of Brazil, a country the European-based author comes back to again and again.

Today, the distance between the country in which the above situation took place and the country now is so gaping that the story might have taken place a lifetime ago. Back when phones couldn’t be trusted to work and you had to stand in line for hours to pay your water or gas bill, the bedraggled middle classes liked to tell the bitter joke that Brazil always had been, and always would be, the country of the future. Today, amid the realization it may finally be living up to its potential, Brazilians sometimes seem dazed about how quickly their luck has changed.

Brazil occupies half of South America, larger than the lower 48 states. When I accidentally happened into a Portuguese class as a college freshman, I knew that, and not much more, about Brazil. But I loved the language, and my parallel discovery of Brazilian music made learning the language easier than I’d expected.

Two years later, I headed to Rio to study abroad. Before I went, daunted by the vastness of the country, I bought a Brazil Air Pass, which allowed me to visit six cities, from Belém at the mouth of the Amazon to Porto Alegre in the far south. Everywhere I went, I found everything I expected to find. There was no lack of golden beaches, colonial charm, scary rain forests, soccer players, tropical rhythms and chatty hookers. I drank cachaça-based cocktails; I got a tan.

The things I didn’t expect made the deepest impression, and that was not because I was disappointed by Brazil’s more famous attractions. The city of Rio de Janeiro, with its mountains plunging into the sea, was as spectacular as advertised, and the waterfalls of Iguaçu did justice to Eleanor Roosevelt’s exclamation “Poor Niagara!” The Amazon was enormous; and I could have dangled forever in a hammock in old beachside towns like Olinda or Paraty.

All of those things I more or less expected. I didn’t expect to find a gigantic factory in Recife that its owner, the sculptor Francisco Brennand, had spent half a century transforming into a total work of art full of abstract ceramic genitalia. I didn’t expect anything like “The Passion According to G.H.,” a novel written by a part-time Rio beauty columnist named Clarice Lispector, about a well-to-do lady who, at the height of a mystic crisis, eats a roach.

What ended up bringing me back to Brazil, at least 20 times, were the things that weren’t so obvious—including the mysterious Lispector. It was easy to love beautiful Rio, but labyrinthine São Paulo, far less easy on the eye, is an acquired taste; and often, stuck in a traffic jam with a good portion of its 20 million residents, I wondered whether I would ever acquire it. But with patience and the help of friends, I found its unpromising exterior opening to reveal surprising contents.

One friend took me to a monstrous concrete bunker called CEAGESP: inside were stands selling every conceivable produce of Brazil’s fields and forests, from orchids and carnivorous plants to fruits I had never heard of, with names like grumixama and jabuticaba. The next day, a door in a dull concrete wall on a dull residential street opened to disclose a magnificent Modernist house by Lina Bo Bardi: I’d never heard of her either.

Once, in Pernambuco, I took a friend’s advice to visit the town of Igarassu: reluctantly, because I had driven through Igarassu once and found it—politely put—rather unprepossessing. But I was headed that way, and thought it was worth a try. I tracked down the local museum’s custodian, a woman in a tank top and Havaianas. She fished a medieval-looking iron key from her shorts and opened the door to reveal room after room of majestic paintings.

That was how it went all over the country. Every time I thought I had seen something, another door would open and make me realize everything I had missed. But I did get one thing right: Its people’s intelligence and creativity were the most obvious things about Brazil, and if the burden of politics and bureaucracy could be lifted—if someone could figure out how to get the phones to work—there was no limit to what the country could become.

Today, when you get off the plane in Brazil, you find a powerful antidote for pessimism. It’s not because of the palm trees or the scent of ethanol in the air that Brazil feels different. It’s not that the country doesn’t still have its problems. It’s because if Brazil, with all its enormous challenges, can come this far this fast, there’s hope for the rest of us too.

—Mr. Moser is the author of “Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector.”

By ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES

Miami Beach, Fla.

Zaha Hadid, the celebrated London-based architect known for her sinuous designs, has created dazzling museums, concert halls and railway stations across the globe. So what has she decided to tackle next? A municipal parking garage in Miami Beach.

South Beach in Miami Beach is known for its beautiful coastline and Art Deco skyline, but increasingly it’s becoming known for its cutting-edge design of … garages. Some of the best-known architects in the world are designing car parks that redefine the drab bunkers of old.

“I’ve always been fascinated by garages,” Ms. Hadid says. “I’ve always liked this idea of bringing the street into a building and making that into an urban space.”

She has company. Miami Beach has become a magnet for high-end architects intent on rethinking what the often drab, utilitarian parking garage can be. In 2010, Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron completed a towering, airy parking structure in the heart of South Beach that has won international acclaim. Seven blocks east, Frank Gehry created, as part of his New World Center concert hall, a steel-mesh garage that is illuminated at night by multicolored LED lights. A few blocks south sits Mexican architect Enrique Norten’s recently finished garage, featuring a taut, white concrete façade pocked with perforations like a punch card.

Next up: Ms. Hadid’s $12.5 million, city-financed garage in South Beach’s Collins Park neighborhood; a parking and retail complex by Miami-based firm Arquitectonica in the Sunset Harbour neighborhood; and a planned development near the beach by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s firm, OMA, that is expected to include a parking garage, possibly topped by a restaurant.

South Beach is also slated for three new automated parking garages designed by ADD Inc Miami that are believed to be the first of their kind in Florida. After drivers drop off their cars in a bay, thin robotic platforms will slide underneath, lift them up and whisk them away to a parking spot.

Imaginative new garages are cropping up elsewhere. The Santa Monica Civic Center parking structure in California is clad in brightly colored panels, and Chicago’s Greenway Self Park is touted as an “earth-friendly” facility with energy-generating wind turbines.

For drivers, the normally humdrum experience of parking gets a dash of flair. Simón Parra, a part-time resident of the city, refuses to park his black Chevy Suburban anywhere but the Herzog & de Meuron garage at 1111 Lincoln Road. “It’s a work of art more than a garage,” he says. “Everywhere you look, there’s a view.”

He doesn’t mind paying a premium for the experience. The parking rate at 1111 Lincoln Road, $4 an hour, is more than double the rate at the municipal lot a block away.

Herzog & de Meuron’s creation, part of a $65 million project, has gone the furthest in revolutionizing traditional notions of a garage. “Our building is not designed to be a garage,” says owner and developer Robert Wennett. “It’s designed to be a civic space.”

The structure—with thin concrete slabs at irregular heights and no exterior walls, leaving vehicles on open display—is more than a place to stash cars. It features luxury retailers at the street level, a glass box housing a clothing store on the fifth floor and a soaring space with stunning views on the seventh floor that can be rented for events—all connected by an internal staircase that spirals up like a DNA helix. “This garage doesn’t feel like a box that’s impenetrable,” says Mr. Wennett. “We wanted people to move through this building.” A few hundred people a day wander in to explore, he says, and the seventh-floor space has hosted weddings, yoga classes and a Lexus commercial.

While garages often are disguised by, say, an outer layer of office space, the new Miami Beach garages announce their presence unapologetically and aim to entice the eye. “You no longer have to shy away and hide” them, Ms. Hadid says.

Early renderings of her garage show a futuristic structure, open to the elements like Herzog & de Meuron’s, with ramps that loop up like a ribbon and a hollowed-out interior that draws in light.

In Mr. Norten’s garage, Park@420, light enters the perforations throughout the day, sometimes spraying the floor with bright spots, other times filtering in obliquely to give the space a chapel-like feel. The exterior also offers vivid displays, with palm trees casting shadows on the white façade during the day and interior lights producing a glowing effect at night.

As star architects descend on Miami Beach, they seem to be goading more of their peers to join. “What’s happening now is similar to what happened in the Art Deco period, when the city developed a collaborative of architects who played off each other’s designs,” says William Cary, assistant director of the Miami Beach planning department.

In 1996, Arquitectonica completed the “Chia Pet,” a garage with six levels of parking plopped on top of a historic block of buildings and shrouded entirely in greenery, and earned rave reviews. “Arquitectonica made it fashionable to make parking structures,” Mr. Cary says. “And Herzog & de Meuron just raised it to a whole new level.”

The fact that the parking garage has been a neglected form excites some architects, says Bernardo Fort-Brescia, founding principal of Arquitectonica. “That’s precisely the challenge—how to turn that garage into something that people love,” he says.

Another challenge: the structures must still manage to move vehicles in and out efficiently. At 1111 Lincoln Road, the gap between some of the floors is as much as 34 feet, more than three times the norm, says Tim Haahs, a parking consultant who worked on the project. Herzog & de Meuron resolved this issue with a number of steep internal ramps, he says. The garage is so tall, it required a 55-foot height variance, Mr. Cary says.

In some ways, the architectural ferment today harks back to the early 20th century, when garages were beautifully designed by well-known architects, says Shannon Sanders McDonald, author of “The Parking Garage: Design and Evolution of a Modern Urban Form.” By the 1970s, though, “they became cost-driven and functional and ugly,” she says. Not until the late 1980s and 1990s did architects grapple once again with how to incorporate garages into the urban environment.

Miami Beach was at the forefront then, too. Stocked with architectural gems, including Art Deco and Miami Modern buildings, the city wanted to ensure that its parking structures “became urban assets rather than urban albatrosses,” Mr. Cary says.

By BENJAMIN MOSER

Edel Rodriguez

One of the first things I learned on my first trip to Brazil, in 1996, was how to make a phone call.

First, you made yourself comfortable. Then, with hope and a prayer, taking a deep breath, you lifted the phone off the hook, and placed the receiver to your ear. You heard nothing, so you hung up. A couple of seconds later, you dutifully tried again, waiting for the dial tone that never came. What else could you do but repeat the procedure once more, twice more, growing increasingly despairing until finally—sometimes hours later—a dial tone deigned to appear?

Ben Moser on Lunch Break discusses the unique charms of Brazil, a country the European-based author comes back to again and again.

Today, the distance between the country in which the above situation took place and the country now is so gaping that the story might have taken place a lifetime ago. Back when phones couldn’t be trusted to work and you had to stand in line for hours to pay your water or gas bill, the bedraggled middle classes liked to tell the bitter joke that Brazil always had been, and always would be, the country of the future. Today, amid the realization it may finally be living up to its potential, Brazilians sometimes seem dazed about how quickly their luck has changed.

Brazil occupies half of South America, larger than the lower 48 states. When I accidentally happened into a Portuguese class as a college freshman, I knew that, and not much more, about Brazil. But I loved the language, and my parallel discovery of Brazilian music made learning the language easier than I’d expected.

Two years later, I headed to Rio to study abroad. Before I went, daunted by the vastness of the country, I bought a Brazil Air Pass, which allowed me to visit six cities, from Belém at the mouth of the Amazon to Porto Alegre in the far south. Everywhere I went, I found everything I expected to find. There was no lack of golden beaches, colonial charm, scary rain forests, soccer players, tropical rhythms and chatty hookers. I drank cachaça-based cocktails; I got a tan.

The things I didn’t expect made the deepest impression, and that was not because I was disappointed by Brazil’s more famous attractions. The city of Rio de Janeiro, with its mountains plunging into the sea, was as spectacular as advertised, and the waterfalls of Iguaçu did justice to Eleanor Roosevelt’s exclamation “Poor Niagara!” The Amazon was enormous; and I could have dangled forever in a hammock in old beachside towns like Olinda or Paraty.

All of those things I more or less expected. I didn’t expect to find a gigantic factory in Recife that its owner, the sculptor Francisco Brennand, had spent half a century transforming into a total work of art full of abstract ceramic genitalia. I didn’t expect anything like “The Passion According to G.H.,” a novel written by a part-time Rio beauty columnist named Clarice Lispector, about a well-to-do lady who, at the height of a mystic crisis, eats a roach.

What ended up bringing me back to Brazil, at least 20 times, were the things that weren’t so obvious—including the mysterious Lispector. It was easy to love beautiful Rio, but labyrinthine São Paulo, far less easy on the eye, is an acquired taste; and often, stuck in a traffic jam with a good portion of its 20 million residents, I wondered whether I would ever acquire it. But with patience and the help of friends, I found its unpromising exterior opening to reveal surprising contents.

One friend took me to a monstrous concrete bunker called CEAGESP: inside were stands selling every conceivable produce of Brazil’s fields and forests, from orchids and carnivorous plants to fruits I had never heard of, with names like grumixama and jabuticaba. The next day, a door in a dull concrete wall on a dull residential street opened to disclose a magnificent Modernist house by Lina Bo Bardi: I’d never heard of her either.

Once, in Pernambuco, I took a friend’s advice to visit the town of Igarassu: reluctantly, because I had driven through Igarassu once and found it—politely put—rather unprepossessing. But I was headed that way, and thought it was worth a try. I tracked down the local museum’s custodian, a woman in a tank top and Havaianas. She fished a medieval-looking iron key from her shorts and opened the door to reveal room after room of majestic paintings.

That was how it went all over the country. Every time I thought I had seen something, another door would open and make me realize everything I had missed. But I did get one thing right: Its people’s intelligence and creativity were the most obvious things about Brazil, and if the burden of politics and bureaucracy could be lifted—if someone could figure out how to get the phones to work—there was no limit to what the country could become.

Today, when you get off the plane in Brazil, you find a powerful antidote for pessimism. It’s not because of the palm trees or the scent of ethanol in the air that Brazil feels different. It’s not that the country doesn’t still have its problems. It’s because if Brazil, with all its enormous challenges, can come this far this fast, there’s hope for the rest of us too.

—Mr. Moser is the author of “Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector.”