A very appropriate name for this artistic photo by Ingo Quake. As for colors, I like this combination of red and green, both intense. The photo provides too little detail to can indicate if it's made in Germany or elsewhere. The building is certainly old, not because the plaster is eaten by time, but rather because the windows are placed quite low. A little odd is that the plaster is unkempt, but the exterior shutters seem to be recently painted. The curtains suggests 19th century on the one hand, and on the other that the house is probably inhabited by older people.
A brief parenthesis about the shutters. Technically a shutter is either a solid or slated window cover. Probably that the first shutters originated from ancient Greece, and that they were originally designed for light control, ventilation and protection from the elements. Until the 20th century it have been used widely, both in urban and rural areas, both inside and outside windows, both functional and decorative purposes. Functional shutters have traditionally been constructed from solid woods, to endure outside elements. In many European countries were brightly coloured , creating a contrast with the rest of the façade. Almost all the architectural styles used shutters, in one form or another.
In my childhood, by 1960-1970, in Ploieşti, the city where I was born, only few small and old stores (prăvălii) had shutters, which remained as before the war. The goal of these shutters was only to protect against theft, and they were closed when the stores finish their program. From there survived the Romanian ironic slang expression, rarely used now, "a trage obloanele" (literally "to pull the shutters"), meaning, "to close, temporarily or permanently", or (for human beings), "to die".
About the stamp, illustrating St. Peter's Cathedral of Regensburg, I wrote here.
sender: Kristin / SuperTINE (postcrossing)
sent from Hanover (Germany), on 08.05.2012
photo: Ingo Quak
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