A Little Architecture Tour

I also did a little walking tour of our area with Janis a few weeks ago cause he told me there was some cool architecture (besides the rounded tower shape, nicknamed "el supositori" if you can guess what that means). This thing lights up at night sometimes in even more vivid colors than it has during the day. Pretty sweet looking.

So we took a walk around for a couple hours. See what we saw. I apologize for the sideways photos but its something about the blog- it takes rotating, saving, opening, re-rotating, and saving again, to get em correct. Too much time.

Some of these are pretty self-explanatory. I like the colored fins, and they block the sun.

Looks like they're gonna fall over.

In a park designed by Jean Nouvel, who did that tower, there are these circles all over the group. Looked pretty cool when the rain started to fall and made MORE circles! A video will be posted later of it...

The entrance to that Nouvel park, with a pixelated gate.

Cool facets to these buildings.

The faceted building in the background, this weird park in the front- also designed by Enric Miralles. That water was FETID from all of the birds that live around there and poop everywhere.

Sweet- the white wall cuts right through the glass!

A model of this church we saw, but the model looks cooler cause I can't take this same photo of the actual church :)

A looooooong pedestrial boulevard with many flagpoles that are holding...nothing.

The tallest building in Barcelona, with exterior structure. An SOM building.

That same long pedestrian boulevard, later, with random sculpturey things.

I like the facade. It opens up to reveal windows.

The suppository, along with two buildings that look like they're...engaged somehow, I guess.

I like this building. Its round.

One of the more famous, or infamous, buildings in Barcelona, The Forum Building in Diagonal del Mar, an area near the waterfront that is hopping. This building is by Herzog and de Meuron (going to see their stadium in Basel, Switzerland with Chris later) who built the Bird's Nest stadium from the Olympics in China.

Frank Gehry did this a long time ago. its a fish, but its basically just a mesh over a metal truss structure underneath- not a building, more of a giant covering or pavilion of some sort.

A floating staircase.

A very yellow school.

The "ME" building, maybe a play on his initials, also by Enric Miralles, on the right. Both of the buildings are offset volumes, hanging over nothing. Cool looking.

This thing is gonna be ugly. That orange is the actual outside of the building, as is the orange glass on there...

Volumes. I like the protrusions. A cool place for an office.

Some technical school. All louvers.

A view down the street, from near the fish, of the city rising up into the hills....

Another exterior structure building (sideways)- a lime-green truss holding the whole building up- I'm pretty sure all the floors are actually hanging from the truss at the top.

Some kind of powerplant building with vents, no windows, covered in wires on the outside for greenery and vines to eventually grow up the side of it........

I like the shape bulging out.

More cool volumes.

School, Laser Cutting

A bit more about school. Its basically a big warehouse with some floors on one half and an open three-story roof on the other. We have a fabrication area with laser cutter, CNC mill, and 3D printers, and then Studio space, and a kitchen. Its in a very industrial type neighborhood that's slowly being converted over to creative people spaces and to living spaces. We had an assignment for the laser cutter, which I posted that movie of, and here's also some photos of it, as well as a group project just like ours that was done last year. More pictures of OUR group project when I get them.

This is the model from last year, and roommate/partner Janis checking it out. Its a bunch of different shapes, cut and made with ribs like mine, hooked together, and wired as a chandelier.

Right after we returned from the laser cutter, this was what we had to work with:

Here's our pieces being laid out...

Pieces moving along a bit, and my computer joins me for entertainment while I make the model.

aaaaaaand the finished product. Another plug for the video here if you didn't see it :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ1OJud0Trk

The warehouse interior of our building.

Aaaaaaand some wonderful little faces that were scraps from the laser cutting process. Dave turned them into Calvin and Hobbes snowmen type faces. Fantastic.

Creative Factories- Studio

In Studio, we have three professors, two who are Spanish and one who is Belgian but lives here. So the 21 of us broke up in three groups of 7. Each group has a different site somewhere in Barcelona, where we have to design a "Creative Factory"- basically a place where artists/creative people of different sorts collect together and work and exhibit and such. We visited one such place, Hangar (pronounced without the H) that you can see below. After breaking up in groups of 7, we broke up into groups of 2-3 to further design, and then finally once we have a bunch of decisions and rules in place we go off on our own after this Thursday's Mid-term and design our own individual projects.

Here's some work from Hangar. This guy is kind of a desconstructionist, and actually takes things apart and puts them back together- usually he finds used or discarded things, even like bottles or orange peels, but here he bought a new pair of shoes, cut them into pieces, and then reassembled the pieces. Weird.

This was a view from Hangar out the window- I kinda like the composition of the photo.

This was someone's old Mac screwed to a door.

Another guy's art on the wall in his studio. I thought this was a pretty cool sequence.

A mural outside on the building

Later then, we also visited OUR site, Fabra i Coats, that was an old thread making place. Its pretty big. But there are creative things going on there right now as well actually.

This was all yarn that had black lights on behind it. Pretty sweet sculpture.

This was a movie set they were filming on in the warehouse.

And this is an empty portion of the warehouse. HUGE.

This was on the floor next to a window: "CAUTION! KEEP YOUR HEAD OFF THIS AREA".

"Good Touch". HI-larious.

Misc. Stories, Travel Plans, School...

Also thought I should mention our course schedule. One we finally started class a week and a half after Chicago did, we still only had two classes the following week and a virtual chat with our research seminar back in Chicago. Now finally, our schedule looks to be Studio T/Th 10-2, our fabrication class Tuesday 4-8, and a virtual chat Wed at 5 or 6 until 7 or 8. The fabrication class ends at the end of October, and our research seminar's main goal is to enter a competition, due November 2nd- so basically I'll have class twice a week for 4 hours each time, for all of November. Should be able to find some time to travel in there :)

Speaking of traveling plans (I like segues)- here's my tentative plans for the semester, in case you're curious. Cause I'm excited to talk about them :)

I already went to Valencia two weekends ago, which I'll talk about. This weekend we're (currently) planning on going nowhere but that could change- but we gotta be back for the Red Bull Air Race at least on Sunday, though its Saturday also. NEXT weekend we're going to Bilbao and San Sebastian for about 4 days. That's my birthday weekend. The following weekend is Granada and Seville. The weekend after, WITH MY ESTEEMED VISITOR JENNY STAHL!! is Madrid. That brings us to an as-yet-unplanned Halloween weekend, which I currently hope to be a 140 euro flight to Casablanca. The following weekend- MORE VISITORS! My brother comes, we go to Switzerland. We see Barcelona during the week, then we go to Paris the following weekend.

Then I have a weekend before finals (which I also hope to fill with a trip, perhaps to Southern France, somewhere in Spain, Stuttgart, Copenhagen, I dunno) and then we're off to Genoa, Florence (both of which I hope I will have roommate Josh and girlfriend Andrea with me for) and then to Rome, where TIFFANY COMES. (!!!!!!!!!- exclamation points to let her know how excited I am for her to come :). Then her and I head off to Slovenia, where she lived for five years in high school, and celebrate her birthday there. I better figure out something nice to do for it :) Then we go to Prague, Dublin, and home in time for Christmas.

So other stories- our classmates who live downtown had a party shortly after we got here, and afterwards my friend John's friend Sharon, who's doing a 1-yr Master's here, took us to this late-night bar. We walked in and at John's suggestion (and our agreement) ordered 10 pitchers of beer for 20 people. Only one had already ordered one and another group of four had ordered one. That left 10 pitchers for 15 people. All the people in the bar were staring, pointing, laughing, when 15 people walked over to a table with 10 pitchers of beer. Thankfully shortly thereafter we found a foosball table, I fondly relived some high school, and when we were done, magically all the beer was gone without me having to drink my share- cause that woulda been bad news.

Interestingly, my friend Marcella who's parents are Mexican, and roommate Todd who just speaks Spanish, met some Italians (I assumed by speaking Spanish but I could be wrong) and I ended up talking to them to. This guy Francesco Macri was from the same region of Italy (Calabria) as my family, and I told him that in my hometown in Indiana the Macris were good bakers. Anyway they told us to Facebook em and look em up when we got to Rome- so we may!

The last story is that we found a glorious way to watch football games, as I showed before. Thankfully my roommate Dave is a big college football fan (OSU grad) and so after I watched the ND-Michigan game (which I don't wanna talk about) we got his computer on the projector and sound system at school and watched the OSU-USC game huge on the wall...until 5:30am. That was rough. But fun. There'll be more of that I hope, but I'll be on the go quite a bit during weekends as well. We'll see.

Its time to transition to a new post. Where to begin?

A Little Site Visit

The following Monday we met at school, got on a bus, and drove up into the hills, to see a newish project by a Catalan architect Xavier knows, who spoke at UIC last year, Carme Pinos. It is a large spread out mausoleum type cemetery. Interesting, somber, respectful, quiet. Made almost entirely out of concrete. The weird thing is, apparently it was a cemetery for snails too- there were TONS of little snail shells on the ground, bleached and crushed, and lots of snails who like just dried up and died while stuck to plants. Cool looking but creepy. Looks like the snail apocalypse.

We saw a wind farm across the top of the hill from our bus...

Here's a small part of what the whole complex looked like, with each square being someone's loved one. You descended down into the ground all around you, an interesting experience.

The snail is dead, remains stuck to this wall he was climbing.

These are ALL smashed snail shells. Really weird.

After (or was it before?) The mausoleum place, we went to a place called Colonia Guell (pronounced "Wayy". It was an old workers colony that was basically a self-supporting village built around a factory of some sort. We went there to check out the architecture and such of course. This colony is the site for one of the three Studio groups this semester- they hafta design their project on this site. More on that later.

This was just a cool little road with kinda creepy or interesting trees. Reminded me of Wizard of Oz.

A castle up on the hill that Janis and I explored while others got lunch. The stairs up in the tower were gone though sadly. When I get the pictures from Janis I'll post em, of the inside. It was mostly collapsed and destroyed inside and full of mounds of dirt and random trash and graffiti- apparently a nice secluded hangout for some high school kids.

Some of the cool architecture we came to see. Really amazing brick work like I've never seen.

Once again- pretty amazing. Brick!

Gaudi's Crypt at Colonia Guell, a pretty cool but mostly unrealized place- this was just the Crypt below what was to be an actual church up above.

This is what it looks like from farther away. You can see the flat top and the doorways that were to be the real church that never happened. Shame.

This is what it was supposed to look like if it'd been built.

Sorry for the Sudden Influx of Stuff :)

Some more to tell. One of the first days we got here, Friday, Xavier gave us a brief walking tour of the city. We walked past two Gaudi apartment buildings that we will hafta tour later, and could see Sagrada Familia, the most famous Gaudi here in the city- the big cathedral that is still under construction and has been basically since he started it in the 20s or 30s. Pictures of all that business when I actually go visit them for real, with either Jenny Stahl or Chris, my two confirmed Barcelona visitors for the rest of the semester.

We then walked what feels like South, in this city, which means towards the water (the shoreline is actually Southeast from the city- everything is on a 45 degree angle grid off of the cardinal directions). We got out of the grid of the city into more compact streets at random angles, that apparently is the old city center. Here, there are ruins of the original walls of the city when it belonged to the Roman Empire! Pretty cool. There are a few other old Roman ruins (of course nothing like what we'll see in Rome) and there's a museum built over some of them, so you can descend to the level of the original city (since built up to the modern level, like Rome).

This is a cool market where they sell tons of seafood and like ever part of the cow to eat. Yknow, tongue, stomach, etc... It was built by Enric Miralles, a well-known Catalan architect. Cool roof.

This is some kind of eternal flame that burns in a small placa/plaza/piazza/square (depending on your language) that burns for all the Catalans killed when they lost the war to the Castellans.

This is right near there, just a cool hallway/arch thing connecting two buildings.

This was apparently built by Toyo Ito (famous Japanese architect, who I think built John Cusack's house in Chicago but I can't remember at the moment), who usually works in concrete, but not today. I forget, but I think this was like a Prada or Gucci or something, in the main shopping district, across the street from one of the Gaudi apartments.

My roommate Todd was having a great time walking over these posts that are everywhere, to divide the driving lane from the walking/biking lane, and probably to keep people from pulling over and parking there as well.

This is the church next to the eternal flame, and my roommate Dave taking a picture.

Some Roman ruins, into which a museum has been inserted not-so-attractively, and the church on the left that we were in, under construction.

This is some guy. A real guy. Dressed up as a slave/statue, I dunno, but he doesn't move, stands next to the ruins. People take pictures. Like me.

Here was our little lunch stop where Xavier treated us to some bottles of Cava, which is basically really dry Spanish (or Catalan?) champagne. We had a couple glasses like midday and stumbled back out into the city........

I MADE Something!

All my picture-posting time tonight has been spent doing this, but its pretty cool! We made the model days ago and took pictures, and I just got around to putting this video together...

my first iMovie video :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEbkxN3l6sg