Villa Picture

The traditional end of the year Villa Picture...

Pompidou Center (this is out of order, but it was a very special favor...this building is actually in Paris, France)

The inside out building...all of the structure of this museum/gallery is built on the outside skin of the Pompidou building, and it's all functional and (as I've been told) it allows for "flexive spaces."


These giant tuby things were across the plaza...I don't know if they were just for decoration or if they're functional ooooor what.

The reception area.

The gift shop and gallery area.

Escalator going up to the gallery spaces...located outside the building.

The main gallery space...

The museum did have some really cool exhibits...this one was a little "room" that the artist made and it was interactive for the guests...

Some of the stuff was really strange...I have no idea what this mess is, I guess you can just hang crap all over the place and call it art.

A kinda cool wall covered with really colorful art works...

A giant "airplane" hovering within the gallery...

...and it had hundreds of scissors stuck in it...I don't know, I guess it's open for personal interpretation...

aaaah yes, the masterpiece and highlight of the exhibit...a minimalist painting series (no you're not missing anything, there is really NOTHING painted on these canvases).

Come on guys, we can do better than this...they could have at least put it on a red wall or something for some contrast

A piano in a room which I guess is designed to absorb the sound

Really the gallery was pretty cool, even if some of the stuff was pretty far out there. I can't say it wasn't interesting. This artist was completing an unfinished series in the gallery...I guess he was part of the exhibit too.

oh man, the giant red rhinoceros..."if you can't make it good, make it move; if you can't make it move, make it glow; if you can't make it glow, make it fly; if you can't make, it fly paint it red..." (designers' anthem...it's a joke, but I think it applies here)

Matisse

A room full of Picasso...

Picasso...

...aaaand another Picasso.

Spring Break: LONDON

YAY LONDON!!! It was soooo nice to hear English again...even if it was a strange and snooty version of English that actually took some time to get used to so that we could understand it. But being in London was almost almost like being home again...

They had actual hearty meals again...(even though they call them "patsies" which I thought very strange...these people run around saying "I want a patsy" why not say "meat pie" it sounds so much less retarded than "patsy") This was a cottage pie with a meat and vegetable gravy with mashed potatoes and cheese on top. yumMY!

and Starbucks... (there were Starbucks on literally every corner, sometimes there were more than one on a block...it was crazy)

...they even had a waffle house!!! (although they clearly do not have the right idea because the place was clean and not at all sketchy...we were very disappointed).

But England was very lovely, it was actually really really clean...I'd always envisioned a smoggy soot filled city (probably an impression I've gotten from history classes where they talk about England in the industrial revolution or something). But compared to Italy England was immaculate, and there were no beggars camping out everywhere and pestering you pitifully on the streets.

We stayed on a street that looked very similar to this one (streets like this were everywhere). Rows and rows of the same house repeated over and over again in the same color and everything. But it was really very pretty.

Our shady hostel room...we were in a five person mixed bedroom (mixed meaning boys and girls). SOOOO SKETCHY (excuse me "dodgy"...those Brits have got some straaaange words). We were kinda (ok really) nervous the first night there...

...so we shoved this closet-like thing in front of the door. The thing probably weighed like maybe a pound because it was made of some sort of foam-core material but we figured it would make some noise or something if someone was trying to break in.

They had some pretty cool buildings, though... this was their city hall.

The London Tower bridge

holy CRAP these people stunk! I was seriously gagging...

Probably why the streets were so clean...this guy was vacuuming up bits of trash on the street.

The Peter Pan statue...the story on the tour bus said that Mr. Barrie (creator of Peter Pan) had the statue made and then placed in Hyde Park in the middle of the night so that children who walked through the park on their way to school saw the statue the next morning and thought that it appeared magically.

HAHAHA...this was a hippie peace rally or something. These people had been here for so long they had killed the grass with their tents. Anyways, it made me laugh...

Westminster...this place was not what I was expecting. We've been visiting churches all semester but this was without a doubt the most cluttered place I've been in yet. If you think about how many famous kings, queen, scientists, poets, and writers are supposed to be buried there...well they're all really there. There were sarcophagus and coffins and statues and plaques everywhere...I mean EVERYWHERE. I don't see how they even know who all is buried there...there are bodies in the floors, in the walls, in marble tombs in chapels, and in the hallways...it was crazy! Quite literally a cache of tombs. I guess I was expecting to see a large graveyard (especially considering how many people I've heard are buried there) but they're all inside the church!

British taxies

British guards (it's quite odd to see cops walking around with these massive machine guns...a little unnerving too. But they do this all over Europe.)

London had lots of cool pubs and bars and stores with these strange names...


"bag o' nails" (whaaaat?)

"the high and mighty" (oh puleeeese!)

the Globe theatre...

Buckingham Palace and the changing of the guards...really not the spectacle I was expecting. They had all these weapons and they didn't twirl or throw any of them! They just marched in and played some songs and not even good songs either...they opened with "that's the way (uh-huh uh-huh) I like it." From what I hear, I think the Citadel cadets could take them on any day. AND you know how you always see these pictures of people trying to get the guards to move and stuff, well you can't even do that because they keep their little soldiers locked away behind those big gates the whole time...very disappointing.

The grounds were really beautiful, though.

Oh la la...the Ritz, baby!!!

Riding around on the Big Bus tour...it was a really good way to see the city.

The RE Swiss building (or St. Mary's Cross)...it took us forever to actually find this thing...we kept seeing glimpses of it in gaps of the skyline and reflected on other buildings but we really could not find the actual building (well obviously we did eventually find it, but it was very frustrating).

Yay for Spring!!!

The House of Parliament and Big Ben.

Big ol' Ben

Hyde park and "Speaker's corner." Apparently speaker's corner is where you can go to just rant about whatever you want and the crowd is encourage (actually expected) to heckle the speakers. Sounds like a good time...we saw this crowd and planned to come back when we had more time to watch what was going on but the next day we found out that they only do it on Sundays and "Bank holidays" so we didn't get a chance to check it out.

All the tons of chimneys on the tops of the buildings...apparantly each room in the house used to have a fireplace and a flue, hence the smog that I was expecting. However, most of these chimneys are not used now and so the pollution is not nearly as bad as it was.

Message in a Bottle

Like I said, you can find all sorts of things floating in the canals of Venice...one one of our tours we passed by a bottle with what appeared to be a message in it floating a ways out. BUT when we passed back by, it was a lot closer...

So of course... we had. to. have it!

Being architects, and therefore very creative and sometimes ingenious, we used Mark's portable tripod to fish it out of the water...we were gathering some spectators who undoubtedly thought we were retarded and it took us forever to get it out and of course everyone was hollering directions and trying to tell Mark the best technique in retrieving the bottle.

But finally we got it out and all was well. The message was something really stupid (of course) so we wrote our own message and threw it back. It was a very exciting highlight to the trip.

Some St. Patty's Day Fun

Soooo the night before St. Patty's, which we spent in Venice, some people went out and found this bar were if you buy two Guinness you get this really really cool hat. Of course they got one and brought it out the next night on St. Patty's and of course everyone just had to try it on, myself included. While I had the hat on, someone said "SWade looks like Slash." So I have no idea who slash is but if they say I look like him, sure why not. So they make me pull all my hair forward and put the hat on again and take all these pictures...

When I get back to the villa I Google this "Slash" and was shocked to find that yes indeed with the hat and the hair, I do unfortunately resemble this character quite remarkably.

Venice

Shopping...

Venice is know for it's production of glass...especially blown glass. So of course they had some really nice and really cool glass platters, glasses, cups, etc.



these glasses were my favorite...too cute!!!


there were also some vases...I didn't like them as much as the other things but they were everywhere so I thought I would include them just in case...



They also had street artists everywhere. You could buy these oil paintings that were just on like a watercolor paper or you could get a black and white drawing of the city. Inside the actual gallery shops were more paintings that were actually on a stretched canvas instead of paper...those were often framed and obviously more expensive.
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Beautiful Venice...


It was a bit hazy but not in a smoggy sort of way, more of a mist that faded out the distance. And the water was gorgeous (even though it's supposed to be toxically disgusting...a professor was honeymooning in Venice, got off the train and looked at the Grande Canal for the first time and saw a dead pig just bobbing along...you never know what you can find in these waters). You know college kids love to do crazy things and we probably would have ended up jumping in at some point in the trip but we were very strongly (and effectively) discouraged with stories of last semester's students who jumped into the canals and became horribly sick...yikes.









As you would expect, there were gondolas everywhere and we actually got to ride in one one day...we were all excited and getting all wound up and we get in the little boat and we're riding away and then like 2 minutes later (after we had crossed the canal) we docked and had to get off...quite a tease. But apparently there are only 3 bridges that cross the Grande Canal and so a quick and cheap way to get to the other side is to pay like 50cents to ride in a gondola across.

see...I am definitely waaaaaay too excited.



And there were restaurants that had out-door dining on the canal and little accordion players ...so Italian.


and of course you've hear that Venice is sinking...


well it really is...a lot of the stairs leading up to the doors of houses are under the water (as you can see). We actually heard something about some possible deal with Walt Disney. Something like Disney wants to buy the city and the city is considering it because Disney is so good at handling large crowds and they could market the city and raise more money which could be used to help restore and preserve the place.

A Palladian church...they were everywhere and they all look the same.

On the island of Murino there was a glass museum where they displayed the history of glass making and glass blowing in Venice. These were some reeeeeally old pieces...

and a little bit of stuff from the 17th century...

and some really cool modern stuff like this octopus by Carlos Scarpa (who is also an architect). There is actually a larger (actually HUGE) octopus that he designed which is held in the gardens of this museum but the gardens were closed so this is all we got. But I really liked this little octopus...you have to remember, too, that this was hand made!

This was just a really pretty more medieval church that I don't even remember the name of...it was just picturesque...

A delightfully cluttered bookstore...I'm definitely a literary person because little stores like this just make me happy...we poked around and found everything from cook books to architecture and fashion to novels to romance novels and ancient leather bound copies of The Canterbury Tales to some pretty explicit... ummm... material...lol. Anyways it was fun to just poke around in here.

We went up into the tower of one of the churches and got to see the whole city...we were up in the bell tower, and we about shat ourselves when the thing actually went off...I mean, we were practically inside the stupid bell when it rang.

Awwww! This is my cute little Italian professor, Stephano Fera. He teaches one of our History and Theory classes and he meets up with us in the cities we visit and gives us guided tours of the cities' architecture. This man is full of information...he knows random and interesting details and stories about everything. Anyways, he is just too cute and looks like such the Italian...

The Love/Hate with Architecture

The Tuesday evening before our trip to Venice, Prof. Ron Rael arranged a wine tasting party for the studio to teach us how to enjoy alcohol in a mature and more sophisticated manner... the party also served as a surprise birthday party for his wife (our professor) Virginia. There were two red wines to taste with a spread of meats and cheeses, and a dessert champagne that went perfectly with our strawberry cheesecake AND...

the sugar cookies I baked! Unfortunately they came out hard as rocks but once you broke off a piece and let it kind of break down a little in your mouth, they were really good. And they actually went very well with the champagne.

This is Ron and Virginia in the picture.

A couple of "cultured," wine tasting ladies...my friend Janis and I.

So first you look at the wine and determine it's color and "cloudiness" and transparency. The clearer the wine is the better the quality. Red wines have several different shades of color to determine the quality and type of wine you've got...ruby, rose, oranger red, crimson red (burgundy), etc.

I love this picture...Patrick looks like a priest at mass. hehehe.

THEN you smell, trying to decipher the layers of scents that compose the "body" of the wine. The longer the wine's scent remains the better the quality. You're supposed to be able to distinguish the secondary and tertiary scents...people were pulling out stuff like "wood" and "lavender" (???).

I would recommend you try fresh mozzarella cheese (the kind that's still in the water), it's a favorite around here and it's really very very yummy (Buffalo mozzarella is especially good). All in all it was a very lovely and most enjoyable evening...very deceiving, we should have known.

We knew that we were having a pin-up on the Wednesday before leaving that Thursday to go to Venice (a pin-up is just like a presentation of the projects' progress). Studio is from 1:30 to 5:30 on Wednesdays and so we were all preparing for the final push before our little mini-break travelling...we were to leave the Villa at 6:15 Thursday morning to catch our train to Venice.

Wednesday morning with 36 hours until departure time we received an email specifying the renderings and images we were to have ready for our pin-up which was re-scheduled for 6:00 am (that's IN THE MORNING) on Thursday before we leave. That is basically straight up, no beating around the bush "you will be pulling an all-nighter."

Around 1:30-2am I grabbed my camera in a sudden moment of brilliance and decided to capture and document everything from the maniacal freak-outs to the silent fuming frustration each student displays (everyone handles this stuff in different ways). This is the Daniel Center, about 4 hours to pin-up (you have to keep in mind many of us had been up either all night or really really late the night before as well).

This is what we do all day and night here...we build the models in 3D programs such as Rino and FormZ and then we render them and then we photoshop them.

We literally sit here all. day. long.

Virginia is demonstrating the classic case of deadened numbness...you just work, don't think just work. You are numb, except for your stomach which is in knots and your eyes which are burning and you JUST HATE LIFE...

Janis grabbing her hair and freaking out...

chomping on Tums and generally JUST HATING LIFE...

Who feels like crap?!?!?!

Poor Mark, all hunched over, developing future back and eye problems...he will stay in this position with those earphones blaring for hours on end.

It is absolute misery.

So we stayed up all night long...working and then taking a frantic 15 minute break to pack...we all had the most random crap in our bags for the trip because we were literally in a state of complete delirium and exhaustion. We had to run through the train station because we were late When we finally got on the train, our reserved seats were taken by some stubborn old Italian ladies and the only seat left when it came time for Sarah to sit down there were no seats left, so I just plopped down on Janis and we both (apparently) passed out.

For the first two days of our trip, we were recovering from this nightmare. We're used to pulling all nighters and we've pulled several this semester. But the whole 6 am thing was a bit ridiculous.