Gerona, Rome, Bilbao

Paris

It's time for me to recount my week in Paris, and as my parents often suggest, maybe I should devote more of my writing to architecture and less to illustrating my studies abroad as a endless raging party. Point taken. After all, if people back in the U.S. were to judge the foreign studies program solely by my blog entries--well, Randall Ott himself might fly one of his chapels over here to make sure I'm working. I can assure you I am, and not only that, but I actually want to learn and experience everything Europe has to offer. My travels [the somewhat edited version] began with a Metro ride to a bus to a train in an airport in Geriona, all to save a few euros. We arrived at our grimy hostel bordering the redlight district, oddly named the Friends Hostel. Our first acquaintances were a generic New Yorker, a young man from the U.K. enlisting in the French Foreign Legion, a dreadlocked American hippie girl who works in a sex shop, and our roommate; a California gang member turned gourmet chef. As the name implies, the hostal was a place to befriend wandering derelicts and watch the one television show offered in the dining room, Friends dubbed in French--the French are lovers of corny jokes. Our first stop was, of course, the most visited of Parisian icons, the Eiffel Tower. The base was surprisingly large. As I ascended the first two levels by stair and tourists below became impressionistic dots, I felt the occasional tingling of acrophobia in my legs, that I might somehow trip and plummet to my death, bouncing through the web of iron beams to the plaza below. On the top level, despite the howling wind and rain, I got the best overhead view of the city. Next, I went to the Arc d' Triumph, and naturally, the Louvre. One could spend a lifetime in the Louvre, studying the greatest works of the greatest minds, in one place--to literally walk through and witness history; from the Code of Hammurabi to the Mona Lisa. By the end of the day, my feet were sore and my brain was numb from hours of staring at paintings and sculptures. At the conclusion of each day, we navigated back to our hostal through a swarm of hash dealers; illegitimate cigarette vendors; gypsy girls begging for change with babies in their arms; and a horribly deformed woman with backwards knees, walking on all fours with sandals on her hands. Each night, we climbed La Monte to a cathedral with a panoramic view of Paris to watch the city lights. At night, the cathedral steps were also frequented by Moroccans on cocaine who blasted 80s music from a stolen iPod, hippies strumming guitars, French winos, transvestites and prostitutes, teenage couples swapping spit, and an occasional tourist family unfortunate enough to get caught up in the mess. Delinquent teens, in all their drunken glory, went sledding down a slick dew-covered grass hill on plastic bags, until one crashed into a fence. He stumbled across the cathedral entrance, clutching his face and screaming and dripping blood across the ancient stone steps, before disappearing into a shadowy alleyway. Oh yeah, back to architecture. I went on to see the Egyptian exhibit at the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais, Notre Dame, the Paris Opera House, and other buildings that made me appreciate the architectural achievements of the French--their adaptation of other styles, incredible attention to detail, ornateness, creativity, displays of wealth and grandeur. Nothing like these places, I suppose, will ever reappear in today's architecture. Perhaps because such skills have been lost to technological advancements and mass production, or perhaps because such structures are simply born from an egocentricity and a wastefulness, often the lust of one man to display his power to the world, that is no longer tolerated in our society. Call this approach towards architecture what you will. Alright, it's not quite balanced for some pompous king to build a palace with hundreds of rooms and marble and gold and sculptures and all sorts of superfluities--especially considering how many peasants probably spent their lives working on these--but who can argue with how amazing it looks today. As I left France; unable to bring any part of Paris back with me through customs, still disheartened by the confiscation of my food by a French bomb inspector who suspected I might somehow blow up an airliner with a jar of raspberry jam and a couple cans of tuna fish; I have returned to Barcelona with a sour taste in my mouth for the French and their silly guttural language but a fascination with their architecture.

Phase One of Urban Planning Project

Ben, Bob, and I created an approach for the basic massing of the blocks surrounding the proposed renewal of Placa Glories. Using the Cerda block plan as a starting point and working within the guidelines set forth by the town council for square meters and preservation of certain existing facades, we worked to improve the perception of the area as an urban enclave, solve the present complexity, recognize the green corridor of the city, and create a singular space that improves the current fragmented nature of Placa Glories. Therefore, we felt it necessary to define a new urban edge and establish a unified center of Barcelona.

Project One: Plaza Analysis

Ben and I analized the relationship between static and dynamic elements in Placa Universitat, Placa Catedral, and Placa Catalunya--static lacking movement, and dynamic being characterized by energy.

The Sun Also Rises

My excursion through central and southern Spain began with vomit in a clear plastic airline bag and ended with a site model the size of a tennis court, but what occurred in the 10 days between these two gruesome snapshots was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. At a cold and eerily silent 0500, TEAM ALDANA assembled its gear and slinked through the backalleys of Barcelona like some cinematic recon unit, spreading out across Placa Catalunya and coagulating at the Aerobus stop. From the airport, we flew to an even colder Madrid where an occasional snowflake stung the back of my neck as I watched the grey skeleton of the parking garage left by the recent carbombing. Later on, I ate an enormous drumstick of some unknown animal, slept, woke up the next day, and went to the Prado museum and Reina Sophia. It was a much different experience to see the works of Picasso, Dali, El Greco and other famous artists, and even the disturbing cannibalistic paintings of Goya, in their full scale and actuality, rather than in a history book or magazine. We took a day trip to Toledo where we walked through the town's wildly ornate cathedral, peered down lush rock-studded valleys, and posed with statues of Don Quixote. I bought a souvenir butterfly knife from one of Toledo's redundant knife shops to add to my collection back home, which would later be stolen out of my jacket at a nightclub in Sevilla. We took the train back to Madrid, then traveled south to Cordoba. Among the columns and double-tiered peppermint arches of the Mezquita, I gained a greater appreciation of Islamic architecture which would only increase as I traveled through the southern region of Andalusia. As well as a slight annoyance with the reoccurring imposition of Catholic iconography in formerly Muslim places of worship. In Grenada, I watched the sun set over the Alhambra, alongside scores of hippies playing guitars and smoking hashish. Bill Clinton, who is widely considered the foremost authority on the beauty of life, claimed the sunset over the Alhambra as one of the most beautiful sights in the world. While impressed, I found the sunrise over Sevilla after an endless night of partying equally beautiful. Stumbling from the nightclub into the street at seven in the morning, robbed, crapulous and unshaven, numb and battered by the percussion of Persian and American remixes, I rematerialized in my youth hostal bedroom and then the Alcazar in time to sketch. Running my hands over the infinitely complex geometric patterns of Islam, traveling through the snow-capped mountains, orange groves, and smooth stone-patterned streets; I thought back on the writings of Hemingway with a newfound insight. I never appreciated his simple literary style, and aside from Old Man and the Sea, thought his work amounted to little more than that of a depressed brain-damaged alcoholic expatriot. I found, however, a new understanding of the deliberateness and depth of his writings, in a detail as seemingly unimportant as a title, The Sun Also Rises. This seemed as baffling and arbitrary to me as the title Hills like White Elephants, and assumed it could only make sense to the most philosophical, imaginative, or simply insane. Perhaps I am all of these, or perhaps the point of Hemingway's seemingly pointless book, which describes the travels of a group of American expatriots through Spain during the Prohibition era--the main character struggling with the battle wounds of impotence and each character with varying degrees of alcoholism and promiscuity--is that the world can be a beautiful place, even without these. That sitting on the mountaintop above the Alhambra is much more meaningful than an endless overlapping of hangovers, sheesha or absinthe, some nameless girl at a bar, or any other misplaced reason why Americans come to this place.

First Impressions

So concludes my first week in the city of Barcelona, and if I have realized anything in my short time here, it is that a lot can happen in a week. After missing my flight in Baltimore and having to drive desperately into the malodorous high-pressure sodium lit chaos that is Newark, I weaved through airport security in record time, caught my flight and soon found myself seated uncomfortably amongst a sea of hirsute Mediterranean men. I drifted asleep and awoke to an orange band of sunlight gleaming over the curvature of the Atlantic's horizon and a blanket of swirling cream-colored clouds beneath the wing of the Continental airliner. We descended to a level of small village lights burning across the Iberian peninsula and then, with one unsteady turn, touched down in Barcelona. I followed the native masses and, with a few hand signals, managed to find the studio and then my apartment, where I fell into some bizarre timeless chasm that exists between our continents. The next few days were a strange haze, an alteration of time and a deluge of foreign linguistics and cultural oddities. The architecture was an unusual blend of handsome classical reminances of the past and modern expressions that bordered on psychedelic, void of codes and regulations. The city is condensed, filled with narrow alleyways, stores and bars and butcher shops. It seems a city of loiterers, people with no place to be, skaters and punks and rebels, paramilitary policemen who turn a blind eye to practically everything--a more than occasional hashish dealer, illegitimate beer vendors late at night. Thankfully, I have not been robbed yet, although our director has not been as fortunate, and I witnessed a tourist couple chasing after their stolen car to no avail. In only a week, I crossed more than four-thousand miles with a fervour that rivals an espionage novel; I have eaten pig intestines and baby octopi; come to appreciate why absinthe is outlawed in the United States; gone from back-alley bars to throbbing orgiastic nightclubs where the music sounds more like a car accident, British girls befriend you in hopes that you might sell them pills of any kind, and unisex bathrooms are as good a place to meet people as any.