This morning we had an office visit with Barkow Liebinger. It was really great. Barkow has a nice office, and he showed us a good deal of his work. He’s doing this really cool thing with milling pipes that I plan on looking into later. After the meeting Clay went and talked to him to ask about getting a summer job. Barkow gave him his personal email address, which is pretty incredible. Next we headed off to see Snohetta’s Norwegian Embassy. It was fairly awesome. Although the complex itself came off a little bit like a Scandinavian Epcot, the buildings were all beautiful. The norwegian piece used the motif of glaciers, and one wall was made from the largest piece of uncut stone in Germany. It was massive. Daniel Topping got a picture of me standing next to it for scale. The Danish Embassy looked just like Matt Childress’s studio project from integrations, and the Finnish Embassy was really elegant and covered in wooden slats to relate to the idea of a traditional sauna. The Icelandic Embassy was cool because it was clad in tiles of volcanic stone that is normally protected by national conservation laws and they had to get special permission to build with. In the main building there was an exhibition of photos of the Northern Lights– so pretty. After our tour, the group split up for a little while. Clay, Allie Ross, DTops and I headed to Mies’s New National Gallery. Let me try to think of a good way to explain it… it was an oversized version of Crowne Hall. You enter into the main lobby, which is huge and has nothing in it at all except a very large chandelier and black + white paisley carpet. It smells a bit like a grandmother’s house. It was an incredibly strange space. Downstairs there was a small shop, a lounge full of Barcelona chairs, and a few paintings. Oh Mies. Next we walked down the street to see Potsdamer Platz. We were in a bit of a hurry, so we checked out the Renzo building, stopped for pretzels, and then headed to the train station. We met back up with the group at RaumTactic– a design company run by a friend of Catherine’s. It was actually really cool. The guy writes and teaches, and then just gets to sort of do whatever theoretical design he wants on the side. Their research ranges from fashion to small scale built works to urban planning. I’m not quite sure how he manages to sustain it financially, but it definitely seems like an awesome lifestyle. Clay bought a book from him on TV Towers, and I went and got it signed for him. Post-meeting, a good portion of us went over to see Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. Its beautiful. The Holocaust Tower was easily my favorite moment in the project. Its incredibly powerful. The way he sets up the displays relating to the dead is also incredibly poetic– they’re in black cases so that as you look at the relics of the dead you’re also forced to look at your own reflection. Clay, Allie Ross, and I walked through it together. It was unfortunate that the Fallen Leaves installation was closed. Overall the museum was quite interesting, though. At the beginning there’s a tree, and you can write down a wish on a paper pomegranate to hang on the tree. The whole museum was very much about Jewish History, with the entry sequence being the only portion that really focussed explicitly on the Holocaust. They had penny pressing machines, and I made on to give to Dan when we see him in Copenhagen. After the museum, Clay, Allie Ross, Sadia, and I went back to Potsdamer Platz to spend a little more time and see the Richard Rogers office building. It was really nice. They’ve had trouble getting people to really use Potsdamer, but the lawn out front is so nice– I really hope they work on it. I could see it being perfect for outdoor music festivals, which people would be able to watch while sitting on Rogers’s stepped cafe terraces. The space has a great potential. We went inside the shopping center to hit H&M. We talked Clay into a pair of dark-washed skinny jeans. At 9 we finally made it to Que Pasa (Mexican restaurant down the street from our train station) to meet up with everyone for dinner. We had chips and salsa, which I’ve really missed since we got here. I had the veggie burrito as well. It was delicious, and I’m not even big on Mexican. Instead of filling the burrito with beans they used broccoli and eggplant. After dinner we went to the store so Allie Ross and Patrick could get some champagne in a can and then we went back to the hostel and hung out for a little while before going to bed.