It was another early morning as we had an appointment set up to tour Adolf Loos’s Moller House before leaving Praha. We split up into two groups– I was in the first one. Our guide was nice and took us through every room in the house except for the driver’s bedroom on the lowest level. Walking through that house, I have a much better understanding of Loos’s ideas about Raumplan. Rather than achieving spatial hierarchy and compression simply through a manipulation of the ceiling plan, he utilizes the movement of both floor and ceiling in order to provide a more engaging haptic experience while allowing for a higher degree of variance and subtlety. I’ve never been overly interested in Loos’s actual built works, but I certainly am now. He put into action many of the techniques that I’ve always unknowingly tried to integrate into my own architecture. Plus he sketches just the same as i do! After the tour we drove back into the city to see Pleznik’s purple church. Its kind of cool because all the bricks are glazed so that its a really pretty, dark color, but apparently everything that’s actually worth seeing is inside, and it was closed until 6:00 pm so we left pretty quickly. Back at the hostel we had lunch (broth-based, herbed pea soup that tasted strangely like Jewish rye bread) and then packed up the cars and set off for our next destination. Andy Ruff was taking a turn at driving, so I was in the backseat between Zsolt and Sadia. Our next stop was the Sedlec Ossuary just outside of Prague. The story behind it is that a monk brought some soil from Golgatha hundreds of years ago and placed it at the cemetery. After that there was a surge in the number of people who wanted to be buried there. To accommodate everyone, the oldest skeletons were exhumed and their bones were used to decorate the chapel above. It was, in my mind, a little bit disrespectful. At the Capuchin Monastery, there’s an idea that the entire time you’re in the monastic order you know that eventually your remains will be used to adorn the crypt. These were the bones of people who had no idea– and it was set up to be very touristy. It was at least cool to see. After that we continued the drive into Austria uninterrupted. There were a few really terrifying moments where you really couldn’t see the road at all for the snow. I’m glad ARuff was driving. By the end of the trip I was really nauseous though, and as soon as we got to the hostel I ran inside and was sufficiently sick. Welcome to Austria. After we got settled in, Patrick, Allie Ross, Tess, and I went to a Mediterranean restaurant to get some food. I had a glass of Gruner Veltliner, a white Austrian wine with a light appley flavor, and some stir fried veggies with rice. It was good to get something back in my stomach. After dinner we headed back to the hostel and went to bed.