We didn’t have to set out this morning until 9:30. The hotel had really good breakfast selection– 3 different kinds of granola! The whole group set off on the tram to see Prague Castle and the additions by Pleznik. Right as we got there it started snowing. It was really really pretty. Unfortunately it was also really really cold. Almost unbearably so. My feet had reached a dull, numb pain within 10 minutes. We went inside the Cathedral first. It had some really nice stained glass– mosaic in a way I’ve not seen elsewhere. The tomb condition at the apse, however, was awkwardly narrow and overly ornate. Next we set off for the armor museum and golden row. At the armor museum, Clay and Daniel Topping shot crossbows, which was very cool. The gift shop there also had a shark figurine. At the Golden Row, we walked past Kafka’s house, and I selected the little blue house I’d live in if I ever decided I wanted to live in Czech-Bosnia. Our last stop was the torture chamber– again very neat and interesting, but too cold to enjoy. We met back up with the whole group in front of the cathedral and walked across the Charles Bridge to Club Arkitektur for lunch. It was really phenomenal. I had a glass of red Czech wine called Frankonova, which was quite good. I also had some steamed carrots and tomato soup (which tasted like a tomato-based hot and sour). It was all great, and by the time we were finished eating everyone was much warmer and happier. We marched off to the main square to see the Astronomical Clock hit 4:00. Its a really elegant piece of machinery, and on the hour a trumpeter comes out and plays just like at St. Mary’s in Krakow! We also ran into Courtney’s family while we were there, and they were just as awesome and Jersey as I had expected them to be. After watching the clock we were supposed to go see Pleznik’s purple church, but it needs good lighting and since it was excessively overcast Margarita decided we’d go to see Gehry’s Dancing Houses instead. We got all the way across town only to find that we couldn’t actually get inside them, so we headed back to the hostel to get out of the cold and rain. I took a hot shower to warm up and then a group of us headed to Bily Konicek, a jazz and blues club off the main square, for dinner. I had spaghetti, and the band was really incredible– so the evening ended up being fairly successful. We met up with the rest of the group underneath the astronomical clock at 11, but ended up all getting separated again and making our way back to the hostel in the middle of sketchville.
Waking up at the Bauhaus was amazing. The window is large, and the light pours in across the white walls. Breakfast was good, and afterward we packed up the cars and met in the lobby for our tour of the school. Our guide was incredible– she was basically a female version of James Rose. We got a full tour of the studios, theater, and offices. I really enjoyed it. Especially the theater– it has these super comfy chairs and some of the nicest lighting fixtures I’ve ever seen. I’m going to see if I can get Matt to help me build similar ones this summer during the Design Camp. After the tour we continued on down the street to see the houses of the Masters (Klee and Kandinsky!) It was rad. We walked back to the school and I got some postcards. Then everyone went to have lunch at the Bauhaus cafeteria behind the theater stage. I got a bowl of lentil soup only to find that it was super full of bacon. Uck. When everyone was done with their meal we set out for Dresden to see a synagogue that was rebuilt after the city was bombed in World War 2. It was one of the 200 synagogues that was burned. A little Jewish man gave us our tour. Nobody else seemed to enjoy it– but I thought the place was absolutely breathtaking. Courtney got some dirt to take back for Alex, and I pulled a seed from one of the trees in front of the synagogue for her to put in it. Then we set out for Prague! Crossing the border into the Czech Republic was essentially the same as crossing the border into the Siberian tundra. It was a really beautiful landscape to drive through. Especially in the twilight. When we finally neared Prague, the city spread out before us like so many stars dusted over the snowy ground. That illusion was shattered the closer we got to the Hotel E Inn where we were staying. It was located on the sketchiest street I’ve ever slept on. All the girls were in one room. We all decided the best approach was going to be catching a tram into the Old Town to get dinner. Eventually we found a place called La Diavola to eat. Allie Ross and I both had dumplings with eggs to eat. The best way I can describe it would be like a savory French Toast. It was really good! And only 99 CZK– about $5. Have to love the exchange rate. After dinner Gabe, Clay, Tofan, Sadia and I went to a bar to get a drink and celebrate our first night in the Czech. It was fun– I had a glass of white wine served in a mini pilsner glass. We ended up sharing a cab back to the hostel with a gay Czech man named Jorn who hates Americans because his brother’s brain was addled while he was fighting for the Czech army in Afghanistan. Thank you, George Bush.
This morning we had to get up pretty early– the goal was to be out of Berlin by 8:30. There was some unexpected difficulty getting the cars. I got in one with Zsolt, Sadia, Tofan, and Brian. We nicknamed it the Stealth Panther. We finally made it out of Berlin and to the H+DeM Library. The town it was in was really small, and super German. The library itself was really cool from the outside. It was clad entirely in screen printed glass and sand-blasted concrete slabs showing images depicting scientific and technological research. I did a rubbing of the concrete texture– it was really fun. The building’s interior wasn’t really special though. Apart from the deep blue carpet, it looked just like any other library I’ve ever been to. We stopped across the street to get pretzels for lunch, and then we kept driving to Leipzig. Going through Germany is really nice– all tall, skinny trees and windmills. In Leipzig we got out of the cars at the Zaha Hadid BMW factory. From the outside it looks a bit like a huge whale breaching the sea of asphalt surrounding it, but stepping inside is like stepping into a giant spaceship. It was absolutely awesome. This really put-together old man gave us a 4-hour long private tour of the factory and central building complex. We started by walking through the central offices– which have a glowing conveyor belt running through with unpainted car bodies illuminated by neon blue lights. Next we went into the welding factory to see the machines, then to the paint shop, then back to the factory to follow the painted bodies from start to finish. The BMW S-1 is an absolutely gorgeous machine, and getting to see the factory was even cooler than I had thought it would be. After the tour we were all in good spirits and continued on to Dessau and the Bauhaus. It was great– we were just driving down the street and there it was! We ate dinner at the cafe (really tasty pasta). The glasses and silverware were all Bauhaus design and awesome. We hung out there for a while and then got assigned to our rooms. I was with Courtney in Room 201. Not many young architects can say they’ve spent the night in Gropius’s Bauhaus dormitories. Our room was awesome, and we were on the side with the balconies. I stepped out onto ours and waved to Gabe nextdoor and Clay up on the 5th floor. There was only one shower-head for the floor, so we worked out a schedule. It was the most pleasant shower I’ve ever taken. The space is huge, but you’re entirely alone and free in it. Courtney and I proceeded to curl up with our amazingly cozy, slate-grey, fuzzy Bauhaus blankets to read for a little while before falling asleep.
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.
Today was the day of our gallery exhibition. We had a meeting with Catherine and Jeff over breakfast to finalize our photo dimensions and such. We settled on 84×40 cm for the landscape paths and 40×24 cm for the other two. We went back upstairs so I could format the images and then Jer and Gabe took the files to the Copy Print shop near the University. While they were doing that we showered and napped, and at 2:00 Allie Ross and I finally made our way out of the hostel. Our first priority was to get afternoon pretzels since we were both hungry– I’ll miss those pretzels. They’re slightly smaller and less dense than the ones in the states. At the pretzel stand we ran into DTops and Brian, small world. After we’d been fed, we headed over to the burned out church Patrick wanted us to see. It was just as awesome as he said it would be. We stepped inside and the whole thing is just glowing blue stained glass broken up into 6×6″ squares– like being surrounded by thousands of static TV screens. The statue over the altar glistens gold, and the space is overwhelming in a beautiful way– with traces of green, gold, and red winding through the blue fragments of glass. We just sat there for a little while taking it in. The sky was just a little overcast, so more light was shining in through the left side of the chapel– it was incredible. When we were ready to leave, it was just time to go pick up our prints from the Copy shop. It was only E78 for all of it on photogloss, which is really a very good price. The print quality was stunning. We set up the exhibition, which turned out really well. The whole thing as just incredibly exciting and everyone was in good spirits. I’m amazed by how much work we were able to get done in such a short period of time. Allie Ross and I talked to Margarita’s friend Seagram for a little while. She was very nice and apparently taught at UT for one year in 1999. We promised to tell Professor Davis she said hello. After everyone had presented their work we all went down the street to eat dinner together. I had a sort of fried eggplant dish with tomato sauce on it. Apparently its very authentic German, and it was extremely tasty. To drink I had a glass of Retsina. It was an amber-colored white wine– slightly fruitier than your average white, and very much my new favorite. It was well after midnight by the time we finished eating and got back to the hostel, so I headed to bed to prepare for our incredibly full schedule the next day.
Today was Allie Ross’s real birthday! I woke up at 8:30 still exhausted from the rave adventure, but in dire need of some breakfast. I went downstairs fully expecting to be the only one awake only to find Margarita sitting there, so I ended up having a much longer breakfast than expected. At about 11:30, Abby and I made our way to the Monument to the Murdered Jews. Now that I’ve made that trip about a million times, we have no trouble getting lost or being confused about which train to take. When we got there I headed down into the museum. Im glad I got to experience it by myself, because its a very powerful space and I got to take it in silence and at my own pace. Its beautiful and sad, and when I got to the black room with the glowing stellae benches where they read the stories of the dead over the loudspeakers I cried and didn’t really stop until well after I’d left the museum. I didn’t expect the Museum-Memorial to really hit me the way it did. When I emerged, i walked through the stellae with a new sort of reverence. It was difficult to get myself to take pictures, but I finally walked it off and got some good shots in. I met back up with Abby and Jer at 1:30, and we took the train back home. On the way we stopped and I got some Haribo gummies to surprise Allie Ross for her birthday. She was super stoked! By this point I was dead tired but pushed through it and went downstairs to the little bar-cafe where we worked on selecting which photographs and things our group wanted to present at the critique. At 6:30 we finally packed it up and Dtops, Tess, Allie Ross, Sadia, and I headed to Amar- the Indian restaurant down the street- for birthday dinner. It was so delicious! We started off with some naan and mango sekt. For dinner I had shrimp in red curry sauce, which I loved. Allie Ross said it was the most delicious birthday dinner she’s ever had. We were supposed to be at the University for our mock-up review at 8, but we ended up being about 30 minutes late. It worked out well though, because the meeting didn’t really start until right when we got there. Catherine decided she wanted our group to make some large prints of our night shots and then have a loop of our two videos running beneath them. After the meeting, Margarita took everyone out of the room very secretly so Courtney and I could set up cake, candles, and Champagne to surprise Allie Ross and Mike. They came back in, were super happy and shocked, and everybody sang Happy Birthday. I made a Lent exception for birthday cake– it was an Austrian poppy seed cake. So incredible. We made it back to the hostel by midnight to work on all our photoshopping and such and didn’t get to bed until around , at which point I basically passed out.
This morning we were all up for breakfast at 9 and headed out to the Holocaust Memorial with Margarita and Catherine by 10. We took the S Bahn, but it was still quite a trip to get out to the site. We started out by just walking through it for 15 minutes and meeting up on the other side of the field of stellae. After that we jumped into a cafe and discussed our ideas for the project. By 11:30 M + C set us loose on the Monument and its unsuspecting visitors. We each staked out a position within the field and sat there shooting anyone who passed for 1 hour, with the exception of Gabe, who was focussing on getting some video of people wandering through. At 2 we headed back to Die Fabrik to get the walkie talkies from Jeff and review the pictures we had taken so far. Gabe got an excellent video passing through the stellae, and we have several nice shots that start to really show the movement of people in between. It was intense sitting still in that space for so long. One man stopped to take pictures of me taking pictures. Another boy and his friends came and posed for me, and then they’d pop back up at different points. People are always so surprised to walk around a corner and see you there- like they’re shocked to realize that they’re not actually alone. The sound in the field is so powerful. Quiet except for the footsteps and voices of people within of few rows of you, so you always know when someone is approaching right around the corner. After reviewing our pictures, Allier Ross and I set out to find the German Military Surplus Store to get a flashlight/glowstick for our night shots, and everyone else headed back out to shoot some more. We had great success finding the Trendy Army Supply Store and then hopped back on the train. At Friedrichstrasse we got a little bit turned around, but ended up finding a little hipster vegetarian restaurant called Super Good for Me where we stopped to grab dinner. The whole experience was somehow slightly awkward– we blame the hipster Germans– but I had an amazing minestrone soup bowl as big as my face. It was spicy and delicious and full of vegetables and rice. After dinner we reoriented ourselves and found our way to the Monument. By this point it was dark and we were about to play or game of running through the stellae with the glowstick to get some long exposure photos. We shot until about 9 and then headed home. I took a short nap while we waited for everyone to get back and ready, and then we headed out for Mike and Allie Ross’s joint birthday. While we were searching for a bar the group sort of got separated. Allie Ross, Patrick, DTops, Clay, Aubrey, Kelly, and I ended up going to a really fun bar called Lux until about 3:00, at which point we walked across town, down several sketchy alleys, and through a bunch of warehouses to a seedy underground German rave-dance place called Arena Club. It was so awesome. Like Slink, but much much more fun. At 5:30 Patrick and I headed home. Excellent adventure.
This morning we had to et up pretty early to catch a cab to the Universitat der Kunste where we were having our photography seminar. Catherine showed us some of her work, which is really interesting. It deals with issues of crowds and queuing and observing the way people begin to occupy public space. Then Jeff gave us a very brief lecture on depth of field and such– not that I can do much with it since my camera has no aperture setting. After that we had lunch at the stands across the street from the burned out church (German pretzels are awesome) and then broke up into groups based on our sites. I’m working with the Monument to the Murdered Jews, which I’m beyond stoked about. Patrick gave us a really good idea for shooting at night using a flashlight. My group is Jer, Allie Ross, Abby, and Gabe. At 1:30 we had an appointment to get a tour of Rem’s Dutch Embassy. I love Rem. The Embassy was super cool. Walking through it was so much more like I envision being inside Rem’s head would be than the Student Union at IIT. I think the best way to describe it would be that the building is a spatial Rubiks Cube with a metallic circulation snake winding through. I was happy because even Daniel Topping really really enjoyed it. After the tour, the whole group headed over to Alexanderplatz to meet up with Catherine. We stopped for a short coffee break at Dunkin Donuts (notable flavors not found in the US being the Spicy Chili Donut and the Tomato-Chili Brownie) before going up into the Disco ball Tower. It was super neat. Like going up in the Sunsphere on a much grander scale. We could see absolutely all of Verlin. This is the point at which I started shooting some photographs in black and white. After the tower we had a little time to ourselves to explore. All the girls hit the mall. Allie Ross and I made a dent in our Maxi list of things to try in Germany. First we located our blood orange Rachen Drachen. They’re really strange. And yet delicious! They’re coated in a sort of mentholated sugar, and then the gummy part is orange flavored. We were beyond excited. Then after a bit more searching we found several of the other items. Waldmeister is a green soda. I had a taste of it, and it wasn’t too bad. I think it may have been like water melon flavored. Next was Jever, a beer brewed in Northern Germany. Upon opening it, the first thing we noticed was that it smelled a lot like pot. It also tasted incredibly terrible. Our last experiment for the day was Hanuta– chocolate hazelnut sandwiched between two wafer cookies like a s’more. It was sooo tasty! It even smelled excellent. After a brief meeting with our workshop group, Allie Ross and I headed down the street to the Pirate Bar (whose German name I can’t spell) with Andy Ruff for a drink.
Today was our first day in Berlin. I love Germany! So far it has very much agreed with me. I woke up a bit late because Margarita apparently didn’t realize that you’re supposed to make sure your roommate gets up for breakfast. I made it down anyway and we had coffee. After everyone was ready we set out to brave the German mass transit system for the first time. It was a touch colder outside than we had thought it would be. And by that I mean it was absolutely freezing. The German trains are really complicated– but highly awesome. The first one we got on was like the trains in Chicago (or the monorail at Disney, take your pick) which was perfect because it gave us a chance to really see the city as we zoomed through it. Our first stop for the day was Frank Gehry’s DZ Bank building. Its the one with the huge horsehead-shaped auditorium suspended in the atrium. I was more okay with it than your average Gehry building just because all the super nonsense parts were pushed to the interior and treated as sculptural elements. There was a beautiful glass piece in the atrium that resembled a fish just brushing the surface of a lake. The detailing and jointwork still fell short– typical. Margarita had arranged a tour, so a nice German man took us around the bank and told us all sorts of fun facts. The tour ended at the back of the Bank– directly across the street from Eisenmann’s Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I was beyond excited. Margarita let us wander around it for a while. The sound of my footsteps on the ground was exactly like the ones Eisenmann made in the film we watched on the monument. Surreal. The stellae were beautiful. So smooth, and some sloping at slightly different angles. I didn’t sketch it because I wanted to just experience it fully on this first visit since we’re definitely going back. From the Monument we walked down the street a little way to see the remains of the Berlin wall. It was sort of a powerful moment– standing next to the shattered remnants of the structure that once divided this huge city. We went inside the Kapelle der Versohnung– it was a small church that got trapped between the two layers of the wall so nobody could get to it. It fell into disrepair, and so when the wall came down they built this chapel out of rammed earth mixed with the rubble of the original church and wrapped it in a wood slat enclosure. It was really beautiful. I think it also bears some association with the little cemetery right next to the wall. Next we headed down the street to find the White Trash Fast Food Restaurant for lunch. It was awesome. I had a sandwich with red pepper, guacamole, and sprouts on it. Almost everyone else had burgers and fries. It was perfect. We set back out into the cold with full bellies and made a pitstop inside the lobby of the I.M. Pei art gallery. It had beautiful white board formed concrete, but also a rather obtrusive looking glass structure tacked onto the front. Afterward we hit up the Chipperfield museum, which had a lot of Egyptian and Prehistoric-Bronze Age artwork– including the bust of Nefertiti! The real one! Courtney and I walked into a room not even realizing the bust was in the museum, and there it was. Crazy. After that we wandered around the city and stopped in two different pharmacies searching for Rachen Drachen before finally finding Remy’s Dutch Embassy. We couldn’t get inside, and it started hailing, so we kept walking. We stopped inside the University library, which was gorgeous. Clay and I wandered around it for ages. The study rooms were terraces that opened into a large wooden box at the heart of the library– think really intense reverse Panopticon. The stacks surrounded that volume and set up a rhythm that became the ordering system for the whole building. Lovely. We got incredibly lost on the way back to the hostel, but we finally made it and then headed back down the street to grab some quick dinner. The others got kebab, so I went next door and grabbed some bread and delicious tomato-red pepper soup. Excellent choice.
Sorry for the lapse in posting- there hasn’t been much to report since we’ve been hitting studio pretty hard this week. Monday night was Dave Matthews in Milan with Daniel Topping. I got back from Rome exhausted at 1:00 and then left for Milan about 2 hours later with DTops and several of the liberal arts kids who decided they were going to try to scalp some tickets. They were able to find some when we got there, and I was super glad because it was a great show and it was fun to see it with a good group. The warm-up band started at 7:30, an hour earlier than we had thought they would which was perfect because it meant Dave actually started at 8:30 and the show ended just in time for us to catch the last train back to Switzerland. We stood next to an American couple living on a naval base in Sicily who had traveled up to Italy to see the show. We were really close to the stage– I was like 20 feet from Dave. So so so awesome! And the show was spectacular. We got to hear him play Dancing Nancies, which I’ve never heard live before and I was beyond pumped about. They also played a good bit of the new stuff. Full setlist:
Proudest Monkey
Satellite
You Might Die Trying
Funny The Way It Is
Seven
Squirm
Crash Into Me
So Damn Lucky
Lying In the Hands of God
Why I Am
Dancing Nancies
Shake Me Like a Monkey
Jimi Thing
Burning Down The House (Talking Heads cover)
You & Me
Don’t Drink The Water
Encore:
Baby Blue
Everyday
Ants Marching
In summary, pure awesome concert. I’d say it was only second to the Piedmont Park show. Dave wins always.
Also, I filled up travel sketchbook number 1! Dave’s always a good entry to end on.
The rest of the week was work-filled. We’re trying to get a good bit of studio knocked out before we leave for Berlin and Spring Break. (I’ll be in Copenhagen the 17th-21st!) Yesterday was an excellent day for no reason at all. I woke up and went to take a shower, and I had one of those moments where you get completely unstuck with your project and figure out what to do. Then I worked hard for the rest of the day and we watched Wings of Desire for City in Film in the evening. I love that movie. 🙂 This morning was church and now on to more studio for our pin-up tomorrow.
Sweet Swiss Adventures 