Frankfurt seems like a nice place...

Lufthansa overbooked their flight out of here so I decided to stay over one night and am rebooked tomorrow. Should pay for a replacement computer screen!

Reviews were interesting. My project turned out really well I thought... but it was a very modern building in a very traditional context and the visiting reviewers didn't like that at all. They did have some useful comments but a good deal of the vibe was `we just don't like that concept'. Where I was feeling like, 'it looks beautiful right there!' So I don't really know if it was a good review or a bad one. But I certainly sparked a lot of discussion and I was certainly the most experimental and unique of the designs. Which I was striving for as well. So I feel like I succeeded in many ways. I'm trying to bring home the model... we'll see if it makes it. It is a very solid little thing so I am hoping it will.

Looking forward to getting home!

- B -

Model finally done...

It took me several days to finish off my museum model instead of the 1 or 2 I'd hoped for. I ended up building a pretty spectacular model though, very nicely crafted and the form looks great when placed in the site model. It seemed like making a good model was a more effective way to explain the building structure rather than trying to do it through drawings and a crumby model.
So now I have a day and a half to generate a whole lot of drawings...

- B -

Why I have to come home...

This is the email I received from Emily today...

> Hi dad,

> cant wate intil you come back

> -Em-

Things are heating up...

The weather suddenly switched here from the cool rainy spring we'd been having to the hot summer we we're supposed to be having. Suddenly we are in the 90s and it doesn't cool down much at night either.

I like the warm outdoors, and inside the buildings it stays pretty cool. There have been a couple of negative incidents though. Because it is so hot I've been keeping the windows open at night in my room, they are casement style windows hinged on the sides and open inward right over my bed. So the night before last I sat up and rammed my forehead right into the corner of one of these stupid windows. Guess I won't open that one any more.

Then today I set off to take some sheets and towels to a laundry they asked us to do before we left. The Italian prof had read us the address as 46/50, meaning that it is a long shop between numbers 46 and 50. But I'd written down 650 and started hiking off to this remote address in the countryside. The addresses here don't increment every block like they do at home. I have no idea where 650 actually is... I gave up and turned around when I'd reached the city limits and was only at 400. Of course the walk back was all uphill and hot hot hot... phew!

- Brian -

So much for Italian Soccer...

Italy lost to Spain last night and so are out of the finals. But it was fun while it lasted. I've started on a final model of my project and it is looking very good. Was planning to do more drawings first but Prof Don wasn't ready to believe that everything would fit together nicely until I built a model to show him. Which is fine. I'm hoping to work late tonight so as to get the model finished. Unfortunately we have to spend quite a while this evening doing a review for the Town Form class as well. Which would be okay under normal circumstances but right now no one wants to spend time doing it. Also tomorrow morning I have a final in the Italian class that I need to review for tonight. About half the group changed their grading options to audit a couple weeks back and then promptly quit coming. I've stuck with it but am taking it pass fail so am not really worried about the test. Just has to be done.

- B -

Italian Soccer

The big deal here in Italy these days is soccer. The world cup is happening and Italy just squeaked into the finals. They played France last Tuesday night and won 2-0. Although the game wasn't very good. Winning was critical, however, as the loser of the game was to be eliminated from the tournament. The same evening Holland beat Romania which was also critical. Somehow the elimination process worked such that, because Holland had won against France and Italy previously, if they'd lost to Romania then both Italy and France would have been eliminated. In fact, the locals were worried that Holland would lose the game on purpose just to do in France and Italy.

We were on the way back from Venice on the bus that evening and pulled into a truck stop to eat dinner and watch the game. Along with every other trucker on the highway it looked like. The truck stop was jammed with parked rigs. Tonight Italy plays Spain and we've been told that working in studio late is simply not allowed...

- B -

Project progress...

Just a quick note to say that I've been working hard on my museum project. It changed quite a lot since the last review and I'm feeling very good about it. Here are a few photos of a quick sketch model I built to see how it would feel. For space reasons I had to straighten up the exterior walls and then I decided to make the light openings vertical instead of horizontal and carry them across the roof.
I've done a lot of work tweaking the organization of the spaces... there is a ramp down the outside curve of the museum which has to be handicap accessible. Which means a maximum slope of 1:12 and a flat landing space every 0.7 meter drop. I carefully lined up the landings such that the structural beams run right through them so that the ramp doesn't conflict with the building structure. Its pretty slick.

You will also notice the use of pizza boxes for materials. Modeling materials are hard to come by here in Macerata. As are a variety of other useful materials. Such as trace paper which is at a premium here these days.

- B -

And if cats were not enough...

Last week a colony of bees swarmed over our building and took up residence in one of the holes in the church facade across the street. When they built these churches the masons would stick wooden beams into the wall and lay planks across them to serve as scaffolding. When they got done at that height they'd move the scaffolding up to a higher level. Thing is, you can't get back and fill in the holes once you are done. So the facades have these holes all over them. Particularly the brick unfinished facades.

Lots of these churches were started and then they ran out of money before they could put the marble facing on the front of them. So the churches remain unfinished with indented brick fronts where the marble would have attached had they had the money to complete it. This happened a lot... even the fancy churches in Florence were unfinished for hundreds of years. They were only finished when the Italian capital was relocated to Florence in the late 1800s. They decided that the capital city couldn't have all these unfinished churches sitting around.

The funny thing is that this stands in sharp contrast to the palazzos in Venice. There the families were building houses to impress their friends and neighbors so the facades along the Grand Canal were the first things to go up... and *then* they ran out of money and couldn't finish the interiors. The Peggy Gugenheim museum in Venice is in a one-story stone building on the Grand Canal... the first floor of a palazzo that was never finished. This isn't just true in Venice either. Many of the Palladio palazzo for which he is justifiably famous were never finished on the interior.

Anyhow, back to the bees. They decided that they were not happy with the church I guess, and formed a huge swarm under the eaves of the palazzo we have school in. There was this huge ball of buzzing bees over there... about a foot and a half across. The fire department brought a ladder over the other day and they smoked the bees and scooped them up (using a kitchen ladle no less) and put them into a hive box. It is unclear at the moment whether or not they got the queen bee. They left the box for as many of the workers to collect in as they could but yesterday it looked like they might have moved back into the church. But I guess the bee-guy came back today, collected the hive box and said that he thought it had worked. I'm sure he knows. He estimated 60,000 bees. Just so long as they don't end up in our wall along with the cat...

- B -

The cat returns...

Well, after all of that, another kitten showed up stuck in the wall yesterday. There is a pipe in an outside garden that seems to lead into there, but once you are in the kittens are too small to jump back up out of the slot they get down into.

We don't know if it is the same one or not, Ian thinks it is not but I think it probably is. Either way, the landlady locked the door of the room where it was so there is no way to get at it and go through the whole rescue fiasco again.

So now we hear the faint meowing of the kitten all night long...

- Brian -

Cat fights continued...

Well, the saga of the cat continued through the night. I left at 11:15 and found Chris and Jeff drinking beers at the bar around the corner. So I sat and joined them for one as well. They were busy working up their outrage over the cat, the loss of the headlamp, and the landlord's involvement. After joining in for a beer and some bitching, I headed on home while they went back to studio to collect a few things.

So I got home the kitten was totally cute of course. They'd gotten it cleaned up, fed it some food and it was happily camped out on Ian's chest. So I got some dinner and headed for bed. Was surprised that Jeff and Chris had not shown up yet... and sure enough, they'd stopped at another bar on the way home to work themselves up further and finally showed up around 1:00, loaded for bear. They were griped a lot about the cat, and losing the headlamp, and getting the landlady upset. Turns out that she wasn't really all that bent out of shape, she'd just wanted them to stop before they damaged themselves. It was a pretty dangerous little place they were inside.

Long and short of it all is that Ian let the cat go the next morning. I'm sure it did fine. I'm glad that I stayed out of the whole fray and it has left some touchy feelings between the rest of my roommates. But everybody is tired and has been working long hours. The good news is that we'll be going home in a couple weeks! We had reviews today, leave on a bus for Verona at 5:30am tomorrow morning, will be there for a day, in Vicenzia for a day, and in Venice for two. Then back here on Tuesday (getting in about 1:00am Wed morning). Have a couple of final exams (Italian and History) end of next week. The next Monday we have a final in Town Form, and a paper due as well. Then that Friday we have the final review for our studio project. Saturday we have a potluck, Sunday I go to Milan, and Monday the 1st fly home!

Whew!

- B -

Cat stories

A few weeks back I came home very late... like 2am, after having worked most of the night in the studio prior to midterm presentations. When I got to the apartment building, and opened the door, there were several people inside attempting to get a cat out of the stairwell. The cat was having nothing to do with leaving, she was camped. The three Italians (our neighbor and a married couple who I think were visiting her) were shouting at each other (I can never figure out when they are actually having a *real* argument versus a polite conversation). They were afraid the cat was rabid... it certainly had sharp claws. I didn't think it was rabid but it had been acting pretty weird I guess, leaping up at our apartment door and of course being completely unwilling to leave. I tried to help but we finally all gave up, left the outside door open and went to bed.

Well, over the weekend I started hearing this mewing sound. I thought it was outside but came to realize that it was a cat trapped somewhere in the building. I opened the door next our apartment entrance in the stairwell and found an old furnace room with no lights, lots of dirt and clearly could hear the cat mewing in there somewhere. I used my bicycle headlamp to try to peer around but could not see anything. And the floor of the room dropped down into a pit from the door about 4 feet. It was a mess.

I looked in later and found the cat, same one as before in the hallway. She was up on a ledge to the side of the room, in an opening in the wall right next to the ceiling. There were holes back into the wall from there. And I soon suspected that it was a she and that there were kittens in there somewhere. That explained her behavior and refusal to leave before.

There was no way to get her to come down and out, I tried to put a board in that she could climb down on but that was about the extent of it.

Enter my roommates. Or one roommate in particular, Ian. He got in there with a ladder and up to the opening in the wall. Discovered that behind the wall was an opening that dropped down about 5 or 6 feet. The mom cat was long gone now, but there was one kitten stuck at the bottom of this well. And of course there was no way to reach it. Ian tried to get it out but finally gave up and came on in to studio.

At the end of studio, at 7:00, Ian and Mark headed off to attempt to rescue the cat again. They were planning to drop something down in that the cat could climb up. Apparently the cat is in pretty bad shape at this point. I decided to delay going home for dinner because this clearly isn't something I want to be more involved in. My other roommates Jeff and Chris are still here, although Chris takes off pretty quickly to get food. Jeff disappears a little later.

Chris returns at 9ish, completely ticked off. He'd been roped into helping as I feared. The landlady, who lives upstairs, had come down for a bit. The neighbor had come out. The landlady starts yelling at Chris for them to stop messing around in there (Basta! "Enough!") Of course all in Italian so Chris can't understand her but it appears to have to do with the piping in the room getting messed up. Ian and Mark wouldn't give up ("We've almost got it!"). Chris bales and comes back to studio.

Jeff returns at 9:30, totally pissed. They had been using his headlamp light (without having asked him) to look into the hole and had dropped it down there. So that's gone. But they had gotten the kitten out, it is on it's last legs and stinks. Angelica, the wife of the Italian prof who hosts us here and arranges the housing was there, so the landlady must have called to complain. They are attempting to feed the cat. Chris and Jeff head off after a bit, I don't know whether they went back to the apartment to attempt to deal with all of this or what.

Now at 10:30, Mark comes back in. Totally filthy. Says we have a new roommate kitten. I'm still working here in studio. But I can't hide here much longer because they'll shut the power off in another half hour. Plus I'm getting hungry.

Just I hope they didn't find my bike lamp and drop it down the hole as well!

I'm sure there will be a follow up post on this...

- B -

A visit to Shangri-La

Okay, here is the posting that I've been waiting to get to. This is where I biked through after Rome and one of the unknown places in Italy that I most highly recommend visiting: The Sibillini Mountains. Part of the mountain chain that divides Italy East and West, The Sibillini's are named after a Roman goddess and contained in a national park on the west edge of the Marche region. Northeast of Rome and Southeast of Assisi.

The mountains are great for hiking, mountain biking, parasailing, skiing in the winter, lots of Italians doing lots of outdoors things. The high peaks form a circle surrounding two flat plains at about 1200m, the Piano Grande and the Piano Poco. On the edge of the Piano Grande sits the town of Castelluccio on a hilltop at about 1400m.

I started my trip from Rome, taking the train to Spoletto. My goal was to reach the town of Norcia which is at the base of the mountains on the West side. I had not wanted to pack my bike between Siena and Norcia... just because I was lazy. So I made up for that laziness with the extra work involved in finding second class trains on which I could take the bike. Which was fine.
After arriving in Spoletto, I anxiously waited around for a couple of hours for the bus... I left Rome at 4:00, arrived in Spoletto around 5:30, and the bus to Norcia left at 8:00. While sitting next to the station, I glanced over and finally noticed this huge metal sculpture standing in the center of the roundabout in front of the station. Had to be a Calder! Sure enough, I found his signature. Which was pretty cool, he's one of my favorite artists and I'd run across him in Finland as well. He and Alvar Aalto used to hang out together.

I was anxious because I was not sure the bus driver would let me put my bike underneath and, if he didn't, I was going to be stuck in Spoletto for the night. Which was *really* going to pay me back for not packing the bike. But he did, and I did, all of which was good because there were long tunnels through the mountains leading to Norcia and I could not have ridden through them.


Okay, so now we are on our way up to Norcia with just a few people on the bus. There are some college students with backpacks and I ask them if they know how to find the hostel, which I'd looked up the web and which had looked very nice. They say, "yes, we know where it is, but we are a group of geography students having a meeting there this weekend and we've booked the entire place!" Durn! This is going to cost me a hotel in Norcia!

So I arrive in Norcia about 9:00pm, just gotten dark. Norcia is a pretty town, a ski town. It reminded me of a small Aspen or something. It is a hill town... there are walls and all. But it clearly has a much better economy going than most of the Marche towns. I don't know where I am going but hear some voices down one street and so wander down that way. Turns out it is the hostel, and indeed filled with about 30 geography students from all over Europe. I stop in and ask if they know of an inexpensive hotel to recommend, but none of them are local. But they are really nice and end up inviting me to stay over anyhow, they have about three empty beds left over. So I stay, have dinner, buy a tee-shirt from their group. Have a great time visiting.

In the morning I head up. Norcia is at about 600m elevation, the pass I have to cross is at 1500 and about 20km away. It was a long slog climbing all the way up there. Campers and motorcycles. But a beautiful day and the road was not so steep as to be awful. Just a long long climb.

You finally reach the pass, with mountains on both sides of you. No trees up here. Just grass and rocks and sky. There was a restaurant near the pass which I stopped at to have a coffee and buy some more water as I was out. Three mountain bikers there with some sort of electric assist on their mountain bikes! (I kind of thought that was cheating). They took pictures of my bike and trailer. It was nice to be the object of the photos for once.

Once you cross the pass you look down about 300m to the flat Piano Grande, and about 5km away to the town of Castelluccio on the other end. It is completely spectacular. Sort of coming down into Death Valley but green. And the mountains all around are beautiful. From the pass you blast down the hill and out across the valley floor. And after an easy ride across, climb back up to the town at the end.
Castelluccio is a very small town. I got in pretty early in the day as the ride was not long in km. Just long in hills. I got cleaned up and took a break, wandered around town for a while, and then sat and started trying to do a watercolor painting of the town. Something I don't do enough of and I'm really jealous of the other folks here who do a lot more of that. I'm still finishing the painting... will post it when I'm done.

There are three rooming houses and lots of folk hanging out. I was pretty lucky to get a room as we'd had so little time to make arrangements that I had not gotten a reservation ahead of time. Think I got one of the last available rooms. The three rooming houses also have restaurants. The worst thing about traveling alone in Europe is that when you go out to eat they always give you the lousiest table as far away from the windows as possible.

The first restaurant was crammed (Sunday night with locals just out of the church I think). They offered to let me sit by myself outside but it was too cold. (Food looked great and otherwise I would have taken them up on it).

The second restaurant was about half full with a nice dining area. They took me into a side room with about a half dozen tables and nobody in it, set up a new tiny table against the back wall (had to kick one of the owner's kids out who was sitting there coloring) and offered that. I said no thanks.

The third restaurant finally gave me a table in the main dining area, with other people. Still at the back wall and the couple who showed up a few minutes later got to take a 4 seat table next to the windows. But at least I could *see* the windows from where I was! Food was great, I was tired, went to bed.

The next day I was planning to make it about half way back to Macerata. But I was unsure about how far I could actually cover in a day. Not only was I a bit inexperienced about distance with my trailer, but also not knowing the route, conditions, hills, etc. But it was great fun blasting down out of the mountains. The road was smooth and well paved. Then I started heading north along the edge of the mountains. Since the river valleys in the Marche run west to east, going north involves crossing the river valleys and the ridges in between them so there were a lot of ups and downs. When I got to the town I had intended to stay at, it was still only around noon. I had lunch and set my sights on another town a ways further. Which I made it to around 5:00. Sarnana. A nice town. But again I don't know where to stay and I'm getting tired of traveling (not to mention my grubby clothing), and I realize that if I make it over just one more ridge I'm in the Fiastra river valley which I can follow down to just below Macerata. So I did. Flew down the last 40km or so and doing about 100km for the day. Made it home at about 8:00 and was happy to be there. A truly great 2 days of biking. You can see more pictures here...

- B -

Siena

After two days in Florence, I biked with the trailer about 45 miles to Siena. It was a pretty ride through the Chianti wine region with cute small towns and lots of scenery. The day was hazy and grey, however, humid, so the picture taking wasn't really worth stopping much for. Especially as I could not leave Florence until about 2:30 and needed to get to Siena before dark. Which I did... barely!

This first photo is my first view of Siena. It is much easier to find your way into a town than out of one...because they stick these big towers up in the middle to show you where to go!

The main piazza in Siena is called the "Campo", it is huge and a really fun space. It is sloped towards the center so it is easy to sit and picnic on it. There are pictures here of the iconic Siena tower on the Campo, people wandering about, Archtecture students hard at work, and what it looks like when you lay on your back in the Campo and look up. Those are swifts, not stars. Tons of swifts darting about all over the place here.

Cheers!

- B -

Florence

The first stop on our travels after midterm was Florence. I had been here once before in the early 90s and have to say that I enjoyed it a lot more this time. They seem to have gotten some of the traffic under control in the core area. And it helped to have acclimatized to Italy a bit before joining into the tourist frenzy. The people in Florence are not terribly friendly... they're just sick of dealing with tourists. Everybody speaks English even when you attempt your marginal Italian. And when you go out to a restaurant you are more likely to find it full of American university students than Italians. There are tons of study abroad programs from the US based in Florence. I'm not sure this is a good thing.

But the architecture is amazing. I found drawing frustrating because I was having trouble getting perspectives to work for me. My notebook is full of attempts to figure out how to construct a hexagonal dome base in flat perspective. But along with a lot of lovely pictures I've thrown in a few drawings here...

Ciao!

- B -

ps- I should add that there was a lot of architecture by Brunelleschi in Florence (like the humongo dome for example) and he also developed one-point perspective during the Renaissance... so I felt good about practicing perspective drawing on his architecture! :^)

Midterm

I'm finally getting a few items posted that I've been promising to do over the last couple weeks. The first is my midterm presentation. We are attempting to design an art museum to house a modern art collection from here in Macerata. The site is an existing piazza near our studios, historic, but with a pretty awful looking bank building from the 80s. We are replacing the bank.

My approach is much more aggressively modern than anyone else's here. Which I am rather pleased with. I am basing my design on the Kiasma Art Museum in Helsinki which I liked a lot from last summer. So what I have is a rectilinear "L-shaped" building combined with a curved building that connects back to form a circular space surrounding a small courtyard.

At the midterm my idea was that the curved wall would have horizontal bands of skylights along it to bring light into the galleries. But based on the feedback I got I am currently thinking I will instead use vertical bands of walls cascading down the side of the building with gaps for light in between. Also, the way I cut the curve off and formed an arch on the piazza end looked way too "church like". So I need to change the way the wall curves around the front. Unfortunately I don't know quite how to draw it yet!! In any case, here are some additional images that I presented. My drawing of a modern art statue out front looks a bit pregnant I'm afraid... I'm calling it the "Macerata Venus".

More photos here...

Back in Macerata...

The bike ride turned out great! I actually made it home Sunday night so that I had Monday free. (Was tired and badly in need of a laundry! (Both for me and my clothes!!)). I'll post photos and such as soon as I can. Would have done so yesterday but the internet here was down and it was yet another Italian holiday so there was no one around the school who could reset it. (In addition to having the power shut off at 11:20 each night, our internet rarely makes it through the entire weekend without crashing... needless to say, this is somewhat frustrating when we are all supposed to be in touch with the department in order to preference terminal studios for next year...)

- B -