I Update, I guess

So its late on Easter Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday, and i'm in studio working and i figured i should update my blog. So, since our great rome escapade, including a trip to Bilbao, and Girona, we got back and did work. NOTE: THERE ARE NEW PICTURE LINKS ON THE LEFT COLUMN. SEE LEFT COLUMN FOR DETAILSbasically. last weekend brandon u came in, we had all had a good time for once, it was a nice refresher after a rather unusually quiet week field trip. but the work is getting worse. our director, in an effort to "keep us on track", decided to have a jury last wednesday, a week before this coming wednesday, which is our midreview jury. dave shove will be in town and so will the council town, so there's alot of pressure. so she decided that in our best effort, in order to stimuate out design, i dont know, it doesnt make alot of sense, but the workload has increased, over easter break. not only are half of the students' families in town, but there is also no real time ot analyze crit analyze crit before having to get down and prepare for this wednesdays jury. so i'm not sure what the big idea is, but i dont think there is one.

anyways, as rob said, what better time to be under pressure and learn a new program. so that's what rob and i are doing. we are going to use ARCHICAD to save us from our woes. basically this program promisses to be easier as far as exporting necessary drawings such as elevations, plans, sections, and perspectives. it so far has proven to be exponentially more competent than sketch up, and alot fast er to use than CAD, in many ways. everything is sort of linked inside of everything else, so you draw a wall, but there's a wall settings box where you can customize just about everything to everything. rob and i think that they asked architects how to design a program, bcecause it gos so smoothly. well relatively, its very early yet. also, this program i think allows pdf exports, which could provide higher quality exports for post production work for our boards. i'll keep you posted on the details.

anyways, its been quiet. i've noticed that my hands cramp up on this keyboard alot, and on my mouse too. its the eregonomics i tell you! theyre at it again, and its not good. if any reader, stalker or not, knows of any good sites or products that could be recommended, please post comments.

Girona, Rome, and Great Weather (Not Bilbao)

So yet again, i will attempt to summarize our second field trip excursion. For this trip, we only hit 3 cities, Girona, in Spain, Rome, and then Bilbao, back in northern Spain. Nice trip, better pace, just some problems here and there. but more on that later.





TO NOTE: Pictures will be sparse in this part where i actually write what happened, but there is a link under my links section (look left column) that says, Rome Architecturally Speaking, click on that, it goes to an album of selected shots of the trip. There might be another one for Bilbao/northern spain, stay posted.





We first went out to Girona for a few days. its a quaint small town, at least the old town part is, and it has a very nice feel to it. it's actually a fairly rich city, which is nice, and walking around was pretty casual and nice. it wasn't like cordoba or granada that have a distinct feel and architecture. Girona was just a nice city. We checked out a couple of churches there, one romanesque, which is the older of the styles, and simpler in design. it was alright. We also went to the Gothic church there, which was awesome. Though pictures weren't allowed, i snuck some, because this church apparently has the largest span of vaulted ceiling in the world as far as gothic church. and it is a massive space, and it didnt feel like a forest of columns. it was really cool, and the stained glass was awesome.





Anyways, we did some other stuff, but really kept it quiet as far as night life and going out. we didnt do that alot this trip, which is very different from last trip. but i didn't mind, i really didnt feel like going out and spending more money. whatever. so we then eventually head off to rome.





rome was awesome. We got to hang out with the rome kids for two days which was awesome.


some of the things we saw were:


Renzo Piano's Auditorium Complex


Zaha Hadid's under construction IMAXXI building


Pantheon


Piazza de Popolo


Piazza Navonna


Pantheon, Colosseum, Palatine Hill, Roman Forum


Campidoglio


Trevi Fountain


Campo De Fori, where the Rome kids' apts were. we stayed there for 3 nights.


Quatro Fontane, only the outside


St. Peters


Church of St. Ivo


Richard Meyers Arcis Pacis Building


Tempieto


Church of San Pietro next to the Tempieto


Spanish Steps





That's quite a list indeed. we spent about five days there in Rome, so this hits alot of hte major ones. This is the stuff that we did as a group. One morning I went out and did my own tour of several other places, including the Piazza de San Ignacio Loyola, The church there, Some imperial palace and another baroque fountain that i dont remember the name of.





Over all, the most impressive buildings were of course, the oldest. Colosseum is nuts, and so are some of the buildings in the Roman Forum. the Temple of Romulus, had the original metal doors of the original temple, making them date to maybe 2000 years old! insane. It was just very impressive to walk the streets that millions of people have walked on over thousands of years. it's a very humbling experience too. Thank God the weather was nice.

Anyways, we eventually go out to bilbao. i'll write about that in another entry. i hate the internet sometimes.. one wrong click and you lose alot of info. captions on photos are always difficult.

anways, stay posted, more to come.

second half of semester begins

here is team rob bob ben's photo board. this is basically 20 boards in one image, each board being 11x 16, roughly. we had to pin them up on the wall with a half inch border, it was

a nightmare and a half. it was an extra half nightmare because we had to do crazy trimming things in order to bleed to the edge if we wanted to.

the presentation went well. Bob told me after i talked my head off that he would have rather just stood up there and let the boards speak for themselves. they definately could have. i talked my head off, but i lead it well i think, that was because we had written all the theory behind our concept early on in the night before, which is really effective later when putting information and formulating graphics for the boards. i think i'm gonna keep that tactic for later projects.

the jury went well, a bit mixed, but i think our stuff was solid, so it was good. because we had proposed to put some new buildings in and redistribute the floor area around the plaza and create new pockets of green space, keeping hte same numbers, but reallocating them differently, the jury wasn't all for it or all against it. it was alright. we later went out to this "local" place, whatever it was, it was really good. alot of meat, alot of patata, and plenty of sangria, which was a nice break.

but i'm hungry. so i'll write more later.

ps-- totally spent my free time designing this site, reading code, experimenting, and having some fun in photoshop. let me know what you think.