Don’t worry!  I have not forgotten this blog, even though I am less enthusiastic to write now.  I will do my best to write a more interesting and well-worth-your-time post in the next couple of days…but no guarantees.

Two all nighters in a row.

Even back at USC, I rarely did this.

This should be an interesting second night…Grazie, Italia.

“Field Trip” to Basel, Germany, and France

These “field trips” definitely help make up for the numerous all nighters I’ve done.  It kind of sucks that we’re in these countries for such a short period of time but on the other hand, who cares?  I get to look at cool architecture, be in some random countries trying to get around, eat good/bad food, and not really be in class.  Studying architecture, for once, is starting to be more fun.

Our day started Thursday morning.  We were to meet our bus at 730am.  I stayed up late because our sketchbook due date was coming up and I needed to start finishing up all my drawings, especially at the rate I draw.

Praise God that I didn’t forget anything this time.  I remember basketball shorts and most importantly, my camera.  That last field trip was an epic fail.  But this one…win!

From Como to Basel, Switzerland is supposed to be around 3.5 hours.  We didn’t get to Basel until around 1230ish.  Why?  Because people are retarded.  Explanation: people can’t hold their pee, people don’t get back to the bus at the set meeting time when we stop, our bus driver drove slow, people can’t hold their pee.

I normally enjoy road trips for a number of reasons: long conversations, random music playlists, and sight seeing along the way.  But there are things I hate about road trips: slow driving and bathroom breaks.  All of these reasons, good and bad, happened.

But focusing on the bad reasons…come on!  Use the bathroom before we leave on the bus trip.  Use the bathroom when we stop.  Don’t think about the bathroom where we’re in the car.  I understand there are times when it hits you all of a sudden but don’t let it happen again…otherwise find a different car ride.  If I wanted to stop multiple times on a road trip to let someone use the bathroom, I would have a child.

Back to the trip.

We get to Basel, meet up with our instructors, drop off our stuff at the hostel, and begin our tour of Basel.  What we saw in the beginning was kind of whatever.  It was just more urban context and not specific buildings, kind of a like a scene from Disneyland.

We go to this train station and stop for lunch.  Everything is really expensive in Switzerland and unfortunately, the cheapest thing we could find was Burger King.

Note: I absolutely hate Burger King.  Before eating it in Basel, I hadn’t eaten Burger King in over a decade.  Even when I was the Burger King for Halloween, I didn’t eat the burger I bought to go with my mask.  I gave it away to some poor college student…I think it was Cory.  I feel like if I’m going to eat at Burger King, I’ll spend an extra 10 minutes looking for something else.  But this time, I had no choice since we were pressed for time.  It will probably be another 10 years until my next burger.

After lunch, we start walking through some residential neighborhood, going past an oddly painted apartment building, and arrive at our first modern building.

The picture above is the SBB Switchtower designed by Herzog and de Meuron.  Such a cool project that has double curved sides and metal panels that twist from horizontal to vertical, giving this appearance that the openings are fading out.  From some points of view where the sky was reflecting off the facade, the building looks like it’s disappearing into the sky.

For some reason, some of were talking about parkouring throughout Europe.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s basically climbing, jumping, flipping, wall scaling, rolling, and other stuff times infinity.  These guys are crazy.  Watch the video for a better idea

Sick, I know.  So we wanted to do this everywhere we went.  But…it ended up with us taking pictures of each other jumping off things like…a step…or a curb…or jumping onto a bench.

HARDCORE PARKOUR!!!  That weird looking lady is my instructor.  Terrible instructor but nice lady.  And her Engrish isn’t that bad.

So after this, we saw some other cool buildings.  Most of them were Herzog and de Meuron but there was this sweet Children’s Hospital that had a holographic facade that changed colors as you walked by it.

From the Children’s Hospital our instructor took us to the firm of Herzog and de Meuron.  No, we didn’t get to go inside.  But we got to LOOK inside…from outside.  So sad.

We looked at a few more different places, crossed the river on a boat that uses the current to move (pretty cool), and called it a day for architecture.

During this time, we were still working on our sketchbooks that were due on Sunday.  Everyone had sketches to work on, especially your’s truly, so we spent our only night in Basel…sketching…But later on into the night, maybe around 10pm, we found out that there was a ping pong table.  So we decided to take a break and play for a little bit.

That break lasted until 1am.

It was late but we still needed to sketch.  So we sketched.  Until 430am.  Probably my least favorite night while on “vacation.”  Almost pulling an all nighter sketching.  Wonderful.

Of course, the next day we’re really tired but we had a lot of cool places to go to.

The first thing to see was visiting the Foundation Beyeler Museum in Basel.  They had an excellent exhibit o f Giovanni Segantini paintings, an impressionist painter.  He had a style of painting similar to stippling, where “countless tiny strokes or dots of pigment in pure colors are set directly next to each other.”  So rather than blending colors together, you would see, up close, individual colored lines.  There were also other paintings by Monet and van Gogh.  We weren’t SUPPOSED to take pictures but that didn’t stop me…

After what felt like a very short time in the museum, we left to grab a quick lunch and then move on to Germany to see…

The Vitra!  An architect’s playground!

Vitra is a Swiss furniture company based in Germany.  They are basically THE European manufacturer for furniture designers.  For instance, we saw them making the Eames chair (designed Charles and Ray Eames) by hand.  The cheapest one was 5000 euros…which is $6950!!

But what we came to see were the buildings.  Like I said, this is an architect’s playground.  There are buildings designed by all sorts of big name architects on this campus.  Here’s some of the buildings:

On the left is the Geodesic Dome invented by Richard Buckminster Fuller and the Vitrahaus on the right designed by Herzog and de Meuron.

This fire station (the coolest looking fire station in the world) was designed by Zaha Hadid.  It’s not used as a fire station anymore because the campus doesn’t have enough money to support its own fire department but it’s still really cool looking, especially on the inside.

If you had to make a guess, who do you think designed this next building?  Hint: he’s a very popular architect right now and he is known for oddly shaped buildings.  Yes, that one.  The one who designed that concert hall in LA but you forgot the name of it.  It’s Frank Gehry (not to be confused with Frank Lloyd Wright).  Gehry’s designs are often heavily debated.  I don’t always like his stuff but I do like his boldness in experimenting with new and difficult forms.  But this one…fail.

This building was designed by one of my favorite architects, Tadao Ando.  He’s known for his incredible craftsmanship with concrete.  The forms for his designs are simple but his attention to detail is spot on.  This picture was of my favorite room in the whole building.

And of course, the most recognizable building on the campus, the Vitrahaus, designed by Herzog and de Meuron, which I mentioned earlier.  This building is used as Vitra’s furniture exhibition of all the products they manufacture.  Here’s a couple of shots from the outside and inside as well as some of the things they had on sale.

H&dM wanted to exhibit all the furniture in a “home” atmosphere so they took the more generic form of a house and extruded it and stacked them on top of each other.  There were these lamps along the path that reminded me of the “Bird’s Nest”, also designed by H&dM.  Yes, Herzog and de Meuron has designed A LOT of stuff.

Frank Gehry cardboard chair line.  Pretty cool to see them in person.  When I was in JC, one of our projects was to design a cardboard chair.  My group designed it…the night before…but it turned out well!

I <3 this chessboard.  So simple but so awesome.  I think I’ll try to make it when I get back.

After running around in the gift shop for a little bit and being the last person out of the building, we got back on the bus and headed over to Ronchamp, France, for the only thing notable in the area: the Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, designed by Le Corbusier, one of the “founders” of Modern Architecture.  I have a tshirt with his face on it and I was sure to wear it there.

During my second year at USC, I did a precedent study on this building and I had to do all sorts of research on it, like plans, sections, elevations, historical context, and model making.  It was really cool to see this building in person.  It’s not the greatest looking building in the world but it is definitely breath taking and unfortunately, pictures don’t do it justice.

 

My favorite detail of this whole building is how the roof barely touches the walls.  You can see the light peeking through in between the walls and the ceiling.

Alright.  That is it for now.  Time to do some all nighters.  Sorry for the super late post on this trip but I’ll try to do one over the weekend.  Ciao!

 

So far behind in my blogs.  Blogs to come (I think):

- Basel/Germany/Ronchamp

- Paris

- Adapting to Paris??

- London

- Adapting to London??

- Other Italian stuff?? Not sure what this means…

And Can It Be?

I have been listening to Enfield’s version of “And Can It Be?” on repeat for the past couple of days.  Literally.  I currently have 84 “plays” on my iTunes…not including what has been on my iPhone.

Their live version isn’t as good as the recorded version but I still enjoy it a lot.  And I think we all know, including the person who recorded this, that their drummer is sick.

Italian Eats: Spaghetti alla Carbonara Edition

For some strange and wonderful reason, I have been eating a lot of Spaghetti alla Carbonara.

It’s strange because I don’t usually get Carbonara back in the US.  Usually I’ll get Fettuccine Alfredo with chicken because…well, butter, cream, and cheese is pretty delicious.  90% of the time whenever I go to an Italian restaurant I’m ordering this.  But Carbonara?  It’s definitely more rare, hence my lack of ordering it (is that grammatically correct?)

It’s wonderful, however, because Spaghetti alla Carbonara is absolutely delicious.  For those of you that aren’t familiar with this dish, it’s a spaghetti dish mixed with eggs, bacon, Parmesan cheese, and pepper.  The eggs are beaten together with the cheese and mixed with hot spaghetti, which cooks the eggs.  I am seriously through a crazy phase with this dish.

I’ve had some good Carbonara and I’ve had some excellent Carbonara.  We’ll start from the bottom of the list:

This Carbonara came from a restaurant that was in the piazza of the Pantheon.  The bacon bit were huge and the sauce was pretty good but I don’t like this type of pasta…it’s like giant penne or something.  One thing I liked, though, was that the portion was pretty big.

Ristorante Polese gave me this Carbonara dish.  I was sad because it was on the small side (I was super hungry that night because of all the sight seeing I did earlier) so I think I ordered something else…potatoes, I think.  I like how they put extra cheese on top in addition to the cheese in the sauce.  But again, I probably could have eaten 4 of these but flavor beats portion.  Actually, I’ll get back to you on that.

The runner up in this post is awarded to the Carbonara from da Luigi.  I mentioned before that this is my favorite restaurant in Rome and I hold firm to that.  Not only is the food good but the service is superb.  The waiters will make conversation with you, pull jokes on you, and just make your experience there excellent.  Back to the Carbonara, this was my first Carbonara dish in Italy and I think it awoke my desire for it.  The portion was generous, lots of well cooked bacon, the sauce had a very good consistency, and I was full after eating it.  We went back another time and I ordered the same thing.  Why change up your order when you’re just going to settle for something lesser?

And the winner for the best Spaghetti alla Carbonara goes to:

Yellow Bar!  All the way from Florence!  My sister and my parents highly recommended this place to me.  And let’s just say, it lived up to the hype (we went a couple times while being in Florence for 3 days).  First off, just look at that dish, straight off the stove.  There are a couple things that I would like to note about this specific Carbonara masterpiece.

1) The fresh ground pepper.  All the other places had SOME pepper but for Yellow Bar, they made sure it was in there.  Carbonara is supposed to have lots of pepper in it.  I think Yellow Bar got the note.

2) Pancetta.  If you look closely, that’s not bacon in this pasta.  It’s pancetta.  Beautiful pancetta.  It was so nice and thick with such good flavor to it.  I WANT MORE!

3) Lots of sauce.  This was the only place that had an actual sauce with it.  It was more of a cream based sauce but still had the eggs and Parmesan in it.  Not traditional but I’m down.  Plus, it made for an excellent dipping sauce for my bread (by the way, bread is terrible in Florence, or I’m guessing anywhere in Tuscany.  Apparently, salt used to be super expensive since the Renaissance so people in this region are more stingy with their salt.  But come on!  Get with the times, Florence!  Your bread is terrible!)

4) You can’t tell from the pictures but the pasta is al dente.  I think all the other places were too but this one was on the firmer side, which I really liked.

I’m going to try to make some Carbonara at our apartment since it’s rather easy to make but I’m guessing difficult to perfect.  Or…I could just go out to a restaurant and order it.

Siamo Studenti!!

Here’s Villa Olmo, the building in Como where I get to have my design studio along with other classes.

It’s pretty cool that we get to have school in a villa.  It’s a little rundown but it’s huge.  They have groundskeepers maintaining…the ground.  The villa is on the shore of the lake with an excellent view…of the lake.  Man, I’m really terrible at writing right now.

Anyways, studio ends at 7pm for us.  But as we all know, architecture students are weird and like staying at school into the wee hours of the night.  But since this is a villa and we don’t have keys to the place, there’s a curfew for the building.

We’ve been given access to the building until 8pm at night.  They set a security alarm for the whole building so we were told by our instructors to leave by 745 so that we don’t risk getting locked in or something.  They said that Italian police are a little ruthless and usually will arrest someone without any questions asked.  I’m a sinner by nature…and choice…but this was enough to convince me that Italian jail ≠ fun.

Today, we had to make a site model for our projects.  A site model is basically…a model…of a site (I’m really off my A-game tonight).  A friend, Ken, and I wanted to stay a little later after studio because we wanted to finish our portion of the model.  We couldn’t stay super late because 1) the security alarm and 2) Ken wanted to go to the grocery store (which closed at 8pm but takes 20 minutes to walk to).  So by 730pm, we decided to pack up and leave.

We turn off the lights to the room and we start walking down the hallway to get to the stairs to leave.  It’s pitch black.  We were joking around saying that it would suck if the security alarm got turned on early and we got arrested by the cops.  We got to the stairs and I had to get my phone out to use it as a flashlight because it was so dark.

As we’re walking down the stairs to the last landing, the security alarm goes off.  It was so loud it startled me at first.  But we knew right away that we had to get out.

We get outside and Ken asks, “Where should we go??”  And I say, “Away from here!  Let’s walk in the dark.”  So we made our way towards the lake because there’s no street lights over there.  We head over to the front gate to leave.  The alarm is still going off and you can clearly hear it from 100 yards away.

We were still far away from the gate but I say, “Ken, the gate is closed.”  ”No it’s not.  It can’t be.”  ”It is.”

It was.  We were locked in.  It was 735pm and the gates were locked?  The villa wasn’t supposed to close until 8pm!  The alarm was still blaring and I contemplated climbing the fence…which was only 15 feet high….

Ken decides our best chance was to climb along the fence out to the lake, where it cantilevers above the lake, and climb around it.  It’s a little hard to picture but just imagine a wall suspended above a lake.  We had to climb along this wall, get to the point where it stops, and then climb back along the opposite side.

Ken was ahead of me, and I think he was a little scared, and he wasted no time climbing the fence.  The end of the fence was the hardest part to go around because you don’t have much of a foothold.  You’re basically straddling this fence when you get to the end.  And this is where Ken got a little stuck.  He couldn’t really get his feet around.

And then, he slipped a little bit.  It wasn’t much of a slip, but it was enough to scare him and pull himself towards the fence.  Now, these fences are there for the purpose of security.  A fence made of marshmallows would not stop someone from climbing it.  But a fence with, say, spikes would serve as a decent security device.  That’s what was at the end of this wall:  an array of spikes to prevent someone from climbing along this fence.

Well, poor Ken, when he thought he was going to slip into Como Lake, grabbed onto the fence harder and pulled himself closer to the fence and yes, the spikes.  At the time, I didn’t think much of it because I thought he just got his jacket caught in it.  And that’s how he reacted.  I just helped him get his jacket out of the spikes and he eventually got to land on the opposite side of the fence.  I got around the fence as well and reached safety.

But Ken was on the ground, kind of laughing, saying, “I’m bleeding.”  And he lifts up his shirt and shows me this hole in his stomach where I guess a spike pierced him.  It wasn’t as bad as it sounds but it was still a hole in his stomach.  It looked like he got shot.

After we’re kind of laughing about it for a few seconds, a security come running towards us with his flashlight pointed at us.  For a split second, I thought about running.  I’m evil.  But I remembered Ken, who was sitting on the ground, and decided to stay.

This security starts yelling at us in Italian and kept pointing his finger at us and back at the villa.  Obviously, we didn’t understand him and I kept saying, “Siamo studenti!” (which means, “We are students!”) as I pointed back to the villa.  But he would make this gesture like he’s calling someone and would say, “dkfhgsirug agiuahwofjwaf afughseiguh POLIZIA adifughsaeiru aliigjsaoera vjdhjspriwg.”  That’s all I could understand.  Polizia.  I didn’t need to understand that whole sentence to know that he was basically telling us that he would call the cops.

The only thing I could think of was “Mi dispiace!” (I’m Sorry!) and “Ecco mio cane Tintin” (Literally came to my head…probably THE most unhelpful thing to say at a time like this).

Eventually, the security guard calmed down and took us to a sign that I didn’t understand but it said “500 euros” on it.  I assumed that meant we could be fined 500 euros.  I didn’t know about Ken, but I was not going to stick around to get fined 500 euros so I said, “Mi dispiace!” one last time and walked away as fast as I could.

And that was that.  One of my more exciting stories in Italy…yet.  This will make an excellent story for my grandkids.  I think I’ll title it, “How Grandpa Matt’s Dog Saved Him in Italy.”