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It's 2:30 am. We're leaving for the airport at 3:00 am. Our plane departs at 6:00 am. We were out around the city all day long. I slept for less than an hour.

You can tell I'm only capable of short thoughts.

Nevertheless, I'm about to come home. I'll post up the photos of my day in Barcelona once I'm back for anyone who's interested.

Barcelona

We took an overnight train from Paris to Barcelona on Monday night. It wasn't too bad, but trying to squeeze four people each with their two months of Rome luggage was a bit too close to Tetris for my taste.

We arrived, ate at a little restaurant across the street from our house (11.5 E for a three-course meal, Barcelona is much cheaper than Paris) and settled down to rest for a little bit. We planned out what we were going to do today and met up with our friend Ashley, who has been staying in the city for about a week now. She took us on a tour down to the waterfront, where we enjoyed a fine meal (her last in Europe as she's flying back tomorrow).

Today we have quite an itinerary planned: Barcelona Pavilion, Casa Mila, Casa Batllo, La Sagrada Familia, and a Picasso Museum. This should be exciting.

Notre Dame

Looking out from one of the belltowers.

Eiffel

Paris III

Me

Us

Paris II

Scott, look at what you've done to us. We have a serious addiction. We just can't stop drawing. Not even for dinner.

Of course we're keeping it. You shouldn't even have asked.

Paris I

I took some pictures today:

Here are some pretty leaves. A building got in the way of the background though.

Some tower everybody's always talking about.

An Arc.

A lovely light fixture. Oh, and something about flying buttresses and stuff.

This was the way Notre Dame was lit when we entered. Seriously. It was absolutely fantastic.

Train to Paris

Our plan for the week kinda fell through: we weren't able to get the overnight train ticket to Barcelona, so instead we went ahead to Paris. The good news is that we won't be backtracking (Barcelona --> Paris --> Barcelona), the bad news is that we'll have to bring our 2 months worth of luggage around with us everywhere.


But of course it's not all bad. The train ride through the alps was absolutely gorgeous. And a single, long train ride gave me a chance to read about half a Steven King novel (I'm on Part II of his Dark Tower series) and to do a couple sketches.

Some ladies sitting across from me

A building I made up

I'm now officially finished with my sketchbook, every page filled. I guess it's now time to hunt down a new one to use.

End of Days

I'm enjoying my last few minutes of Rome, I'm leaving this morning to take a train to Milan, then to Barcelona. It's an absolutely beautiful day, I'm so sad to see this place go. But I've had a great stay, and I've learned so much. This isn't the end of the blog yet though, I still have a week before I leave Europe, and I have a few places left to visit. We'll arrive in Barcelona, spend a day exploring, then drop off most of our stuff and head to Paris via train. We don't return from Paris until Tuesday (because we found a really cheap RyanAir flight), so we'll have more than enough time to see the city, and maybe even a few other places as well. We'll see how that goes.

Well guys, it's been fun. Stay tuned for a few more updates before this is done for good.

San Carlo Part I

Yeah, great. Thanks Borromini, for creating a staircase that is physically impossible in the universe I occupy.

Seriously, how is this thing supported?

Presentations II

Well, it's all done folks, my time here is almost up. And now I've finished all of my classes for Spring 2009. For the last assignment, I put together a smattering of the research I've done on Medieval churches for a presentation, and we had a fairly informal jury review of our semester's work.

My presentation

I say 'fairly' informal because, to be fair, we didn't even know we were having reviews of any sort until the day before. We were all under the impression that we'd just have our work for the professors to look at -- not that we'd have to give a 15 minute presentation on it.

The look of panic

Basically what mine came down to -- and what a lot of people's came down to -- was a personal, independent study of something in Rome. We weren't trying to draw conclusions, or make any kind of statement about what we were doing. For the most part, we were just spending a lot of time looking at and drawing something we really liked. But suddenly, we had to give reasons, have intentions, and have some kind of important conclusion based upon what we studied. Which, you know, is tough if you were just drawing the Roman skyline, making a sectional cut through a street, or looking at church porticoes. Actually, John Mansour (the joker I did this project with) put it best when he, after being asked why he did his project, said, "I turned to Scott and said, 'You know, I'm going to draw this.' So I did." John's a simple man.

And this is not to say that this was a particularly stressful presentation. We've been having these for four years now, and we've gotten pretty good at winging it. And the feedback was really good. We had a visiting juror from the American Academy in Rome, who provided really great insights into Roman history and culture, and in general into the ideas behind architecture. We had a really great time, and it was really fun being able to see the culmination of everyone's work.

Presentations

We have our final presentations of studio work today, so I've pinned up and am waiting for reviews to begin. I'll put up some pictures in a bit.

Photosynth Update

My official program this semester, Photosynth, has recently made some major upgrades, not the least of which is the ability of Macintosh users to now be able to see synths. Hooray! To celebrate, here's a synth from photos I took a while back at Ostea Antica, a ruin we visited about a month ago (has it really been that long). I just never got around to stiching them all together.



For those of you who haven't been able to see my synths before, here's all of them in one place, so you can see some of what I've been working on over here.

Studio II

When last we left our heroes, they had made a beautiful picture, but had not yet turned it into anything resembling architecture. Well, here then is what we ended up making:


We left the texture from the drawing in the model, both because we thought it looked nice and because we felt it helped make the transition from 2d graphic to 3d model easier to understand. I really feel that we were able to take what made the drawing so compelling -- the flowing lines, the local symmetry, the focus on axes -- and really expand on it when we pulled it into the third dimension. You can see that we focused heavily on the use of stairs -- we wanted to be able to pull people off the street without forcing them into the forum: sort of a halfway zone.


An overall view of the site. The bridge we felt was too visually heavy and obstructing, and it was actually one of the only negative aspects the jurors brought up.


This image is really powerful because it shows the idea of the zones of space. You can see the guy standing on this platform, halfway between the street level above and the forum level below, and you can see it winding along all the way into the background. There are three different places you can move down to this level, and you can walk along it for the entire length of the archeological site. There will be coffee shops or restaurants along the wall in the background, to give people a real reason to want to move down into this area.

Oh, and while I can't take credit for all the ideas, I can call the model officially mine. And I'm pretty proud of it for only having had 2 days to make it.

B'day Greetings

Guess whose birthday it is today? No, not mine, alas. It's Rome's! And to celebrate this most auspicious of days, our whole class paid a visit to the Pantheon. On April 21, right at solar noon (which is actually 1:00 due to daylight savings), the light from the oculus shines right on the door of the building. It was incredible.

Multimedia!

I went to a church, and found a little rehearsal of musicians. I'm posting a little audio clip so you can listen too.


I hope this will work. If the audio clip doesn't work, leave a comment and I'll see what I can do.

Water

Well it rained today, and you know what that means.

Reflection photos!

Photos II

New facebook gallery here.

Villa Adriana

San Giorgio al Velabro

An aside to talk about what I'm working on now. For my main studio project, as well as for my undergraduate research program, I'm studying various churches around Rome. While I'm here, I'll be taking plenty of pictures, while making drawings and taking field notes. I'll sort and organize these photos for reference later. Here's what I've done for one of these churches.



Note all of the controls. Photosynth is incredibly powerful, and it's great to be able to dive in and explore an environment.