Today we started with a Tube ride out to the National Theatre. It had a fantastic exterior; with concrete that was so fantastic that it took on the appearance of the wood formwork to the point that I had to feel the walls sometimes just to check. Unfortunately we couldn’t get in because it wasn’t open, so we walked along the Thames and through the most eerily empty district; it could have been in I Am Legend! After escaping that area we found the Tate Modern, a fantastic gallery designed by Herzog & de Meuron (one of my favorite firms) from the shell of an abandoned power plant. A highlight was being asked by a British Citizen where the front entrance was, to which I chuckled and told him I should be asking him that question (especially since we couldn’t find it either). We then walked across the Millennium Bridge, which was pretty great and had great views to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Unfortunately (or fortunately) we couldn’t make it shake since there were only four of us walking together.
Once we got to the other side we took the Tube to the National Gallery, which was another quick stop that could have lasted for hours. Some of the great paintings I saw (if you wanted to see them) were Cognoscenti in a Room Hung with Pictures (paintings within a painting…Inception?), Dido Building Carthage or The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire, and Winter Landscape by Friedrick.
From there we went to Stephen Wiltshire’s Gallery. Stephen is a savant who has the most unbelievable talent for drawing, mostly from memory. His most famous works are 5-meter drawings of cities such as Rome, Paris, London and New York done after a single helicopter ride over them. He accuracy is scary good and his work is just unbelievable. If you guys have a chance, there is a great YouTube video of him creating one of these drawings. Unfortunately, the gallery was closed…so salty. So for comfort we went to McDonalds. Little did we know that it was the classiest and nicest McDonalds EVER! It puts the main New York one to shame. We even got to play Monopoly, I won porridge! After taking a picture of the interior and getting the evil eye for it, we embarked on an eventful walk to the Tube station. We walked alongside a massive rally against the current job cuts that was marching through the streets with bagpipes and extremely annoying horns (like Vuvuzelas on steroids).
Next up was the Royal Institute of British Architecture. It had a great and expansive exhibition of Adolph Loos, a pretty good architect who specialized in focusing on the comforts of home and the way we interact with our dwellings. He did this through excellent materiality, highly detailed woodwork, great colors and custom furniture. The Institute also had an amazing bookstore, filled with monographs of every architect I know and just as many that I don’t as well as books on theory, green design. Even the textbooks for our Structures and Construction classes were there!
When we left the Institute we split up and Richard and I walked to Foyle’s bookstore (voted UK’s best in 2010). The walk involved running the gauntlet through another rally, but this one was much angrier and scarier (no bagpipes). We looked through the huge expanse of books, and I checked out the Harry Potter books-the covers are very cool and featured images of the main props from the movies like the Sorcerers Stone or the actual Goblet of Fire. From there we caught the train out to the King’s Cross and St. Pancras Stations.
St. Pancras was unbelievably gorgeous; it had a classical Gothic façade outside with a massive steel and glass structure inside. It had been renovated recently and decked out for the Olympics so it looked great! King’s Cross, on the other hand, looked miserable. It was dark, dirty, and in the process of renovation (I'm not sure how much better it would have looked without it though…). But, we were able to find Platform 9 ¾!!!!!!!! Sadly, this was another disappointment. It was just a picture of a brick wall applied like wallpaper to a service tunnel between the two platforms. There was half of a luggage cart stuck in the wall, which was a little cool and a lot cheesy. However, it was still exciting just to be there!
Next we took the Tube out to Greenwich and the Prime Meridian. When we got to the station we walked through town, which was very neat, and passed the Royal Maritime Museum. We walked up a gigantic and steep hill up to the Royal Observatory where we met back up with Joe and Josh, took a picture with the Prime Meridian (meh?) and walked around through gardens and parking lots. Next we hiked back down into town where we ate at a fish and chips place that has been serving food since 1770! We got shoebox-sized meals, which I thought were still not quite as good as the takeout on day two, but the shear amount of food made that irrelevant. Once we could move we stopped in a candy shoppe and took the tube home!
Once home we packed up and dragged ourselves to the airport via Tube. The reason we came out here so early was because out passes for public transportation expired tonight and we needed a sure-fire way to get here. The airport is amazing, besides the pretty awesome structural design, the fact that we are almost alone here allows for awesome pictures of an empty airport. We even stood in the middle of the entry road to take a picture! So that brings us to our current situation: we are chilling at a café in the airport for the night, and I am sitting here cranking these out! I will finish them all tonight along with some reading and sleep! Then it’s on to Rome at 7:00 AM!!!!!!!
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