Today I woke up and took advantage of another fantastically beautiful day to relax. I ate some breakfast at the hotel before dragging our very comfy chair out onto the porch to read and enjoy the weather. After a good bit of that (I have to enjoy it while I can, right?) a few of us went to the pastry shop with Lisa (our teacher who leads the trip for anyone who didn’t know). It was fantastic there, I had this little peach-shaped pastry that blew my mind; it was a mix between cookie and cake that had been soaked in strawberry flavor, then covered in crystallized sugar, then filled with nutella.After we ate and talked at the shop for a little while, we walked back to the hotel so I could enjoy some more reading; sadly it was for our theory class, much less enthralling but still better than waiting till the night/morning before to do it…The reading that I am responsible for is actually pretty interesting this time, it looks at tourism and its relation to architecture, specifically in the way that architects engage the places they go rather than simply walking through/by them. Pretty great, but a little pompous for my taste. Anyway, after getting a pretty solid chunk of that done we got together as a studio group to discuss the remaining work we had to do. We ended up getting a good bit done and I threw together a quick photoshop collage trying to show the iconic view down the center lane of the original construction, but with our parasite crashing through.
We also ended up flooding the main path (a random suggestion from the Italian professor) so as to preserve the view but to remove the one-way-only, universalized design that was common in Italian (Fascist) architecture. Our parasite then becomes the “free” and “individual” mind-set of the world today, and these two juxtaposed begin to break down the symmetry and rigidity of the original design. The building’s program then becomes a big metaphor for this motif, with the majority of the original structure being gutted to form a series of art galleries. Thus the original work becomes what we are calling “static art,” one that follows the sheep model of in a room, stand, look, out of the room, while the parasite punching through this space becomes “performative art,” with the people walking through being framed as the polar opposite to the gallery
Enough boring stuff, after working for a while we met up with Lisa and left to explore the city to find some food.
Sundays are very calm here, with very little open and even less happening. It is pretty great in terms of the social aspect, families stay together and the city is quite peaceful. It is not pretty great, however, if you are a tourist with no family who is getting kinda tired of nutella and jelly sandwiches for dinner! But with some luck we found a pretty great little place off of Piazza Arringo.We ended up being the only patrons, which was pretty great because we didn’t have to deal with any “Italian time” malarkey from the staff! I had some ravioli stuffed with cheese and spinach, topped with crumbled sausage and a creamy alfredo-ish sauce. We ended up passing around plates because all of the pasta was amazing! I tried a little wine and hated it, not much better than the Jewish wine at Passover (how do people drink that?????), but that was ok. After a pretty great dinner we walked across the street to Yoghi (but we stopped at the public fountain for some shenanigans and pictures first) for gelato. This time I mixed it up and went with pistachio…and this new cake-batter type thing that tasted like a sugar cookie but better, with some other mysterious one that was almost like raspberry cheesecake again. We stood in the square and ate and talked before walking back to the hotel.
At the hotel we dragged ourselves back up to work on studio, but not before disturbing the lobby by laughing at as many YouTube videos as we could find. We did get some work done, mostly preparation of our discussion for tomorrow as well as another perspective and some diagrams. Once finished, I went back to the room, typed, read, and hit the hay!
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