Today we all woke up and began the long, arduous walk to the school. The trip involved about a half hour walk through the city, which was absolutely fantastic! The weather was still cool and we got to see everyone just getting ready for the day, setting up shops and talking on the street. Even better than all this, was the set of 308 steps that we got to walk up at the end of the nice stroll through the city. Thank goodness for Italian time, because we got to the school a smidge later than 9:30. Alas, it turns out our worries were for naught, because they decided that we wouldn’t be meeting till 11 instead. So we ended up just sitting in the classroom and reading stuff until then.
Once Jessica got here, we worked for a little while on some last minute developing and preparations, before we got a great little surprise (I equated it to a giant wedgie) that we were going to have to present our work thus far to the group as well as a few Italian jurors. Pretty fun seeing as we had 2 perspectives, a site model and some ideas to work with, but we made it work. It ended up going extremely well, which was quite refreshing, and they seemed to really like our project and the direction we took it over the weekend. So now it is just finishing a few little issues and then production mode until the review on Friday. One of the jurors, Pippo Ciorra, is a curator at Maxxi, which is a pretty famous and important art gallery in Rome. He told us that if our work finished well, and the production was great, we would have the opportunity to present it there in front of a board of Italian architects and critics, which is pretty amazing and scary at the same time!
So after a quick lunch at the café downstairs we met back up to continue working, and that went very well! We figured out pretty simple ways to fix our issues as well as some better ways to illustrate our main points. We worked there for a while before splitting up for the night. The four of us walked out to the courtyard where we took some pretty great pictures before heading down a third exit which we hadn’t found before.
The walk was pretty awesome, we went along the hidden edge of the hill that the school is on and saw some interesting structural elements that could possibly be holding up the top of the hill! After that we walked to a small church that is under construction where we had a pretty funny conversation with an old Italian woman who noticed we didn’t understand her but continued speaking to us (we think she started talking faster…). We were actually able to make out some of the main points she was telling us about, such as why the church was in disrepair and what other church it is related to. Anyway, we continued exploring the complex before coming to one of the most beautifully sad moments I have witnessed.
We were essentially in the graveyard of what was once an extremely pretty courtyard with a breathtaking view of the city and mountains beyond. Trash abounded, graffiti covered everything and there was a sever lack of glass left in the windows. We stayed here marveling at the supreme state of disrepair of this are before venturing into one of the buildings (pretty sure that tetanus was discovered here…), where the garbage and other junk filled it to the brim. While this may seem like a pretty nasty way to spend an afternoon, the exploration of architectural ruins was not only pertinent to our studio project, but also a pretty harsh way to realize how ephemeral the things we architects do are in the grand scheme of things.
But enough sadness! Following our adventure into the secret dump, we took a super-steep walk back down the hill, stopped for some quick pizza and went home. Tonight I have some more readings to do (I have almost all of it done already so no early morning escapades tomorrow!!) and some relaxing to make up for the stressful studio shenanigans we encountered today.
No comments:
Post a Comment