Woo Hoo Final Review!!! We woke up nice and early today and left for the school where we started cranking out the model and finishing up the renderings for the boards. The model took a really long time to complete because of the many intricate connections between the snake and the buildings it crashes through. That plus the fragility of the columns (they don’t seem to use hot glue or good superglue here, which made this much harder) and a few emergency surgeries we had to perform made it a stressful but very rewarding experience when we finally finished. However, we still needed a title for our project (Alright Parasite, my own idea, had been turned down repeatedly). In a moment of brilliance, Laura and I were somehow discussing titles of movies and Beauty and the Beast came up. We then adjusted it to Beauty in the Beast, for a fantastic double meaning: the Beauty of our project is in the glass parasite (Beast) that has attacked the complex, and there is Beauty (the parasite) within the Beast (Grassi’s original building). We were very excited at this development, and with renewed vigor we continued our push towards the review.
We worked as a big group on the model and boards until 4, when the print shop opened back up. The way they print is pretty great: you just walk in and give them the file and they take care of the rest; no issues, the print looked great, and there was a pretty fantastic staircase to look at while we waited. After the boards were finished we got a ride back to the Pennile (our first driving experience in Ascoli was pretty fun, but not as exhilarating as in Rome) where we changed really quickly and went back to pick the rest of the group off before riding (thank goodness) up to the hill school.
Reviews here are pretty fantastic, we were in a room that was lined with tables where we put our models and we ended up just taping our boards to the walls above them. The style is pretty laid back; we talked to the jury (Lisa, Beatrice, Pipo the man-bear, Julia the Italian professor, and an architectural journalist) for a little while before having a discussion with them about our decisions. I liked the discussion much more than the typical criticism-fest that is Knowlton’s style, and it was very productive. They liked a good bit of our project, and the only major criticism was actually pretty comical to us: on our first day when we showed our initial ideas we were criticized for not understanding Grazzi and his work enough. Today we were told that we used his ideas too much and since it is a ruin of his work we could just ignore the historicity of it. Oh well, we were very happy with how it turned out! One last note on the greatness of Italian reviews; they enjoy clapping after everyone’s presentation and the reviewers thanked us for presenting, neither of which ever happen in Knowlton.
After the reviews were over, we all walked downstairs where the “Archicafe” threw us a little party outside in the courtyard where we had various meats and cheeses plus a series of four or five different pastas that they brought out to us one at a time. It was a pretty nice experience plus the night air was great after being indoors for the past few days. After a lot of chatting and schmoozing we walked back to the hotel where we collapsed in bed almost instantly.
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