Day 44 (5/4/11)

Today is our first real studio day, so of course once we made it to the school we got to work cranking some last minute stuff out. We have a pretty awesome group and we all do work so I think it’s going to be a very fun project. Our meeting with the professors went pretty well, they liked a few of our diagrams and although they misinterpreted one idea to mean pixels (they follow me everywhere!), we felt that we got a pretty good direction. Now it’s just up to us to continue investigating until we meet again! After our meeting we ate lunch and I watched The Office before we went on a group walk.
We ended up heading back to the Richard Meier museum that holds the ruins of the Ara Pacis, an altar designed to commemorate a military victory and to celebrate the peace that the Roman state had secured. Inside was a pretty fantastic model of the rural setting of Rome during its construction, and it was pretty mind-blowing because all of the urban fabric that we had just walked through between this building and the Pantheon was nothing but fields. We had actually talked about this evolution in Francesco’s lecture the other day, so it was cool to see it this way. Anyway, we split up here so we could explore the building and the exhibit. It was pretty great to walk through the altar, and the interior space of the building was great; the light was awesome and the sterile whiteness of it gave a cool background to the marble relic. After this section we went downstairs where there was a pretty fantastic exhibit on public housing in Italy done after WWII. The projects were a part of a large movement by the Italian government to not only house the many families that had lost their houses, but to give jobs to those without in order to heal the war-torn economy. It was interesting to learn about the consequences of these actions, since the majority of the workers were unskilled peasants, the structural design of this time never advanced in order to keep it understandable. The style of building was also vernacular to each site, even though it was one large initiative. Coupled with the original plans and images of the projects were explanations of the current state of these works, and although it is often sad to see them abandoned or mistreated, the decay of architecture has to be one of the most beautiful themes in art.
After we finished there I wandered around the area and around The Tomb of Augustus, which is a pretty cool old relic that has been treated much differently than most, leading to an odd sense of dignified decay. It also provided a pretty fantastic juxtaposition with the clean and very clean museum next door. Next up was a lecture back at the school, so we all convened there and waited. We talked a little bit about plans for the rest of the trip, and we realized a problem: our original itinerary was to leave Venice on June 5th at ten, getting us to Rome in plenty of time to catch our flight. However, our time was extended until two, which means that the four of us are going to have to pay forty-five euro to take a train back on our own just to make the flight. We are going to try and get the school to reimburse us since we based our flight on the original itinerary, but we are not hopeful.
Oh well, we ended up sitting there for a long time before Beatrice told us that our lecturer was sick and not coming (Italian time applies to checking email as well…), so we broke until it was time to head to the OMA lecture. OMA is one of the most famous firms in the world, and one of their partners was coming to speak to us. However, after waiting at the bus stop to take us out to the British Academy for long enough that we would miss at least half of it by the time we got there, we gave up. Thankfully, the exhibit is going on for the rest of the week, so we will work our way out there later to see it. When we got back I enjoyed a little free time to catch up on NCIS before studying for our Italian midterm tomorrow and doing some of our readings and heading to bed!