Day 48 (5/8/11)

Today a few of us decided to take a trip out to the EUR, a business district just south of Rome that utilizes heavy Fascist architecture planned primarily by Mussolini. The area looked to become a city within (or just outside of) a city, and would provide an expansion towards the sea as well as a site for the world’s fair in the 40’s. Our first stop was out to the trains station where we got on what we thought would take us out (we had limited research going in, winging it was mostly the plan). Sadly, this first trip began a long string of failures; we went the wrong direction! After getting off and coming back, we got on a new train that went the right way, and after a nervous ride we got to the stop that we found on my map of the EUR.
When we got there, we saw no signs of the EUR, and just figured that we were somewhere outside. We did see a large concrete bridge in the distance, so we made that our primary objective. After walking around for a while trying to cross the tracks, we found a main street that ran along them. After checking the map we determined that we were nearing our goal, so we continued around the area. After a half-hour and a dead end into a junkyard, we finally admitted that we were in the wrong area. We returned to the station and took the train a little further just in case, but as it started to turn away from where we thought we had to go, all hope was finally lost.
After our sorrow-filled ride all the way home, we stopped at a few new grocery stores, wandered through a new end of the market, and came home. After a nice big sandwich to drown my sorrows, we all met to do studio. We worked on the 3D model some more, developed ideas about our form and the idea of inverting the Noli map in order to create pieces rather than voids, and came up with a program. We have decided on a collaborative business district, since we have been reading about the lack of space for small offices, and since we are sick of trying to jam-pack tons of program into our projects. After that it was time to head to the train station to try to plan out our weekend trip!
We have settled on Milan and Turin, two great cities for food and architecture, and two pretty accessible places. We looked up some tickets and they are looking pretty cheap for now, but we have a lot of organizing to do before we can make any real decisions, so we just wrote some notes down and left for home. Next we came home, ate dinner, and worked on studio for a little while longer before heading off to bed.