Friday, September 15, 2006

Hello everyone again. I’m trying to catch up with these things, seeing as how it’s taking me almost a week to get these done now. We just finished our first studio project, for which I pulled two all-nighters, so I have a little time to catch everyone up with stuff now. Did you like the loop of pictures better or do you want me to link in all the pictures like before? Tell me and I’ll do whatever.

This week has been pretty crazy, with school really starting to get going and everyone getting into this crazy routine they have us on. Biggest thing going on this week was the project though, which was a trial and a half, but thankfully it all paid off.

We’d basically been told to find an interesting space in Castiglion Fiorentino and insert an imaginary 6 x 6 x 6 meter cube into it. Then we’d have to model whatever was inside that cube. And my glorious group (Melissa, Teresa, Jenna, Josh, and me) for some reason picked the space with the most ridiculous angles of them all. And of course, when we get back to the actual model making, who has to figure out all them impossible angles? Yes, me. Our group was slightly lazy, especially the girls, and we didn’t really start the final until Wednesday night. The problem with large groups is that someone always has to be telling everyone what to do so that everyone has some kind of participation in the project. Josh and I started tackling the model, and the girls sat around drawing pretty pictures on their desks. And because it was such an intricate model, it was near impossible to tell them to just cut out a piece this big and this wide because it was way more of an improvised build, making it as needed, not assembled in pieces.

I tried to get them involved but most of the time they didn’t really want to. Jenna feigned sickness. Melissa talked more to other groups than her own. Teresa was quite helpful though, because she did a lot of the measurements of the site, so at least she could contribute a bit. The model took absolutely forever to go together, easily being one of the slowest builds I’ve done, just because of all the crazy angles and the guess-and-check nature of the process. Walls went up in hours, not minutes. Simple turns turned into design-changing maneuvers. It was rough. Thankfully Josh got the easier half of the model finished while I tackled the chimney thing, not only off-center, but angled upwards and cut through by the cube wall. Yes, it was great. Two whole days went by with about 5 hours sleep between them. But we finished in time and Paolo likened our work to that of Classical architects, with a great design and wonderful spaces. Booyah. A great review makes everything that you went through worth it. The group that finished first and actually slept all night got torn apart, so that was kinda rewarding too, but in a bad way.

Wednesday of this week we went to Siena, a large town about an hour and a half away from Castiglion Fiorentino. It wasn’t really as great as I thought it would be, mainly because our guide wasn’t that great. We looked at buildings but rarely went in them, which is frustrating for us architects. Anyway, we had a quick lunch and then were “treated” to a tour of the contemporary art museum, where we watched videos of people scraping records along walls and studied the moral implications of a massive wad of foam on a table. And for some reason, we now have a project based on that. Great.

But that’s all I got from Siena really. Not that amazing or impressive. The best bit of the day was when the clouds finally burst and sweet Italian rain drizzled down over everything. The temperature dropped about 10 degrees and it felt absolutely wonderful.

So that’s about it I think. This weekend I might go up to Florence again, just to have a wander around, but nothing too involved because we have the big Rome trip next week. That should be really really awesome. I’m looking forward to it. Anyway, I’ll add a loop to the bottom of here from Sienna and other pics everyone might have missed. Enjoy!