runja, 2010, and the end

OK so christmas break has quickly flown by and now it is back to normal. runja finally arrived in holland on christmas morning, the same day as that terrorist scare on the flight to detroit. we were probably in the airport at the same time. but runja's travel was safe to and from europe.

we did lots of fun things, including walking on the beach at scheveningen, all around rotterdam, utrecht, and amsterdam a few times. we saw the van gogh museum that is designed by rietveld on the museumplein. it is expensive and 1/3 of the permanent collection wasn't on display. why aren't museums subsidized here like in england? or at least a student discount or something. also new year's eve was a blast. every person in the city set off fireworks at midnight and we watched from a small bridge so it was a beautiful sight. we ate good food (mostly pad thai), made art, and laughed a lot. that was the most important part of the trip: our time together. photos are up now on flickr. it was a blast and now it is lonely to do things i once did with her. i miss her.

but, for better or worse, i only have 3 weeks left. this blows my mind. my semester abroad has flown by. i will be both happy and annoyed to return to the US (happy for black beans, cheap food, and hills; sad for inefficient public transit, canals, and leaving delft). regardless, it will happen and life will go on. i should probably be thinking about things like how to close my bank account and how to get a school transcript, but for now i am worried about school itself. i just finished a paper for my patrick healy course and now have 3 weeks (the review is on january 29) to pump out something for the studio course. it has, organizationally, been a nightmare. i am even worried now about getting credit for it at MIT and graduating on time. i don't want to talk about it because it only makes my headache and frustration larger. instead of complaining i want to do the best i personally can to learn and get positive experience out of it. i'm also trying to get ready for the spring 2010 term at MIT that starts only 4 days after my final review at TUD and what will happen after that. but for now, it is studio crunch time.

snow storm

while the east coast of america was being buried under snow, holland also experienced a huge snow storm. according to my roommate, it is the most snow the west part of the country has seen in over 20 years. i think in delft we received about 30 cm or 12 inches of snow. this paralyzed the city for about two days where travel by foot was the main form of travel until enough salt was thrown and the city's overwhelmed snowplow brigade could work it out.

the storm also froze travel all over the continent. planes didn't fly from schiphol, and for the past three days very few NS trains ran across the country. the problem for the trains relates to the switching mechanisms. around freezing temperatures, these devices are heated electrically to ensure they keep working and don't freeze. but the heaters are rarely used and so many do not work. then when it snows and the switch heaters are needed, many do not work and thus stopping train travel throughout the country. it took my friend 6.5 hours to get from almelo (north of amersfoort) to delft, a journey that usually takes 2 hours.

snow in america also ruined runja's original itinerary to visit me here. her flight to DC was canceled so she was unable to catch her plane here. after a long time on the phone, she was able to reschedule her ticket for later and leaving from dallas. this means she got to spend some time in denton this week! i am jealous about that. she'll arrive on christmas morning and will stay later until january 6. i am excited about the places we'll go visit and all the good food and art we'll be making too. yes!

ok here are some pictures of the snow. nothing epic. if you'd like to see some cool stuff, look up pictures of the mecanoo TUD library during the winter. it has a sloped roof and when it snows students use it as a sledding opportunity (it is the biggest hill in delft, after all).


extra security guards were assigned to my apartment during the storm


mijn straat met sneeuw


how do ducks get around? they waddle on the ice! and now since the canals are beginning to freeze, they all gather in the wider areas that aren't frozen yet and quack loudly.




it stopped snowing/sleeting and the sky turned this uneasy orange cream color as the sun set in the west. both pretty and unsettling.

barcelona

man, TOTAL weather-related drama last night related to runja's flight to NL. it is amazing to think that snow in washington d.c. can make one person in holland fight with one person who is in new mexico. BUT things have worked out in a nice way that will be detailed in the next post concerning WEATHER, including an up-to-date report on the weather conditions here. OK, now on to a warmer topic...

SO

NOW

barcelona



what did you expect? barcelona was awesome. i spent 4.5 days there last weekend soaking up the scene. again all of my photos are on

FLICKR

so you can see too many photos there.

i had to fly ryan air to barcelona which means that the flight was cheap but getting to and from the airport is a pain in the ass. ryan is a cheap irish airline that cuts costs by flying to small airports outside metropolitan areas with lower fees and by having the worst service and worst seats i've sat on in a long time. plus my flights left in the early early morning both ways and that is a total pain as it ruins both the night before and the day after the flight. and you have to pay a lot to get to the airport. i flew out of eindhoven, a city in southern NL. the train ticket to get there and back, without the discount because it is in the morning, is 30 euro! and the bus from girona airport (over 100 km from barcelona, halfway to france practically) is 21 euro! so even if the flight is 10 euro, i still spent a total of 61 euro just getting into the city of barcelona, not to mention all of the time it consumed. so is flying ryan air worth it? if you are young and able to sleep through anything and don't mind all the transit switches (bike > train > train > bus > airplane > bus > subway), then yes! otherwise suck it up and fork over the extra 30 euro or so to fly AMS-barcelona direct.

i feel like i am repeating myself, but barcelona is gorgeous. it is a classic city form like rio de janeiro or even LA situated on a coast and then stretching up into the hills. but like LA the coastline isn't the main center of the city, it is an afterthought, merely a nice addition to an already badass city. there are stretches of beach but a lot of the coast is industrial and dedicated to marinas. in barceloneta the street grid runs at an acute angle to the shore, so that the short end of the rectangular blocks abut the beach; the beach frontage isn't even maximized as property. instead, the real center is further inland, somewhere near plaza catalunya i'd say. the city's medieval city center, the gothic neighborhood, is a winding maze of palaces, plazas, cathedrals, markets, and african men on every street corner whispering in broken english to tourists, trying to sell hash. no! i don't want to buy hash! and especially not from you. raval is the other old neighborhood and is way more gritty (there are more hash sellers), filled with immigrants and cool stores. then the next layer is cerda's famed square block plan (now 150 years old) and the nice areas of passeig de gracia and the avenida diagonal. at the north end of the avenida diagonal is a new developing area, started by the caixa forum building, a purple spray-concrete moon rock by herzog and de meuron (more later). further above that, moving into the hills, is a city scale between the gothic and cerda's blocks, and supremely comfortable. this neighborhood is gracia. i stayed here because my host lived here, a bass player named alex whom i met through UNT. he is studying abroad here for the term before graduating in the spring. gracia is hip but still not really gentrified, tons of bars, shops, pedestrian streets, good scale. there are obviously tons of other neighborhoods but this is where i spent most of my time. also the parque montjuic is awesome, rising by the ocean. there is a university neighborhood at the inland end of avenida diagonal and neighborhoods sprawling out up and down the coast and into the mountains but i didn't visit those. the closest i got was a beautiful hilltop above gaudi's park guell, where the photo above was taken.

OK now highlights:

-when i arrived, the weather was gorgeous. i wore a long sleeve shirt and the sun was so strong. i hadn't seen the sun in weeks. i sat in a park and watched this dog play fetch, simply bathing in the sunlight warming me on a concrete bench. at the end of the day i walked all the way down to barceloneta and just sat on the beach, eventually falling asleep, waking up as the sun was setting. as beaches go it is ok but pitiful for any aquatic experience save swimming. it got chilly on saturday and colder on sunday, but thursday and friday were unusually warm and a great gift. milk duds from heaven.



-alex and his friends are there in the city to play music, so we went to a jam session on thursday night at a club only a few blocks from his apartment that he shares with a pianist and a catalan poet. it was high-level so i didn't play but alex & friends played well. i was super stoked to find out that the jam session was run by jorge rossy, a spanish drummer well-known for being in brad mehldau's trio for a long time. he was there, playing piano and schmoozing with friends. at the end of the session he thanked everybody for coming and then, drink in hand, proceeded to croon a chet baker tune with a medium rare spanish accent ("joo'd bee so eezy to laav"). que barbaro! brutal! puta madre!

-SAGRADA FAMILIA


spent an entire afternoon combing this building from top to bottom. its construction has been continuing off and on for over a century and will probably continue for at least another 200 years at this pace, thanks to the immense costs involved and the laid back spanish mentality. i was overjoyed to see the frequent use of ruled surfaces throughout the building. anybody who has taken ochsendork's class would have appreciated it. and such steep spiral staircases! the structural details are immaculate and the ornamentation everywhere, from the elliptical bulbs where columns meet to the facade depicting the immaculate conception.


it was also both terrifying and great to pay the extra 2.50 euro and go up to the top of the spires where you can examine the ongoing construction and gaze out at the city. i had a few moments of vertigo but overall i was fine. there are bridges between the spires that you cross over and narrow staircases that some americans wouldn't be able to fit through sideways. ironically, i even ran into a dutch person in the top of the spire. you can never escape the dutch. the final plan calls for a higher spire in the center with a cross that can be occupied. the building is also supposed to extend across a street for its main entrance but that block is now a dense apartment block. what will happen? when will it be finished, if ever? who knows!


-la boqueria! colorful market off of la rambla in raval. it has tons of delicious everything, from mantecados (almond holiday candies that start as a powdery thing and instantly aggregate in your mouth to rich wet goodness) to all types of vegetables, fruits, cheeses, cuts of meat, candies, and even all the disgusting meat products that vegetarians love to stare at and be thankful they don't eat those things. like this:




-food. i ate a lot of falafel in barcelona, including a hat trick at the maoz store on la rambla. it is so good and all vegetarian. they have a buffet where you can totally load up on toppings and actually get full. TASTY. but you can only sit there for 20 minutes before they kick you out. and the skinhead that works there always plays this addictive ricardo villalobos minimal techno shit that will rot your teeth. also ate a pizza without having to pay like 12 euro like in holland. also cheap good wine. it was fun to cook at alex's house too.



-lifestyle. i am well-adapted for the spanish late-night lifestyle. eh, we'll eat dinner at 10:30, that's cool. i guess we'll go walk around a bit at 1, no big deal. on friday we were at a concert at an old palace in the gothic area that didn't start until 10. it was traditional music and people were all doing large pagan circle dances and laughing while pakistani men weaved through the crowd trying to sell you estrella for 1 euro a can. sometimes it worked. this was somewhere close to a palace built on top of roman fortifications leftover from their empire. the concert didn't end until midnight, at least. and i think bars stay open until 3? that is nice. i missed going to secret bars because they are open super late and in the old neighborhood and by that time in the night i was already tired and in gracia or at alex's apartment. next time!

-montjuic is a big hill near the ocean. it has a lot of cultural destinations as well as facilities from the olympics in the early 90s (1992?). i started on saturday at the bottom and walked up, seeing this big catalan museum, botanical gardens, and the mies van der rohe pavilion.



the mies pavilion was worthwhile. of course the stone was exquisite, etc. it was overcast and i was the only person there at the time. it is a nice space. i wanted to sit on the chairs like i did in the neue nationalgalerie in berlin but the signs told me not to. the mixing of inside/outside and the ambiguity are nice. good bookstore too. there was an installation by AI WEIWEI too, with milk in the pool. it didn't smell but it looked good. the olympic facilities were OK, now sort of abandoned and windswept with a calatrava communication tower looking like a medieval tool for lancing adolescent acne. my favorite part of montjuic was the jardin botanico de barcelona, the botanical garden featuring mediterranean biomes from across the world. it is really well design with angular cortens steel walls everywhere and nice seats. the main pavilion are some angled planes and there is a pond that must be nice in the summer but is now a placid puddle. the botanical institute building sits uphill above the garden and is a clean austere building, with a glassed first floor and a second story that looks out on the city, also finished in corten. the plants were fascinating too, of all shapes and sizes. i crumpled eucalyptus leaves in my hand from australia and was instantly transported to the hills north of addis ababa where i had completed the same act only 11 months ago (ethiopia imported these trees from australia in the late 19th century to combat deforestation). perhaps the mediterranean is the toilet bowl of western history?



also eating a questionably vegetarian sandwich in the courtyard of sert's miro museum and riding the funiculare down to raval from montjuic. i didn't go see the castle, a decision i now regret but it is ok (next time).

-park guell. hit this on sunday with alex. an amazing wonderworld of gingerbread houses, leaning columns, comfortable benches, and scenic views. horribly faceted, tiling everywhere, even a didgeridoo playing some cromagnon circular breathing grooves in one of the caves by the entrance. lots of tourists of course but gorgeous work. the plantings were a bit average and the park seemed normal after you climbed above the main terrace, but nice. i saw gaudi's house! also alex and i hiked up to a scenic vista above the park where i took the first picture of the post and also the following panorama.



then time at the picasso museum which was free on sunday but not that impressive. large gaps in the collectionand a circulation pattern that was confusing and ambiguous. ew. they had a ton of his early work and then only a series he did while living near barcelona and some ceramics and etchings. there was also an exhibit on picasso's japanese influence including a heavy dose of erotic art that awkwardly contained some book plates of a pair of giant squid making love to a woman. double ew. i think there was some analogy between the mystery of the deep sea and the sexual mystery of women? but still. thanks. the museum is in some antique repurposed manor with interior light wells. they left one room, some salon, unchanged with gold entablatures and mirrors and a chandelier that probably cost more than my house.

-caixa forum area. tons of construction relating to this area in the northeast of the city, at the end of the avenida diagonal. of course the herzog and de meuron forum, a sprayed concrete floating monolith with some expectedly cool perforated triangle cladding but deserted, now only the property of skateboarders kickflipping down its inclined areas under the building. this is a cool area to wander around in. it was frigid and the wind was whipping off the sea when i visited. cool marina with some cor tens and a huge solar array. impressive but deserted. also i recognized the FOA park with its curving crescent concrete pavers. it looked so overgrown and poorly-maintained now. i walked through the EMBT parque diagonal. it had the feel of an abandoned amusement park with rails everywhere and coiled steel sculptures that supported giant floating planters. it seemed wasteful. maybe i don't understand their work enough? their market downtown was nice though. with factories around and construction and weird pavilion space, it was an exciting area. maybe a future node of the city? we'll see. regardless, windswept and intriguing.



-language. whereas in holland the language is hard for me to understand because of the throat sounds and compound nouns, i got along well in barca with my spanish. i was surprised that some of it came back a bit once in the city and listening to other people speak. of course i am not good at it, but i could carry on a bit of a conversation. also it was intriguing to hear catalan, a mix of spanish and french sort of. i am definitely more partial to the romance language sounds of portuguese and spanish but maybe i am biased because of my early childhood experience in brazil or something.

-politics. coming from holland, the city seemed quite politically turbulent and aware. holland, although its government is shifting more right in the recent history like most of western europe, is a country where anything goes and politics aren't at the forefront of discussion. regardless of the actual laws, anything goes basically. all the spoils of liberalism are here. i was surprised to learn about barcelona's history as a center for anarchism and radical politics throughout the past century. i also knew nothing about catalan history before going or the interest in seceding from spain to become a separate nation. apparently some people are serious about this. the catalan state makes the most money in spain and some are angry that their tax dollars go to supporting poorer states throughout the country. there is a theory too that christopher columbus might have been catalan as some of his journals were discovered to be written in catalan.

spaniards even protest late at night. on saturday after dinner around 11 we were sitting around when we heard screams and loud sounds. moving onto the balcony (barcelona is a balcony culture like paris), we saw a parade of people marching down the street with big signs, chanting, and a poster of a local politician. they were also carrying communist flags with the hammer and sickle. the story is that a local cultural center is set to be destroyed to make way for new development and people are angry about this. later at night we walked through a square where there was a benefit concert to save this center. the event was over but young people were milling about, the pakistanis still hovering like vultures hoping to sell more estrella. one group of boys were jostling a port-a-potty with a friend inside. you could here the liquid sloshing around and the guy yelling for them to stop. when he finally emerged (unscathed by waste), he slipped one of his arms into a crutch and hobbled over to his friends, angry but laughing.

-walking. of course this goes for any city, but walking is the ultimate joy. you see everything, the people, the tiles falling off the buildings, the shitty electronics stores, every bodega and old woman. raval especially is a great place to walk, a potent mix of second hand stores and immigrant culture. there were stores for halal meat, indian ingredients, african food, and asian markets. i saw a combination laundromat and internet cafe (a super smart mix). i saw design studios, artist spaces, booths set up on la rambla de raval. i stopped in the open door of a cultural center to hear a quartet of drummers playing samba in the late afternoon, rehearsing for an evening performance. in the gothic area alex showed me the side of a cathedral where there was bricked depression, like a pond that had been drained. here was a monument where the french had dug a low spot and installed a drain. they proceeded to execute a large amount of spaniards/catalans, their bodies piling up and the blood draining efficiently to the sea. nearby i passed a man eating at a open air bar, his dog sitting in the street watching obediently, his marbled fur wrapped at the neck with a red bandanna. the joy here is not to wander between museums and gaudi buildings, but to walk with open eyes and see every little piece of each street, even if the reality escapes you and all you are left with is the scent of a memory.

there is so much more but i will stop here because it is dark and i am hungry now. barcelona was tan guapa in its rough luxury, in its heavy city blocks and thin streets, in its sea breeze and nightlife. i hope we will meet again someday soon.

ting ting a ting goes the cymbal

time is rolling downhill over here in holland. i blink my eyes and already it is december 10. i went to berlin 2 weeks ago, a fact that is hard to swallow. i have been busy with school work because we have a lot to do in studio and there is reading to be done for my other class. it is annoying to have a school term that bridges the christmas break into january. all of the joyful momentum of the christmas break is simmered with the realization that you have 3-4 more weeks of school after trying to enjoy your holiday time.

this past saturday was sinterklaas with sinterklaas and his zwarte piet, the comical black men who help him deliver presents to the young ones of holland. there are a lot of funny things about the story so i encourage you to find it on google or something instead of hearing my incomplete version of it. but i wanted to do something fun so i hosted SINTERKLAASHUISFEESTNACHT and invited friends over for some potluck, drinks, and eventually attempts at collage art. the mess is visible in the photo below. i like house parties like this where everybody can talk with everybody else and the atmosphere is relaxed and comfortable. it made me think of the parties at the tree home that i have missed by being away.



tonight i watched "waltz with bashir" with my cinema class. it is beautifully animated but hideous in plot. it was even stronger because i had no idea about the war events depicted in the film, nothing about the war between israel and lebanon. wow. then i went to rotterdam to hear the stoner drone machine band called brightblack morning light play in a bar there. they are from california sort of and make some hazed out pentatonic drone sounds, with heavy fender rhodes basslines, two drummers, reverb-soaked vocals, and pedals (even harmonium at one point). this set seemed particularly free compared to the restrained versions on their records. nice enough.

now i am packing and preparing because i'm going to barcelona tomorrow until tuesday morning. it will be nice to explore that gorgeous city and even better to see the song again. it hasn't been that cold here but the lack of sunlight is the killer part. it should be yet another adventure. i will report back about the city next week. then i am working to finish things before my very special guest arrives for the christmas holiday. tot ziens, y'all.

berlin

berlin took me by surprise. i was not prepared for its ugly beauty, its ruins and masterpieces. this was mostly because i didn't know anything about the city until i was there. i had read articles and architectural history about haussmann's paris and knew something about london, but i didn't really know anything about berlin. i printed off some google maps, started doing research, and somehow learned about the current city. but still i didn't know anything about the history of berlin, really. i knew about the wall (a recent book i read calls it the last great piece of modern architecture) but i didn't know its position in the city. i knew about some famous buildings there but not the neighborhoods, the immigrants in the city, the good public transit system, and the vibrant lives that people lead there. so i guess when you know nothing you are bound to be surprised by anything. i half-expected to find a city drowned in its past, unable to escape out of its history, but instead i found a churning cultural pot that acknowledges its story for the sake of tourism and continues forward with its urban life.

for a while i didn't know where i was going to stay but i ended up couchsurfing with this generous old woman named gabi, pictured in the photo above with the neue palais in potsdam. her contribution as a host made my experience much better. she gave advice about where to go, graciously provided meals, and talked a lot about her experience living in west berlin since 1971. we also had a nice trip to park sanssouci in potsdam where the kaisers used to rule from. she also let me borrow hercules, the proud stallion you see pictured above. it was nice to get to know her.

i took the train to berlin. the ride is about 5.5 hours from eastern holland but about 6.5 hours all the back to schiphol from berlin. train rides are always a singular experience, watching the landscape zoom by while listening to javelin or koushik. on the way back, a guy from africa was sitting across the aisle from me. i had to watch in disgust as the german police walked through the sparsely populated cabin, checking nobody's papers, but instead hassled this man for almost 15 minutes. they asked him why he was here, where he was working, where his wife was, why he was in germany, where had he been before that, in english. he lives in berlin but works in essen and they thought this was strange and hassled him, asking why he doesn't just move to essen instead, etc. after they got bored of joking with him, they moved off. i don't know if they were responding to some alert they had or were just being assholes and interrogating the only black man in the train compartment. what an annoying experience.

ok, back to berlin. i spent 3.5 nice days there, walking around neighborhoods looking at buildings and looking in museums. jean-paul here has an architecture guide to modern buildings in berlin so i borrowed that (thanks jean-paul!). it was in german but there were maps so it was useful. it seems like berlin has spent a fair amount of time forgetting its history as traces of the wall were gone except for bricks in the street tracing its path and a few relic pieces for the tourists. it has quickly adapted to its new political environment of being a magnetic immigrant city, an art center, and a tourist destination. i will spare you the myriad tiny moments of joy i had because those can get tiring to hear about if they aren't delivered in worthwhile dave eggers prose, but i will give some highlights:

-seeing large examples of mies van der rohe's early and late work, the afrikanischestraße housing in wedding in what remains a highly immigrant and working class neighborhood and his neue nationalgalerie in the kulturforum near potsdamer platz, separated by about 50 years of work. the mies aesthetic has been thoroughly appropriated in berlin, as you see it (black steel columns that are a cross in plan, as one example) in S-bahn station entrances and museums around the town.

-potsdamer platz and crossing another renzo piano building off the list. this was a pretty normal complex but still elegant. here santa drove a motorcycle with a side car and breakdancers spun on their heads next to a section of the berlin wall where you could have your real passport stamped with an east german stamp by a chainsmoking soldier in costume. also here i witnessed the pigeon stack (shown above). it gave me new hope for my upcoming architecture thesis on the use of columns of live birds as structural support for a building. also the roof of the sony center was this impressive tension structure thing that anyone who has taken john ochsendorf's class would appreciate.

-graffiti and falafel everywhere. delicious on both accounts.

-the awesome museums. the newly-renovated neues museum on museuminsel by david chipperfield is gorgeous. i always always love renovated ruins but this is the most beautiful one i have seen so far. it was bombed out during WWII i think. and, of course, what did it house but more artifacts from ancient egypt and greece. it is amazing how obsessed these european cultures are with the ancient world as a way of displaying their power or permanence. there were a ton of german excursions to egypt to raid tombs and pilfer statues from the unaware africans. ok, also the altes museum by schinkel was good to see. the art was standard but the building was nice because i had heard a lot about it in class. on my final night i spent 3 hours at libeskind's jewish museum in kreuzberg. i didn't like the building. it was too allegorical and unexplained for me. the way libeskind explains the building sounds like a good set up for a magical realism story or some lebbeus woods project but not a building you actually should build. you enter underground through the old building and are faced with 3 cardinal axes that are named after thinks like Remembrance, Holocaust, etc. there is a huge void that you can enter where there is only natural light from a small window and you feel the absence of jewish presence in germany's history (that was the main point of the building in libeskind's architecture). plus the random diagonal windows give me a headache. the gallery space is a thin zig-zag that felt too compressed and the exhibits were not designed that maturely. if i was a kid i would have loved the building. the main staircase was nice though with some beams overhead. the main highlight was a gallery with an exhibition of photographs by francis wolff, the (jewish) blue note photographer. maybe they should have let another jewish architect build this building (moshe safdie? the ghost of louis kahn?).

-prenzlauerberg. this is the hip area with lots of good-looking restaurants, shops, vinyl stores, and general trendiness. at gabi's house i met a guy named gui who recently came to berlin from sao paulo. we walked around this neighborhood, ate some indian food, and ended up at a tiny thin movie theatre (about 30 seats) where we watched casablanca at midnight with german subtitles. an absolutely surreal highlight to me as an american.

-biking. i saw a lot of the city by bike, thanks to gabi's loan of hercules. it was very nice even though i had to stop and open my backpack to take a picture. so it constantly made me think about "is this worthwhile enough to stop and take a picture of?" and by the time i had finished that thought i was already past it or the moment was gone. but it isn't all about taking pictures.

-park sanssouci. this is in potsdam, south of berlin where the kaisers ruled their empire. it seemed like a french-inspired palatial garden, although i think it was constructed before versailles? it looked repressed in the winter time with no blooms and the statues in comical grey boxes to protect them from water damage. i walked around with gabi. we talked about what it was like when she moved to berlin in 1971 from a small town near the border with france. on the train she pointed out a checkpoint where people could move from west berlin to east berlin but you had to visit an office 3 times to get papers and stamps and you had to return to your side of the wall by midnight. this building is now a concert hall but it has the german word for tears in the name (i forget the german word).

-art. in addition to graffiti everywhere, the city is littered with galleries (not even including museums). there are frequent squats dedicated to art and the most famous and impressive one is the kunsthaus tacheles on friedrichstraße on the north side of the river. it looks like a bombed out mecca for crackheads but the arts are thriving there where artists have studios and gallery space on its 5 floors. i bet the parties there are intense. graffiti covers every surface and the stairwell has this delicious aroma that is a luxurious mix of piss, beer, and marijuana. i highly recommend wandering around this place for an hour or so. the art is so-so but the space and community it suggests are impressive.

-architecture. man there are a lot of important buildings in berlin. beyond the ones i already mentioned, i saw the peter behren's AEG turbine factory (1908 or so), an odd john hejduk housing complex (pictured above [why do his buildings always look like people?]), an early zaha hadid building (quite normal), gropius' bauhaus archive, the saarinen-like house of world art in the tiergarten, and others. there is a huge modernist housing block in the west part of the tiergarten with apartment buildings from everybody famous in mid-century european architecture, but mostly german and dutch architects. bakema, gropius, aalto, and my first oscar niemeyer building, a block set on tapering Y supports next to the staße des 17 juni. i also biked way too far west out of downtown through charlottenberg to see the berlin version of le corbusier's unite d'habitation. it is a titanic building, almost like a cruise ship propped up on pilotis. you can tell there are big apartments and little apartments and it has his signature man pressed into the concrete by the main entrance. a short note to the publishers of architecture guidebooks who are reading this blog: please make all of your neighborhood maps at the same scale if possible. it makes for more accurate estimations of biking distance, especially if you're not familiar with the city. i had to ride for like 45 minutes to get to this building but it didn't look that far on the map compared to other maps in the book. or at least include a scale on the maps so you know how they change. thanks. OK also the peter eisenman memorial was nice too, perhaps his best building (even though it isn't a building [this says something bad about his buildings]). right next to it was the frank gehry bank that still seemed to be under construction or something and was guarded by two politzei herren who looked at me with suspicion as i tried to enter the (locked) doors. i walked by the reichstag but never went in because it is something a tourist would do. the paul lobe house, split across the river, is also a nice work that reminds me of louis kahn.

-i finally learned what sound this character "ß" makes. the double S sound, who knew.

alright, enough. lets end here and just say that berlin is awesome and i need to come back. i didn't even hit all the neighborhoods of the city, missing the eastern canal part of kreuzberg and the hip student area of friedrichshain where the famous berghain club is. one of my friends here told me to go there at 9 am to see all the fucked up people still in the depths of their trip dancing the morning hours away. i missed out. maybe next time? i hope there is a next time soon. meanwhile, aufedersein berlin y hasta la proxima encuentra.

again, check the flickr for so many photos that you probably don't have the interest to browse through even a fraction of them. i know i don't.

some of my material from the T?F workshop

pin-up at the why factory

pin-up of workshop work at the why factory with winy maas leading the discussion.

diagoon housing by herman hertzberger

this is the diagoon housing project by herman hertzberger, built in delft in 1971. one of my peers at MIT studied it as a precedent in a studio last spring. i was looking up hertzberger's work in the netherlands and discovered that this project, a small single building for 8 or so families, is very close to me. it is tucked into a dense pack of suburban developments southwest of the center, right near the delft zuid train station off the kruithuisweg. you approach this through a maze of houses with cars in front, gardens in various states of disarray, cats on the prowl, and two kids climbing trees on a sunday afternoon that is cold enough to bite your ears when you ride quickly through it without a hat. the building faces west towards a square of land long overgrown with trees but still with paths cut through. dutch ideas of gardens are always messy and overgrown, a bit ragged as if you have been on vacation for months. i was late for something so i only had a chance to observe quickly and then continue. it always makes me nervous to start architecturally undressing a building with people inside looking out at me. i could only take one picture without feeling awkward because somebody in a white shirt was in the second-floor kitchen. hertzberger built some cool stuff with plain CMUs and modernist detailing. the cool thing about this project was its supposed interior flexibility and split-level floor stacking. it seemed nice from the outside, like a little commune set among the banality of suburbia. really, though, you couldn't tell it was much different from the surrounding blocks except that this one looked particularly austere and plain. the flickr photos of this place make it seem very clean cut and maintained, whereas in my picture it sits beyond a bulging hedge and empty tree. i almost like this more, as an image of a work that is lived in, inhabited, and has its own life. its domestic scale and simplicity give it a humble reading i admire, as if to say "i can't change much about the rest of the built environment, but i can provide a worthwhile place to make a home."

i had a discussion recently with another architecture student at the halloween party at the nieuwelaan house, the one where i was dressed as the great state of texas and encouraged people to write their stereotypes of the state on its foiled shape that hung over my shoulders. he is fed up with starchitecture and the lack of concern for details or at least architecture as something other than image or brand. he asked me who my favorite firms were in america who were unknown here but doing solid, well-designed, respectable work. i could only name a handful, embarrassingly (i did mention the name lake/flato because i like them a lot). but it made me think about how much work there is out there for architects and how even the smallest projects can be so satisfying. projects that have clean lines and are enjoyable places to live are beautiful. this is why dwell magazine does so well.

maybe: fuck the birds nest and zaha hadid and santiago calatrava and design competitions. maybe what we need instead of legions of grad students with thick glasses getting off to the rem koolhaas el croquis are people who want to move to a small town somewhere and start building solid, inspiring, cheap buildings. the chances to work at that huge scale and with that piercing urban/global vision are so minimal and the situations so saturated with compromise and legality. even if i end up being an architect i will never work like that. thought i would be open to working for somebody who works like that. in the end, there is probably more value in sitting in your hometown and designing schools, fire stations, churches, and homes. i worked for a company that did just this and has had a great impact on denton over the last 30 years. of course this takes a narrow view of what architecture can be (just buildings) but it is an inviting, human-scale version of an architectural career. so lets all light a candle for the architects who get no recognition in online rags like archdaily for putting in long hours on local projects that really change lives. god bless samuel mockbee and architects for humanity. amen.

ok, now i'm going to sleep. i have work to do tomorrow and a short presentation with winy maas present about a why factory workshop i'm participating in. goodnight.

london

so london was great. flying to luton is annoying because the flight takes 40 minutes but then the bus ride into the city takes 80 minutes. staying with my uncles was enjoyable; it was good to see them again. mostly i just walked around the city and stopped at a few cool things. i saw most of the tourist highlights. i saw all of the cultural artifacts the british have stolen from other parts of the world in the british museum (way to go, guys). the tate modern was cool, with some impressive contemporary stuff including a tall room with an installation by anselm kiefer. i am almost getting tired of impressionist/early modern art being so revered and holy. it is tiring to squint at pissaros and cubist picassos for so long. there is other shit out there. the pop art exhibit to me was trash except for damien hirst's twins piece. they also had a john baldessari retrospective that blew me away. he was expressing a lot of ideas and manipulations in art that i like too. where the pop art exhibit was a packed mass of humanity, the baldessari galleries were quiet and empty and with much better work. i walked around camden, southwark, chelsea, battersea, soho, hyde park, regents park, hampstead, canary wharf, and the bank street area. accidentally stumbled onto james stirling's poultry street post-modern ship building. saw the AA (wasn't impressed). walked across abbey road. walked through neave brown's alexandra road housing development. had an amazing lunch at a vegetarian south indian restaurant in soho. enjoyed walking through hampstead heath at dusk with my uncles, having a pint at a bar where karl marx used to get wasted, and then dinner with my uncles' international friends. i know it was a good trip because at the end of each day my feet would throb because of all the kilometers i had consumed. it was a fantastic weekend. again, check the flickr for all the photos.

in other news i am getting ready for my mid-term presentation in my studio so i'll be putting in the hours now.

also found a practically free fare to barcelona in december, so i'll be visiting for about 4 days. the fare was 0.02 euro roundtrip but there was a 10 euro debit card processing fee making for a grand total price of 10.02 euro. it will cost about 3 times that just to get to the airport in eindhoven. oh well.

last night i went to a hip-hop open mic night and concert in utrecht with my friend sander. it was alright; the main rapper was some guy named BLS from LA. the median age for the dudes in the house band was probably 17 and they played simple hooks like 50 cent's find-me-in-the-club-bottle-full-of-bub beat and the first bar of "people make the world go round." some decent ableton-enabled hip-hop production too that was a mix of prefuse 73 and more ambient clouddead beats. anyway it was fun to see hip-hop in a basement club in a small european city. ok, now back to work.