the end for real sort of

well. the last time i wrote i was walking on water and now my studio is over and i am fitting everything into my suitcase.

so, my time now in holland is at an end. i am really going to miss it here, both the lifestyle and all of the cool people i've met from all over the world. it is a typical exchange experience to feel like you don't have enough time to develop friendships with the people you meet, i think. when i sit down in america and think about it i will be quite sad actually. but, again, it doesn't feel like i am saying good bye forever. beyond tools like facebook, there is a strong chance i will find myself seeing some of these people again, either in america or in their respective home nations or back here in holland. i've talked with numerous people about coming back to work at one of the many important offices in rotterdam. a few other people are serious about coming to america so i hope they will visit me. another cool thing about exchange at such an international school is that now i have global contacts and people i know in portugal, barcelona, berlin, london, greece, milan, latvia, bangalore, hong kong, shanghai, brisbane, melbourne, and LA. that is a nice feeling. the world is a small, good place.

my studio finished and i am super excited about that. the end result (which probably won't be posted here but may be available shortly elsewhere) is ok but unstable and frustrating and immature as an entire studio. there were strong organizational issues with the teachers and no given situation for us to respond to. most studios are organized around problems: design a building for this, propose a new urban plan for this area, whatever. here it was just sort of a blank expanse: do some research and come up with an idea, especially when the topic is as abstract and philosophical as it was. i think my part is OK and, with some work, could stand as an ok project. in the end it was mostly me and another student trying to coordinate everything together but it turned out alright. i spoke a bit with winy about it and he is aware. he will be at MIT soon so maybe we will talk there. i never quite realized how MIT even as a name is such a global fetish. anytime i would drop that i go to school there, people are frequently suddenly impressed. its reputation is pervasive mostly for its technical and media lab work but i guess people assume it continues over to architecture even though the undergraduate program is tiny and rocky. the problems with the studio are also another reason why this blog has been more travel-oriented than academic. i think for most people that is ok because nobody likes shop talk, especially in blog form.

well, what did i do in my last few weeks? mostly stayed in delft like a slob. in the past two weeks i did some work. i actually stayed up all night on wednesday which made me feel kind of good that i was actually working. anyway, i finished two 8-10 page papers for the two lecture courses i was in. i rode my bike around ypenburg, an area north of delft that is a dutch new town development for the hague. MVRDV has some houses there and everything sits on canals. there will be pictures on flickr or facebook sometime. it was a nice sunday afternoon ride. yesterday i had my final review and ate dinner with jean paul and hannes, the two TUD students who went to MIT in my place. both of them are super cool dudes who i would love to hang out with more. it is funny because we know the same people and places now (we spent a lot of our time joking about MIT and talking about cambridge) but we don't really know each other! then there was a great party here with everybody from the two Msc2 studios at the why factory. very good party, if i am able to say so myself. it was a good way to say good bye without being emotional.

then today i went to amsterdam for the last time and walked around a new area of the city, mostly the east docklands that is a huge west 8-masterplanned housing area. there are the really stylish and now well-known dock houses (pictures to come) by MVRDV and others like EMBT. i am glad i got to see them. i also went inside the new amsterdam public library which is super nice as a place to hang out. it was a nice mix of louis kahn-type wood and brick work with some dutch interiors inside. i also saw the renzo piano nemo museum, a building i didn't know existed until this morning. then i was walking and saw the steven holl addition to an office building along the mauritskade, a green block with thin windows cut out in unexpected places and wrapped with a mesh. pictures would explain more. walking back towards the damrak i unexpectedly discovered aldo van eyck's orphanage, a building that jan wampler worships. it was just ok. i became unexpectedly emotional walking back to the station and through these small streets with snow falling. it was beautiful in a way that i hadn't seen very much here. i will miss that.

but then there is also the future: my last semester at MIT and moving forward with my life. i am excited to return to the treehome and have a big nice kitchen and my friends and cat. my classes this spring will be interesting and hopefully not as stressful as before. playing music will be good. and then i can probably graduate and do adult things and act like i have a position of authority on a topic because i have a degree in it. ok, this will also probably be the last post on this blog too because i will be back home and its purpose will have been fulfilled. i am fine with that. see you all soon in the real world.

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.

paris

last weekend was my first excursion into the rest of europe. i took an overnight bus from rotterdam to paris, arriving before dawn on saturday. so from there i started walking around. if you'd like a overly-detailed visual account of my time there, check my flickr link for the set. but i'll quickly summarize my adventure here.

-as previously stated, arrived before dawn. walked around some of the northern arrondissements in the bible black predawn

-sunrise at the basilica du sacre coeur hilltop

-walking all the way from there to montparnasse, stopping at the the palais royal, napping in the courtyard of the louvre next to i.m. pei's glass pyramids

-couchsurfed with a guy named morgan who was OK

-eiffel tower, champs elysees, arc d'triumph etc etc

-patrick blanc vertical garden at the musee du quai branly

-sunset at trocadero arts compound with the eiffel tower

-running into somebody i knew once in high school, drinking on the banks of the seine

-montparnasse cemetery and the graves of jean paul sartre, man ray, charles baudelaire

-notre dame, walking around on an overcast afternoon

-pompidou centre and IRCAM, both renzo piano projects

-teenage cool kids show and afterparty at the sparkling eiffel tower

-nutella crepe

-the vast wind-swept plain of la defense

-finding and exploring renzo piano's rue de meaux housing in the 19th arrondissement, a project i studied last spring for class

i stayed until monday afternoon and then took the bus back. it was really interesting to be in the city, seeing the uniform scale of almost every area. why no skyscrapers in paris? the haussmann avenues are majestic too. there are so many neighborhoods in such a small area. the metropolitain was dirty and felt like i was riding in a cart pulled by a wagon. the city overall was dirty and bustling with activity. i think it was this dirt that le corbusier was reacting to when he proposed his voisin plan for destroying paris. also i was surprised with how international the city is, with the visible presence of a number of ethnic groups. on sunday night the turkish soccer team won an important match and the turks of paris drove through the streets, honking, yelling, and waving flags. i didn't eat much french food outside of baguettes and a crepe (i brought my food from home) but it seemed like nothing a vegetarian could get excited about. paris does have the highest PDA per capita i've seen anywhere too. really good to see the renzo piano buildings too, especially the one i am familiar with thanks to studio. overall a power weekend where i slept very little but had tons of fun walking the city and seeing new things. ok, back to delft and my normal life.