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.

if you give a swan a croissant, he'll ask you for a glass of milk...

dordrecht & de biesbosch

tuesday was the first day i had to wear my winter coat here. it was also my studio mid-review with winy maas. i had my slides together and presented what i thought was a coherent logic to back up my project. overall i don't think it was too successful. at the end there was a long almost heated discussion in which i didn't participate about the scope and dream of the studio. we have since had to refocus our ideas and waste even more time on "research." needless to say i think it has been frustrating. the problems of the studio and my problems with the studio are too numerous and intricate to detail online and i have spent enough time examining them in my head to summarize here.

today is saturday. last night there was a party on the floor below mine in the student house. you know it is a good party when you leave the house the next morning and have to avoid the patches of vomit on the patio outside. today was also one of the shittiest days on record, the kind where you become conscious, hear the shallow rain on your window, and go back to sleep. but i really wanted to get out of delft for a while so i put on my winter jacket and decided to go to dordrecht and bike out to de biesbosch, a national park of wetlands in the delta of the maas river east of the city.

dordrecht isn't much to write home about. the centrum area was nice with shops, tight streets, and wide canals where sailboats were tied. unlike antwerpen, the riverfront areas were mostly redeveloped with large apartment blocks. just east of downtown new apartment developments took over, right up to the water's edge. i arrived in the middle of the afternoon and it was raining lightly the whole time. it was cold and raining and i was on my bike so there are no pictures of dordrecht for you to see.

when you start biking out of the center, you pass through all of the new apartment buildings, stacked on the south side and glassed on the north. then the industrial part of town takes over along the river. the large docks are the striking feature on google maps, but by road you only see silos, knots of pipes, cooling towers, smokestacks, warehouses, and a dupont sign. there was construction on the road to the park and i accidentally got turned around and rode across a railroad bridge across the river towards sliedrecht before reorienting and coming back in the right direction. it was pretty miserable riding but i kept going because i wanted to see the place and do something instead of sitting in my room like i always do and like i am doing now.

on the way to the national park, you pass a golf course whose fairways are mostly under the tall trusses of high voltage cables. in a few minutes you pass an electricity substation with thick concrete walls and a sawing type of electric hum. there was another industrial port on the left and then, within 5 minutes, you're past the stayokay hostel and in the park. national parks in america are considered to be isolated places of preservation. here it is another function that is layered closely on the land, abutting other types of uses casually. to be fair, most of the park was across the river, accessible by ferry, but the tight change of use in this area was surprising. maybe this is a result of there being so little land to start with. regardless i pulled my bike into the visitor's center and browsed around for a bit, waiting for my jacket to dry and the sweat on my back to evaporate.

i was lucky because as i started to walk the short loop, the rain had let up and the sun poked through the haze for an hour. it was nice to be walking around in the midst of this natural setting. i am the type of person that needs to do this frequently to recharge and sharpen my mind. even if it is a short nature trail in a park for an hour, it helps me to center myself, breathe, and appreciate this place where we live. i've done it this semester in the parks of london, in the dunes of haarlem, and on the beach at scheveningen. beyond that, i really enjoy wetlands. this one reminded me a bit of blackwater national wildlife refuge in maryland. wetlands are essential lungs of water ecosystems. one thing i've missed since coming to MIT is the lack of camping and wilderness in my life. anyway, it was nice to spend 90 minutes walking a few kilometers in this park.

then, about halfway through the walk, i realized that this isn't nature at all. i was walking on an embankment that is part of the polder system used to drain the land. to my left were low fields with sheep and horses. i passed a barn with rusting tools in the front. signs frequently dotted the canal above the reeds, directly boats where to go. later i passed a lock or bridge. trees were planted in straight lines at regular intervals along the walking path. towards the end of my walk i hung out with some chickens, peacocks, and a small drenched horse. beyond the rustling stalks i could see barges loaded with containers steaming upriver. this area is productive land that happened to have a footpath running through it. i don't know how the public/private land rights work in holland but it is certainly mixed within this park.

in fact, de biesbosch is really a polder museum that happens to be gorgeous. it is still nature, just nature frozen at a later date than most natural parks. the natural/artificial dichotomy is one i've been thinking about constantly this semester, both in my studio about automation and independently. humans have lived in some places so long that their mark on the land is inseparable from anything that was there before. and humans are biological themselves so how is anything we make distinctly unnatural? we are arranging elements in increasing complex arrays and disrupting ecosystems with high concentrations of metals and compounds that were previously deep inside the earth, but this doesn't mean it isn't natural. it is dangerous and destructive but not unnatural.

this argument that humans are natural beings so their creations are natural is well-trodden (i don't have more sophisticated meditations to share with you in blogland) and in turn can be used to support current methods of production. instead i think it highlights how blurry the boundary is. i used to side more with the crunchy granola AT-hiking hippies on issues like this but after time at a tech school and more thought i still don't support total technologizing but am somewhere in the fuzzy middle. both ends of the spectrum are too extreme to deliver any promising solutions. unfortunately the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle wrapped in questions of scale, application, and lifecycles that are too complex for us to work out. yesterday at dinner, i was rereading an essay by gary snyder in "turtle island," written in 1969, where he advocates population reduction through polyandrous marriage but is severely against nuclear power. this was probably because reliable information on nuclear power wasn't available and everybody was scared shitless in the cold war.

but did you know that only 20% of the radioactive uranium you will probably be exposed to in your lifetime is from anthropogenic sources? it is a somewhat common, naturally occurring substance in the earth and groundwater. sunflowers are naturally efficient at uranium removal from tainted groundwater. after chernobyl they planted sunflowers on rafts to remove uranium from the water. while these are low levels of radioactivity that aren't going to make your children grow three legs, it is still an example of an element that is considered to be a human pollutant in the natural world that is, in fact, quite natural itself. again the question is a level of concentration that makes it unnatural and that is a more difficult question than a binary yes or no answer. there is a recent interview on BLDGBLOG with the designer of the yucca mountain repository that is very insightful.

anyway, the point is that environmental modification isn't the end of the world, but it comes down to a difficult question of scale and concentration. shoot, look at the banana, for one brief example. tons of species have destroyed their habitat before us and have suffered the consequences. coyotes overhunt does and later starve. giraffes grew longer necks because there were no leaves left on the lower branches. iraq used to be the fertile crescent. in the future we will resemble dinosaurs.

and, if it makes any difference, nature doesn't give a shit about the natural/artificial distinction. birds nest in the As of wal-mart. long-legged cranes pick through open landfills looking for scraps of crusted mcdonalds hamburger buns. in the concrete basin of the los angeles river, trees grow in the cracks and shrubs spring up next to the abandoned shopping cart that has parted the waters and allowed life to spring forth. maybe another word for natural should be indifferent.









i found my bike again as the sun was falling off the earth. the ride back to dordrecht seemed shorter but it started raining again, harder than before. the dupont refineries were already glowing, still belching smoke. by the time i got back to the city it was mostly dark and still drizzling. after riding around a bit more and finding nothing interesting, i caught a train back to delft to spend the night in solitude. i might do laundry too.

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.

antwerpen

yesterday i went to antwerpen for the day. it is a small city near the border of belgium and the netherlands. it is compact and gorgeous. most of the buildings are from the 18th century and before and are ornately figured. the streets are narrow stone canyons with cafes and high fashion boutiques everywhere you look. people speak dutch. people speak french. there is a developed asia-town where i explored a thai grocery store. there is also a large african population and i saw stores advertised as "afro-asian markets." that covers a lot of territory. the city is beautiful to explore. the southern part of downtown is newer and more the fashion district but still cool. i walked around for three hours or so and then had a pizza. after dark i went to go hang out with teenage cool kids who were playing a gig there. it was really good to see them again and it reminded me how much i miss being in denton and how cool that town is. i will go back there soon though. i had to leave early because the cheapest train i could find was leaving that night and not in the morning, so i ran (for the first time in a while) part of the way to the train station, barely making my IC train. but, here i am to tell you about it. antwerpen is beautiful.

today i am packing and doing a little work because tonight i am flying to london to visit my uncle charlie! that should be a blast. three days in london. i will report back sometime.

i took a lot of pictures of antwerpen. check them out on the flickr.

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.

amster(damn)

on sunday i went to amsterdam. i didn't leave until the middle of the afternoon because i had to finish some school work beforehand. i hoped to have enough time to walk around before going to see a concert. on the way to the train station i ran into my friend jurrian who was also going towards amsterdam. i asked him about how the canals fill with water quickly if there isn't much runoff. he said it is because the land is below sea level so when there is a void the water comes through the ground to fill it, i guess due to pressure. he said the bigger problem is keeping the water out. there is a massive set of locks and pumps throughout the polders in holland that are controlled by computers to regulate water levels in the major canals. he has seen one of the controller substations. i should check out this infrastructure.


this is what you see when you leave amsterdam centraal train station. lots and lots of bikes.


i walked along the western docks. they are tearing this older building down. there are impressive new condos and apartments being built in the area. some had trendy design studios on the first floor.


ok, this is really why i was walking here, to see silodam. it is a housing project by MVRDV. it sits on pylons above the water. i don't think the tides here are drastic which is odd because of the latitude. anyways some apartments on the first two floors have gangways directly to the street while the upper units have a separate lobby. there is a public deck that you have to cross under the building to find, navigating between the thick columns. in one of the upper units there was a party and the sounds drifted into the road.



the building's visual interest comes from its diversity of cladding and window types. i was disappointed by how flat the building reads. it is just a standard set of apartments (with generously sized windows) with a bunch of different materials slapped on. so its block-ness is a bit deceiving. it would've been more interesting to me if there was more push/pull action going on so you got some overhang, some shadow, some recession, some sense of depth. the building does it twice on the upper floors to create some deck space but it isn't enough. it is odd because stacking as an organizational idea is something MVRDV uses a lot: for references, see their housing block in spain that just finished or the new bank that construction just started on or the fiero milano tower. but maybe this is an early project so they weren't all about stacking yet? maybe the budget was too tight to allow that type of excess? anyways.


ok. now we're talking. this is more typical. i started walking back towards the downtown area.


canals here are wider than anywhere else i've seen in a city. most were lined with houseboats. amsterdam, if you haven't seen a map, is arranged radially outward from its downtown node. canals run in a circular fashion like rings. some frenchman (sartre? camus?) compared the layout of amsterdam to the seven levels of hell. the red light district is on the east side. i wandered mostly in the western areas and downtown. the city is hugely devoted to leisure of all types, from movies to shopping to a vodka museum to coffeeshops (i.e. doobie dens) to galleries to whatever. everybody seemed pretty relaxed. i passed some french hippies smoking joints on the street. in a society where everything is allowed not much is abused.


there is a lot of shopping here. and trams.




after i got downtown i followed the main street south to leidseplein where lots of people where out. i bought a ticket for the concert and kept wandering around, mostly in the oud west and jordaan area. jordaan is the hipster part of amsterdam, with galleries and bars and good-looking restaurants. it gave off sort of a new york east village vibe but here things felt older.




i ate a cheap pizza in jordaan and walked back towards the melkweg, the club where i was going to hear a band. there was a concert in the leidesplein too so i stood and watched a dutch group go through the funk hits of the 70s. i met up with my friend sebastian and his friend helen and we went back towards the melkweg.


i was really excited to hear the dirty projectors live again. i saw them once in june in boston and it was good. seeing a concert at a rock club in holland is like seeing a concert at a rock club anywhere else, with the same etiquette, lights, etc. the opening band (tune yards) was interesting, with just a woman on ukelele and loops and a guy who sometimes laid down some basslines. they both wore face paint. the dirty projectors were good despite a persistent hum in the sound system throughout their set. they played pretty much the same set as i saw in boston three months ago but with some additions in the middle. tempos seemed a bit slow but they have been on the road for a while. it was still a good concert. "bitte orca" means a lot to me.

afterwards we walked to the train station. a woman hit sebastian on her bike and was very angry. we managed to miss the 12:45 train because were distracted and sitting on the wrong end of the platform (15a instead of 15b). what to do? hit the late night albert heijn for some grolsch and wait for the 1:45 nachtrein. good times. and when that train finally came, we sat in a cabin with two kids flying back to barcelona. they talked about how cheap the prostitutes were in amsterdam compared to spain. and the lack of discoteques. they asked us if the security at schiphol would find the weed in their checked luggage. they had it stored in their shampoo bottles. they seemed pretty paranoid, but it was probably the herb talking.

i trekked to utrecht

on sunday i went to utrecht. it is in the middle of the country closer to amsterdam. i went to walk around the downtown area and to hike out to the university of utrecht that has some pretty awesome buildings by some SUPERDUTCH firms (OMA, wiel arets, neutelings riedijk, others).

it was a cloudy day and i enjoyed the city center of utrecht. lots of people were out on sunday afternoon shopping and sitting in cafes. it feels medieval and almost italian. the church tower is visible from everywhere and the cathedral was quite impressive even though half of it was destroyed some time ago so it exists as half a sanctuary and then a tower. it feels fortified because the canals are set a whole story lower than the street (whereas in delft they are on the same level), so you have another walkway down along the water and catacomb-like spaces for storage or business. lots of restaurants set up in these subterranean spaces and put tables out along the water which at night seemed like a beautiful place to eat. the city definitely seemed magical at night. in one block i passed a music venue that hosted a diverse set of acts from sun o))) to maceo parker and marcus miller, art galleries, a good jazz record shop (i could see a vinyl copy of "water babies" on the shelf) that looked like it also had a hair salon in the back (very trendy), a good-looking greek restaurant, and a comic book store.

outside the main island area it gets more normal but still nice. it was a long walk out to the university but enjoyable as there was a lot to look at. along one of the main routes out of downtown i ate at daily wok, the euro-version of wagamama for some cheap noodles. as you continue out of town, the housing gets more standardized but still with big trees and restaurants in old train stations. i made a detour to see a famous house that wasn't very impressive in person and then kept walking.

once you get close to the beltway, you get into campus land with student housing in squat 2-story brick apartments, a big soccer stadium, and a nice campus for the utrecht college. there is a nice dormitory there that acts as a sound wall between an adjacent highway and the rest of campus. it is a long thin building where each student room gets a floor-to-ceiling window inside their brick bay unit. it is nice because it is sculpted to be a wall, with brick serifs coming off each end of the building, tapering to a point but still with windows as if the building isn't a new building but inhabiting a shell of a cathedral or fortress (there is an old fortress on the campus so maybe it is a reference to that).

i finally got to the university of utrecht only as the really interesting library by wiel arets closed at 6. the place was deserted and no buildings were open. i looked around as the sun was getting low, checking out some of the main buildings i didn't recognize and then rem's educatorium and a research building with snakes in the facade. the dorms were quite varied, from a very cosmopolitan high rise to a very eastern-bloc building made of prefab pods once painted and now weathered. it was interesting though as the campus was on farmland so you have these large projects and then across the bike path, the odor of cows and rabbits hopping down into creekbeds. i took a bus back to the main train station to start over and walk the downtown area (all the way south to the museum this time) again as the sun set.

like i said, the city is much more luxurious at night when people sit outside to eat and the lights reflect off the canals. it is quite a romantic scene. on one dock i passed a thai restaurant next to a north indian restaurant next to an italian pizzeria with tables along the water. i was very impressed with utrecht.










i really liked this bench.


my favorite canal/street, oudegracht.




the rietveld schroderhuis (1924). not that impressive in person. you can see all of the layers of paint. like other early 20th century experiments in modern construction, it seems flimsy. as an object or a set of planes in space it seems interesting but i don't know about as a home. i didn't see the interior though so maybe that is nice. i kept walking.


finally on campus at the university of utrecht.




the wiel arets library (2004) i had seen in some books. the paneled facade seemed pretty cool and the interior, from what i had seen, looked nice though i didn't get to go in because it closed. it takes this one pattern, shown below, and uses it both for an impression in the cladding and on the glass, maybe as a strategy to keep direct light down on all the precious books inside. very herzog & de meuron but it does the job.




also had this pool bowl entrance to a restaurant on campus. on top of the restaurant was a basketball court.



the educatorium by rem/OMA (1997). the diagram of this building is really evident. it is another ramp building and seems pretty successful. it would've been nice to see the interior.


a smaller funky building whose diagram is also evident, directly across the street from the educatorium. it is by UNstudio (ben van berkel), sort of a proto diller & scofidio type thing. i don't know. i don't know what happens inside either. it has some pretty nice circulation though.


building by neutelings riedijk (1997). i have trouble pronouncing that firm's name. i have been saying it out loud for the past 23 seconds. it has sprayed concrete as a facade with some odd tremors-esque worms crawling around. i don't know what happens inside, it is probably a lab building.


this building (the tower) is too sexy to be a student dorm. it should be relocated to miami.


again, i have no idea what is going on here. i think somebody was inspired by a shipyard. this is a dorm. i saw people in the windows cooking though i have no idea what goes on in those beams that go across. too industrial.


modular student housing. sort of crappy and weird. they are spined together and the walkways are covered but outdoors. heating bills must be really high.


ok. now you're tired and you're just playing with glass, jack. get on that bus and get back downtown before the sun sets completely.


good, i made it back downtown.


then i walked around for a bit and looked at all of the restaurants i couldn't eat in because i am poor. plus it is no fun to eat by yourself at expensive restaurants because there is no experience or environment or umwelt or milieu without (a) friend(s) to partake with. luxurious settings like that are meant to be enjoyed and that is hard to do by yourself, especially for me because i immediately devour my food without poise and am done too quickly to harvest pleasure from the experience. plus i didn't have a book and i didn't feel like drawing. oh, and i am poor. there are some good-looking restaurants though and a couple funky bars. i walked by one with a lot of rockers hanging out and a band that sounded like dinosaur jr. warming up.


the netherlands is the venice of europe.

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in other news, i finally named my laptop that i bought over a month ago. her name is worknesh mega. she is named after a lion i met in ethiopia because both animals are golden and powerful. at first i didn't really like the windows set-up but i optimized some things and now it is comfortable.

also: i found the veggie products at the supermarket. they are kept in the back in between two types of carcass. why would they be there? why would vegetarians even want to venture among the graveyard that is the meat section? regardless, i had veggie burgers yesterday and am planning to cook some tempeh this weekend too.

also: i went to a jam session last night for the school jazz association at a bar and played well on electric bass. the bar was tiny and filled with students. people there were pretty amateur but it was fun to shred a bit. they play the same tired stuff people in america play. people liked how i soloed though, even calling out for a bass solo, getting quieter, and then clapping. i laid down one jerry jemmott line from king curtis's "memphis soul stew" and everybody was feelin' all right. i met some people to play with, even playing this afternoon on a double bass at the cultural center for a while. we'll see how this goes.

school is OK. you can only check out 10 books at a time from the library and even when you do, people stare at you funny like you have a problem or are actively sprouting a second head from your original one. it is weird. the faculty closed at 7 pm today so i had to go home then. i went to a really good lecture this morning by philosopher patrick healy. he is teaching a class about the philosophy of image and its relation to architecture. he gave a mesmerizing talk about schinkel and berlin and the origin of museums as cultural spaces. he talked like a preacher. i looked at the clock a lot but it was honestly to wish that it was moving slower.