I wasn’t sure what to expect from Friday’s lecture. William Curtis is an essayist and architectural historian/critic with strong opinions (about nearly everything it seems). I wasn’t sure if we’d get architectural criticism, academic theory or something else. I have to say that I really enjoyed the lecture, which turned out to be in the last category of “something else.”

The talk focused on photos and sketches of horizons and platforms and the relationship of the human structure of the platform and the perspective of the horizon. He called out the particular appropriateness of the having the talk at the CGAC, Alvaro Siza’s contemporary art museum in Santiago, which is composed of a series of ramps and platforms. Some other highlights:

• Tons of sketches, which have inspired me to try to do mroe quick contour line sketches.
• A successful photograph is a discovery of something. (Food for thought and a goal for future photographs.)
• A photo of Chillida’s “Comb of the Wind” (also featured in Pallasmaa’s talk, but I didn’t get the name on Thursday night). Used in reference to the perception and ambiguity of distance and depth in foreground and background (see below).
• A photo of (similar to this one) and schematic for the water organ on the promenade of the harbor of Zadar, Croatia.
• The definition of architecture as clear thinking, observation and “a rock with an idea behind it” (a quote from someone I didn’t catch).
• The idea that in architecture and design you can create a kind of vibration and tension between foreground (artificially constructed) and background (landscape). Platform – void – horizon and compression. A concept that I would love to explore further in some of my upcoming design projects.

Friday was our pin-up for the studio project. There was no morning lecture, no tour and no studio. Most of us had very little if any sleep Thursday night, so after the pin-up there was napping all around.

In the evening, we attended William Curtis’ lecture and then went to dinner as a group. (Bread, Jamon, Pimentos de Padron, Paella, Tarte de Santiago, Wine and Beer.) Afterwards, all the young people went out for drinks, but being old and sleepy, I went back to the dorms to bed.

The pin-up went well for me. Fulvio Irace, Pablo and Carmen (one of the assistant professors for the program) were present for my crit and I got some great feedback. Specifically:

• Do not let the Camino be subordinate to the car bridge. Consider carefully the relationship of the pedestrian bridge to the road in this context.
• The concept of velocity is important — consider the varying velocities of pedestrians, bicyclists and cars.
• Look at the paths that animals or traditional pedestrians (before the highway and railroad) might take when considering the placement and configuration of the new Camino crossing.
• Consider the effect the view of the cars and the view of the landscape in the solution.

All of which is really thought provoking, clear and valuable. I was really lucky and feel like I have some good things to work with for the next several days.

For anyone that is interested, I have posted just a few photos from the crit — my boards, the cloister and a couple of my fellow students.

The second lecture in our Distinguished Lecture series was given by Juhani Pallasmaa.

Juhani Pallasmaa is a Finnish architect, professor and author. Last year as part of bootcamp, we read his book The Eyes of the Skin; which, frankly I didn’t really enjoy. However, he is very well respected and seems to be a very nice man. During our “architect’s dinner” Wednesday night he shared some pretty cool projects with us and I’m impressed that he seems to design his own furniture and sculptural objects. I always love a well-rounded person.

Theoretically, the lecture was on the topic of architectural education, with the point being that architecture is so complex that it needs to be taught through an osmotic process and by using poetry and literature rather than scholarly architectural texts. In my opinion though he didn’t really make his point as the lecture mostly rambled through some thoughts on literature and architecture and poetry and other such things with no real thesis, support or conculsion. Clearly Pallasmaa is a very well-read and knowledgeable guy, but I don’t really connect with him. I think the issue is that my personality type needs/values structured, logical arguments and discussions and his personality type is one that values direct experience and emotional connection to a subject. So, the talk just wasn’t my thing. I’ve talked to several of the other CAI student and they seem to fall into two camps — either they loved the talk and Juhani or it fell flat for them as it did for me. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of middle ground.

To veer off on a tangent, I’ve been thinking a lot about architectural education these days. The CAI program presents an interesting perspective on methods of teaching especially in comparison with my experience at VCU. To sum everything up in a single thought, I’m very lucky to have my VCU professors who seem to put students and their enrichment at the forefront of their efforts.

To elaborate on the difference, the professors here each take a very different approach to teaching their studio.

I know least about Maria — she seems to be guiding her students very carefully through their time here giving them specific information about what she expects at each stage, but letting them be reasonably free in how it is realized. I have heard very few complaints from her students. It is interesting that Maria teaches computer simulation at Pratt, and worked on the City of Culture directly under Eisenman; but here she seems to be focused on more traditional architecture and approaches.

Alberto has spent lots of time with his students developing a project that is neither the Camino nor access to the City of Culture, but a combination of both. Their project is wildly ambitious even for a semester project and nearly insane for three weeks of work. His students have produced some lovely work, but Alberto’s conflicting and nearly constantly changing direction has caused some frustration among them.

Tatiana started the program with a very, very detailed plan of tasks and work from her students. They spent the entire first week researching and contemplating the Camino de Santiago at all levels and then have worked together (yet individually) on specific interventions along the Camino. I know that at least two of the students in her group had a different conception of what was expected for Friday’s pin up than she had and that there was some conflict at that point.

Pablo has been extremely loose about what projects we choose and how we approach them. I think that he was perhaps too open in the beginning and we could have used a bit more guidance. However, now that we all have specific projects, he seems to be stepping in in a more useful manner to help get us to completion. In the end, I think our group will end up with a fairly satisfying set of projects.

However, beyond the pretty wide range of approaches to teaching studio, I have been surprised by the other interactions with the professors/instructors. The CAI program is structured into tours/field trips, lectures and studio time, with all other time being free for students to work in studio, eat, run errands, do laundry or whatever at their discretion and according to their needs. Given my background and experience, I expected that the professors would be involved not only in the studio portion of the program, but also consistently involved in the other portions as well. However, this has not been the case. There have been several instances where there have been no professors at all present on our field trips and lectures. I just can’t imagine Rob or Camden being involved in a trip abroad where they did not accompany students on field trips to point out the architecturally pertinent points of the site. Further, both Tatiana and Alberto have asked students to be in studio for extra meetings outside of regularly scheduled times. This also seems unfair and unexpected given how overscheduled we are to begin with.

I think that if I was running this program, I would change the schedule a bit so that it was not quite so full and then expect the professors to be involved in each part of the scheduled activities so that they could make those experiences richer for the students. I think I might also change the way the projects were structured to make them a bit more defined and allow more consistency across them so that there was less of a sense of “luck of the draw” as to what your CAI studio experience was.

Thursday we got to go to the roof of the Cathedral, which was pretty cool. Not only is the view wonderful from there, but you get a good perspective of the various phases of building on the Cathedral. There was a church built in the 9th century, which was there until the Romanesque Cathedral was built and remained as a separate entity for several hundred years until at some point the entryway was integrated into the main Cathedral. There is the Romanesque portion, which comprises the main structural portions of the Cathedral and thus I have heard it most often referred to as a Romanesque structure. Then there are the Renaissance additions, including the clock tower from the 16th century and then finally the Baroque facade and towers which create what most visitors think of as the Cathedral.

Photos of the cathedral (and one of some flowers that are on the way to the studio from the dorms) are here.

After the cathdral tour I had to rush back to the studio for a desk crit with Juhani Pallasmaa (more about him later), which is captured in a fairly bad photo of my on Jackie Tugman’s facebook page.

The morning lecture was entitled “Reaching ‘The End of the World’: Effects of the Camino de Santiago for Local Populations”. The lecture talked about the Santiago to Fisterra/Muxia portion of the Camino and how it affects the local populations. It was an interesting talk and made me think of Laura and how she might enjoy working on such things when she returns to grad school in a year or two. I need to remember to write to the speaker Cristina Sanchez-Carreto for a copy of her paper on “dissonant heritage”, which talks about what happens when different groups have conflicting ideas of heritage.

A definition: Heritage is a metacultural process (a statement on culture by a culture). “Something [tangible or intangible] that someone or some people considers to be worthy of being valued, preserved, catalogued, exhibited, restored, admired, etc.; and others share that election (freely of by various mechanisms of imposition) so that an identification process takes place and that something is considered ours.” (Victor Novelo 2005).

The afternoon was spent working on the studio project.

Thursday evening we attended Juhani Pallasmaa’s talk as part of our Distinguished Lecture series (see the next post on that).

After the lecture, everyone spent the rest of the night into the wee hours of the morning (or perhaps straight through until morning) preparing for the pin-up on Friday.

Wednesday was another busy day. We started with a tour of Alvaro Siza’s Journalism Building on the north campus of the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC for short). This was my first Siza building in person and the tour was led by the director of the Compostela Architecture Institute (CAI), Carlos Seoane. Carlos worked with Siza on the building for 5 years (from start to finish) and so he had excellent understanding of the buliding and all its details.

We walked all throught the building including through the radio and movie studios and up onto the Zinc rooftop where we could look down through the skylights that illuminate the library. Unfortunately, Siza’s architecture shines more in person with the little details of alignments and precision and plays of light and movement than is possible to reflect in photos. I have included a few photos for you though, so you can see at least some of what we saw.

After the tour, we went to our morning lecture on “Current Challenges of Archeology and Landscape: The Heritage Turn”. This lecture tied together the concepts of “landscape” that we learned about last week with the concept of “heritage”, which seemed to be the topic of this week.

A definition: Landscape Archeology is using archological techniques to reconcstruct landscape from a cultural perspective.

The lecture was pretty esoteric, so I don’t have much that I can talk about here, but again it exposed me to some entirely new ways of thinking about the environment around me and its relationship to culture and heritage.

Following lecture we had studio time for a couple of hours.

In the evening, we met with the instructors and Juhani Pallasmaa at our dorm for some food, slideshows and a flaming drink. The food was pretty standard (sausage, bread, cheese, olives and egg/potato thing called a tortilla). Each instructor and Juhani Pallasmaa shared a short slide show of their work or lives. It was interesting to get to know them better. And, after we finished, we went outside for Queimada — a traditional Galician beverage. The flaming beverage part was memorable and a really excellent way to end the day.

Tuesday night we had our first of a series (I think there will be 5) of lectures by widely respected architects. There’s TONS to talk about here, so let me start with a bit of background.

Fulvio Irace is a Milanese architect, professor of architecture and author. I couldn’t find much about him on the internet, but he seems like a pretty cool guy. He hung around all week and participated in my crit on Friday and I’m pretty impressed. He seems like someone you could have a great conversation with, although I didn’t really get a chance.

There’s an architecture thing that happens every two years. I didn’t know anything about it, but apparently it’s a big deal and most people know about it. Here’s the link to this year’s event: Biennale Artitettura. Tuesday night’s talk was taken from Fulvio Irace’s talk and exhibit at the Biennale.

My knowledge of history is woefully spotty, and if you’re like me you did not realize that Milan was very badly damaged by Allied bombing in World War II.

The topic of the lecture was “Face City”, a look at the facades of the buildings in Milan built in the 1950s and 1960s during the rebuilding of the city after World War II. The lecture was largely composed of photos of the buildings and discussions of the facades, which was interesting in itself; but it also introduced me to a number of Italian architects that I had never heard of including my new architecture love, Gio Ponti.

So, I still need to do some research and investigation, but here’s some information about Gio Ponti for anyone that doesn’t already know who he is:

• Overview on DesignMuseum.org
• Industrial Design on Architonic.com
• One of Gio Ponti’s Facades
• And below a photo of the Villa Planchart, which reminds me of Le Corbusier’s Chapel of Notre Dame de Haute at Ronchamp

Gio Ponti’s Villa Planchart in Caracas

Tuesday was a busy day. We started the day visiting some local apartments that were built next to Park Bonaval. The apartments were nice, but not particularly exciting, so I don’t have any photos for you. However, we did visit to a local architect whose office is in one of the apartments.

In the studio he had created these sawhorse-like tables that were pretty cool. That project and some of the other stuff he and his partner have worked on is at their website: http://www.estarstudio.eu/.

After the tour, we had a lecture on “Archeology and Heritage” related to the management of the Camino de Santiago. The topic related to the difficulties of determining and preserving something that has over the last millenia morphed and changed and will continue to change. The Camino de Santiago has UNESCO World Heritage status, and so there is money available to maintain and preserve it, but in order to do so, someone has to define what “it” is and what state should be preserved. For ruins or an unused structure, this is somewhat easier to do — someone defines the target state and associated period and then preservation moves towards returning the site to that state and maintaining the site there. With a living heritage site that is still being used and changed based on the needs of the pilgrims, it becomes a very difficult to define what needs to be preserved and decisions have pretty significant social, political and economic ramifications. Fascinating.

The talk made me pretty sure that I don’t want to go into historical preservation though. I think I would have a really hard time deciding what the “right” state would be for the restoration.

After our lecture, we had studio time where I worked a bit more on my project (although not too much since there wasn’t much time) and then in the evening we had a “Distinguished Lecture”, which I’ll post about separately.

So, I posted on Sunday about the direction my project was taking — a fountain in an area near the old city. Monday evening (about 7p), I finally got a chance to talk with my instructor about the project and he nixed the idea. Apparently, the project might be feasible somewhere else, but it is completely inappropriate for Sanitago. Who knew?

Anyway, grasping for something to work on, I remembered a pedestrian bridge about 4 km from the center of the city that is in really bad shape and I noted that it might be a suitable project. My instructor agreed.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough data on the bridge to work on it, so I quickly left the studio and walked the 45+ minutes out to the bridge to sketch a little and take some photos.

I didn’t get back to the dorms (which are on the other side of the city center from the bridge) until almost 10p, so I ate dinner and went to bed pretty exhausted.

A few things to note about the bridge:

• It is right at the edge of Santiago proper (on the city line, I believe) and sits at a place where there is a pretty clear transition between suburban Santiago (which doesn’t mean exactly the same thing that it does in the US) and urban Santiago.
• It is a 150cm (about 4.5 ft) wide wooden bridge in very bad condition. (See the photos for just how bad.)
• The pedestrian bridge is actually two bridges attached (tacked on) to two car bridges that cross the highway and railroad tracks.
• The bridges are supported by a center beam of some sort, but are mostly just wooden planks spaced about 1.5 cm apart open to what is below.
• The pedestrian portion is separated from the traffic lanes by a guard rail.
• Cars go pretty fast across the bridges — I’m guessing upwards of 70-80 km/hr.

This combination of factors results in a pretty poor experience for the pilgrims: the cars whizzing by are unsettling, the bad condition and spacing of the planks makes walking a bit difficult (especially if you are using poles), and, if you are afraid of heights, the openness of the bridges to what’s below can make them scary to cross.

So, all in all, the bridge is a worthy project and I’ve boiled down the issue to three priorities:

1. Create a good surface for pilgrims and citizens to walk or ride bicycles across the highway and rail tracks.
2. Create a sense of safety from the traffic also crossing the highway and rail tracks and from the traffic below.
3. Make some sort of appropriate transition between the suburbs and city of Santiago without distracting from the camino.

Catching up again… I’ll be posting a ton of stuff this evening. To keep everything in order I’ll start off with last Monday.

Monday morning we went to the President’s Complex in Santiago. Lately, I’ve been struck by the similarities between Santiago de Compostela and Richmond. Both are the capital of the local government and both have large university populations that create the culture during most of the year. Of course, Santiago has the pilgrim thing that happens during the summer, but the comparison mostly holds up.

On a hill across from the Cathedral is the residence of the President — created about 10 years ago (I don’t remember the exact year) by a prominent Galician architect. (Note that the project to create the President’s residence was concurrent with the City of Culture project.) The project takes up the entire top of the hill and includes offices, gardens and a house within a walled compound and a public garden. We were not allowed in the compound, but we reviewed the plans of the house and walked around it and then spent a bit of time in the public gardens. It was pleasant.

If I’m remembering correctly, there was no lecture on Monday, so we had the entire day to work on our studio project. I’ll post about that separately.

And that was Monday. There’s really only one photo with the president’s garden. You can see it here.

My instructor Pablo is a native Gallician and has some very specific ideas about what our project is about. (Remember that we are supposed to be suggesting improvements to the final 12 km of the Camino de Santiago.) After listening to what we had come up with on Thursday, he threw out some ideas more in line with his thinking and then gave us until tomorrow (Monday) to come up with refinements and justification for one of those ideas.

Specifically, Pablo proposed that the enhancements to the camino should take the form of one of the following, each of which should be modular, seasonally applicable (available during the festival weeks during summer when the highest number of pilgrims come) and should benefit both the pilgrims and the people of Santiago:

• A solution for storage of backpacks, bikes, etc. after pilgrims complete the Camino.
• A solution for accessibility for those areas of the Camino inside the old city that involve stairs.
• A solution for bathing, washing.
• A solution for creating and storing stages, which are used during the festival.

For one reason or another, I am not feeling connected with any of these issues, so I kind of went off on a bit of a tangent (although, in a slight stretch, I could argue that my “problem” is related to bathing).

In short, I am proposing a public fountain that would allow pilgrims to wash their hands, faces and feet, and allow the children of Santiago to play. I’m thinking of something that combines pools, channels and waterfalls/streams. The water would be recycled and purified as part of the fountain.

If possible, I’d like to incorporate a way for pilgrims (or anyone really) to add a stone or water or something as a dedication to someone or something. The idea is that a pilgrim could complete their journey and then drop a pebble or small amount of water into the fountain to dedicate their walk to someone or something. I haven’t figured out exactly how to make this happen in a manageable and sanitary way though, so this aspect might have to be dropped.

I’d also like to have the fountain change based on the ambient temperature. When it is warmer outside, there would be more water falls and more opportunities for play in the water. When it is cooler, the fountain “contracts” and becomes more of a place of shelter, quiet bathing and enjoyment of the flow of the water.

I have found a really great site for the fountain — it’s on a fairly steep slope right outside the city walls, across from one of the tourist information offices (for the pilgrims) and next to a public library (for the children and people of Santiago). I spent a good deal of time yesterday mapping out the details of the site and documenting them.

We present our ideas tomorrow. As I said at the beginning, Pablo has very specific ideas regarding this project. So I’m guessing there is at best a 50% chance that I will end up going ahead with my idea. I’ll let you know in my next project post what happens.