Tuesday was one of the most interesting days of the entire program. First, we had a tour of the newly opened Pilgrimage Museum led by the architect Manuel Gallego. Unfortunately, my photos don’t really do the architecture justice, but the museum had some of the best materials and finishes and some of the nicest architecture that we saw during the entire trip. Highlights:

• The museum is a “rehabilitation” of a former bank built in the 1940s. The facade remains, but almost everything else has been changed, including the one side that features a non-reflective glass wall that bends and twists around to create the skylight.
• The spaces are interconnected and open into each other in interesting ways. The interior is divided into layers both by the original architecture, but also by the additions which create additional layers that separate the exterior from the functional pieces (HVAC and the like) from the interior exhibit spaces.
• From within the museum there is a perfectly framed view of the cathedral through the skylight. It makes me wonder if I will ever understand design well enough to predict exactly what someone would see when they look up in a finished project over 5 years later. Amazing!
• A truly lovely cherry-paneled cafeteria that is at the height of the skylight and plays with circular portholes to create a playful environment.
• Incredible details throughout (see the photo of the handrails as an example).
• The discovery of a river and the ruins of the original wall around the city of Santiago in the basement. We got to see the water (it’s not very picturesque, so I didn’t include my photo).

Immediately after the tour of the Pilgrimage Museum we went up to the cathedral for some behind-the-scenes information and tour of the facade of the cathedral, which is currently being restored. I don’t have photos because we couldn’t take pictures of the parts that we hadn’t seen before, but you’ll have to trust me that it was really cool to go up on the scaffolding to see the sculptures and imagine their original polychrome state.

A short afternoon of working followed. (Two days before the final crit, two hours of studio time really isn’t enough…)

Then, in the evening we got to listen to the lecture by Hua Li from the School of Architecture at Southeast University in Nanjing, China. I know very little about China (aside from the really basic stuff) and even less about its architecture, so the lecture was thoroughly fascinating and Ms. Li was an excellent speaker. The topic of the lecture was “Traveling of Architectural Ideas: From the ‘West’ to Modern China” and focused on architecture since the early twentieth century. Specifically, it discussed how different “modern” architecture is in China than in the west due to its vastly different introduction. Specifically, in the West architectural styles of the twentieth century were often reactions to earlier or somewhat concurrent styles (e.g., Modernism as a reaction to Expressionism, Post-modernism as a reaction to Modernism, etc.). In China, the introduction of classical architecture came at nearly the same time as modernism, so the two were intermixed. We also learned about “Chinese inherent style” (a reaction to Western style where Beaux Arts technology was used to create buildings that had characteristics of traditional Chinese architecture) and the National Style, which was manufactured to represent socialism in opposition to the capitalistic philosophies of the West. Also, interestingly, Post-modernism was (is) widely adopted in China in part due to the timing of the translation of 10 post-modern books in the 1980s and 1990s.

I wish that architectural programs included more information about Eastern architecture. It’s a fascinating subject that just isn’t discussed in most basic history classes.