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.