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.