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.