Friday, April 1, 2011

One Quiet Week And One To Make A Video!

So, next week we travel to Southern Italy for a few days, so I figured I would get caught up on blogging before that. I'm combining the last two weeks into one post (instead of the last three) because this week, in fact just yesterday, deserves its own post.

Anyway, we had a pretty quiet first week back after spring break. We were assigned the first of three parts of our final studio project (which we're now complete two and assigned the third), which was to draw as accurately and beautifully as possible a facade of a palazzo or courtyard that we were assigned somewhere in Rome. I think they all came out really well actually and I'm happy with my work and the building I was assigned (it was one of the easier ones to draw). The second part of the project was to take a big sheet of paper out to the building and spend several hours there analyzing it, mainly through different types of diagrams, treating the paper like a giant sketchbook. That was due today and that didn't turn out quite as well, at first. We spent an hour today overlapping all of our drawings on the sheet and they actually look a lot better. The third part of the project we were told today and will be officially assigned when we return from our trip. It will be to take the information we received from analysis and, using the exact same site, conditions, and dimensions, design a modern facade with contemporary materials. I'm looking forward to it.

We also did have one site visit in the first week we were back from spring break, we visited the Lateran Library, property of the Vatican and situated next to St. John Lateran Church. It was a great visit because it is a pretty modern building in an older area, but because of the design and materials it works really well. We spent some time there, inside and out, then visited the church (which a bunch of us had already been to), but I'll just let the pictures do the talking.






The weekend after that was an interesting one. On Saturday, Justin, Speer, Tim and I went up to Villa Borghese to hang out in the park. Well, we ended up renting a four person bike/car thing for an hour and had an absolute blast. We raced some Italian kids in another one, gave little kids high fives as we drove past them, and did a little off roading too. We walked around the area for a bit more too and then started to make our way home and eventually ended up visiting Santa Susanna, the national church of the U.S. in Rome and stopped  by in front of the U.S. Embassy on our way back too. On Sunday, we decided to try and go to mass at St. Peter's, but that didn't work out. We got to St. Peter's early on to look around and when the previous mass had ended we tried to go to the area designated for mass. We were told we couldn't enter and when we tried to tell them we were there for mass they told us it was in the Square, it wasn't. Instead, after standing outside waiting for mass for 5 or so minutes the Pope came to his window and gave a 15 audience to everybody in the square. No mass, but and audience with the Pope, I'll take it.










The next week, we had a visiting professor, Stanley Hallet, come do give us a photgraphy workshop. We ended up getting a week long assignment in which we were split up into groups of three and each group was assigned a piazza somewhere in Rome. We had to visit the piazza for several hours and, through photographs, document the space, the people, the architecture, and the experience. We then had to organize the pictures, add music to them, and make a video that represented both the space and our experience while visiting it. They all came out very well and hopefully I'll be able to post the video on here soon. Anyway, that's all for now, another post coming VERY soon.

UPDATE: Here is the link to our video!

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