Ladies and gentlemen, hang on for a LONG series of reports. Spain was utterly fantastic (even more so since I can speak passable Spanish), so there's a ton of things to show.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2006

For the third time in a month, we board a train from Saintes to Bordeaux. Fortunately, this one is at a much more manageable noontime, rather than at 7 in the morning. From Bordeaux, we fly out to Barcelona aboard the smallest jet I've ever personally been on. Three seats per row... total. One on the left, two on the right. And the plane itself was pretty empty. Surprisingly, that little fella made one of the smoothest landings I've ever been on as well. I suppose good things can come in small packages.

See? Small plane.

It was evening when we landed. Right about dinnertime, in fact. But if there's one thing we discovered quickly, it's that in Spain, dinner doesn't start until 10. At night. And some people don't really go out to eat until midnight! To keep from starving, though, people go out and eat tapas before dinner.

Tapas comes in many forms and varies depending on the style and region. In essence, they're the Spanish version of dim sum. You typically have platters of different types of snacks (this example, which was one of my favorite tapas places, has an assortment of appetizers on breads, so there'd be stuff like BBQ chicken with minced onions, melted cheese with salmon on the bread, and even desert type snacks). You pay based on how many you order. It's a decently cheap meal, actually.

Later on, we went to my professor, Gerald's favorite hangout place in Barcelona, a bar/restaurant named Margarita Blues.

Here's the decor. Get a Margarita Blue for only 4 euro. It's pretty good, actually.

We didn't eat dinner until almost midnight. Then we went back to our hostel (where the AC didn't work) and tried to go to sleep, despite the lack of ventilation in the room and the relatively high (especially for that time of year) temperatures.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2006

This would be the first of seven consecutive days of class. Fortunately, class is pretty fun when you're traveling. Today's theme: medieval Barcelona, literally the heart and core of the city. The first place we went to was Barcelona's Archeology Museum.

Here's a photo inside that I got before some lady told us "NO FOTOS!!!" then stalked us throughout the exhibit. Yeah, they're total camera nazis, and my friend Jason even decided to mess around with them by pretending to take a picture or have his camera out so that the security guards would follow him, enabling the rest of us to snap photos whenever we wanted.

Outside the exit, there's a nifty little square that relatively active. This is medieval Barcelona, part of the area that remained walled in until just before the 1900s.

Next we went to the Barcelona Cathedral, which was nearby.

Inside, they had ducks with mohawks.

AFLAC, punk!!!

The cathedral is very beautiful inside, with an extremely warm tone from the lighting and its effect on the stone.

A shot at some gorgeous rib vaulting.

Visitors can take an elevator (which looks like it came straight out of the Tower of Terror) to the roof. So I did.

Following our visit to the Cathedral, we roamed the medieval streets a little bit until we came out to a larger street that cut through the neighborhood along a major axis.

There, we saw a woman with a huge dog.

By now it was time for lunch. After lunch, we realized that it was siesta. Meaning pretty much nothing was open, because the city is basically taking a nap. And even if they weren't, stores were still closed, to reopen later in the afternoon.

We roamed the streets some more, simply exploring the city and enjoying ourselves.

We passed by a nifty marketplace with a roof structure designed by architect Henry Miralles. It was pretty nice. We tried to go inside, but since it was still siesta, the security guard would not allow us. Interesting culture, eh?

Gerald opted to lead us through non-admission-required sites instead. Thus, we plunged back into the core of Barcelona and explored the backalleyways. Even though they were dungy and sort of shady looking, I found a certain sense of charm to them. Maybe that's just he result of being in a new city, and everything looks fantastic.

As we approached dusk, we made our way to the waterfront. Situated along the Mediterranean, Barcelona isn't that unlike Los Angeles. Only it's on the east coast (of Spain). This marked the first time I had ever been on any eastern coast.

The waterfront was very nice, and as you can see, we enjoyed ourselves.

Another shot of the area.

Some boats docked up.

And finally, as we returned to Las Ramblas (Barcelona's most famous shopping boulveard; it's a pretty big tourist attraction), we found this disturbing street performer with two dogs that had been cruelly dressed up like so. This is one case where I think PETA should have intervened.

With that, the school day was over, and the night was ours to explore. But I don't really have pictures of that, plus when you combine "college students" with "night time" with "hot European city," you're probably going to get Not Safe for Work photos anyway. ;)

Tomorrow: more modern stuff, including Richard Meier.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2006

We kicked off the day by heading to Palau Guell, a building designed by Antoni Gaudi! YAY! Gaudi! Everyone loves him, right???

Nope. Building under restoration. Come back next year. =(

Okay then, next destination: the Barcelona Museum for Contemporary Art, designed by Richard Meier (I know one person this list doing a happy dance as she reads this). This is your typical Meier building, Corbusier-influenced, using white cladding material organized on a grid, with glass and metal and play of geometric shapes to create a pure looking architecture. It's also very diagrammatic. You enter toward the left side of the building. A corridor crosses your path, running along the length of the building. Exhibition rooms open up off this main corridor. A set of Meier ramps brings visitors up through the various floors, as can be seen through the glass of the next photo. If you don't want to take the ramp, you can take the stairs, enclosed in the white cylinder behind that rectangular plane over the left side of the front of the building.

This would be the reference photo to part of the above description.

Check out the louvers providing sunshade, as well as the obvious play on 3D geometric shapes that is a trademark of Meier's design.

The interior receives plenty of light from the clear and open glazing. The ramp penetrates this atrium-like space and allows for nice play of shadows when the sun is out.

A little bit like this.

Here's another view of the main open space.

Inside one of the exhibits, I found my homeboys from China! =D

There's an outdoor deck over the entrance area on the second level. I found this shot nicely capped the sky over the building form, turning it into almost a ceiling.

Here's the plaza it overlooks, along with my friend Yusheen sketching. The plaza itself is very active, because skateboarders flock to this area to practice tricks and just ride. I'm sure Meier didn't intend the plaza to be used this way, but the way I see it, it's active, which makes it a lot better than most public spaces in the U.S.

Albert, meet glass windows and metal louvers. Glass windows and metal louvers, meet Albert.

After lunch, we went to another art exhibition space called the CCCB. I don't remember what that stands for, but it did have an interesting glass facade that reflected the rooftop of the rest of the city. That was actually pretty cool.

Oddly enough, while the above building is to the left, the entry is actually to the right, down an inconspicuous ramp to an entry vestibule underground. It was funny that the designer chose to "hide" the entrance in this way, rather than boldly advertise it as most architects would be apt to do. Perhaps he or she was working with a motif of discovery or exploration?

Finally, after a long day of sketching, photographing, and doing general study abroad architecture field study work, everyone is tired and sleepy. Instantly, this turns into the newest modern art display: "Lazy American Students."

Tomorrow would feature an excursion down La Diagonal, a major street that cuts through the gridded part of Barcelona at a diagonal (no surprise here), a tour at a really, really neat architecture office, and yet another Jean Nouvel building--this one arguably the most phallic building in the world...

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2006

Today was centered mostly along Avenue Diagonal, a large diagonal street that cuts through the grid of non-medieval Barcelona. Our first stop was the most phallic building we'd encountered yet, Jean Nouvel's Torre Agbar (Agbar Tower).

See? You can see it from miles away.

A closer look reveals a LOT of angled glass louvers and colored panels behind them that are meant to represent a volcano erupting upwards and cooling as it ascends.

Here's a close-up of the louvers and the cladding system, which is actually pretty groovy once you get up close.

The building next to Torre Agbar was interesting as well.

Inside the lobby, bunched window openings create interesting effects. The window shapes personally reminded me of Tetris.

The entrance is covered by an arching shade structure that seems to rise up from the ground.

Holy giant phallus, Batman!

Then we walked down Avenida Diagonal, where I found several interesting buildings, some under construction. A quick side note: a lot of the area we passed used to be industrial wasteland, but in the boom the Barcelona has experienced since, basically the Olympics, this has also been reclaimed and redeveloped.

Here's a building with multi-colored panel systems.

This enormously tall building has an enormously protruding cantilever section as well.

We arrived at an architecture office run by a friend of our professor. Estudio Mariscal consists of a lot of buildings loosely clustered around various courtyards. The owner rents out a lot of buildings to various artisans and interior designers who do work in the buildings that Mariscal designs, forming a really nice symbiotic relationship. The architecture firm itself isn't just restricted to architecture; they're jacks of all trades. They do interior design, web layouts, graphics, signage, marketing, videos, and furniture. In fact, if I were to run a firm myself, I think I'd do it like Mariscal does. Needless to say, the studio environment is incredibly fun and enthusiastic.

After a three hour studio visit, we headed toward Parc Diagonal Mar, situated near the waterfront.

Here's a look at some of the structures in the park. Vines are meant to grow across the cables on top.

There's been a lot of apartment development around the area as well. Again, this used to be all industrial less than two decades ago.

Nifty magic hour shot.

I wanted to climb these, but they were a little too high.

Some bold architecture along the waterfront.

The Barcelona Forum is a complex of several buildings used as convention areas.

This one had a cool woven skin system. Totally appealed to the "archi-nerd" in me.

Nice cantilever. The framing plays around with the sense of scale and perspective, in my opinion.

We found the Herzog & Demurron building we were looking for, and it turned out to be a disappointment. We universally agreed that this was nowhere near as good as the other H&D buildings we'd studied.

And now, here are some nifty night shots I took while at the Forum.

I like the mix of lighting and colors.

This giant monument is an actual solar collector and is meant as a large public gathering plaza.

A long exposure saturates existing colors and really brings out the evening hues.

Here's another shot looking back at the big solar collector thingy.

Afterwards, a building grew out of my head.

Then we took the metro back to our hostel. This was an impressively clean station, so I had to document it.

We went out to a restaurant called The Attic that night, since a friend of ours had mentioned it was a nice place. It was, but here's a photo of me and my professor, Gerald, to end the update.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2006

This was the day I'd been looking forward to all trip: GAUDI DAY! One day. Three destinations. One incredible architect. On this amazing day, we would be visiting Casa Batllo, La Padreira (Casa Mila), and the big granddaddy, la Sagrada Familia!

First off, I thought I'd include a photo of Las Ramblas, the main famous tourist-y shopping street in Barcelona that literally never closes. You can walk down this thing at 4:00 AM and there will be people selling flowers. It's crazy.

Here's Plaza Catalunya, which is one of the larger main plazas in the city.

Casa Batllo! It's organic, fishy, bony, and unlike most any other house ever designed. Save a few other houses by Gaudi.

Fish bones...

The crazy thing is that this was a normal looking house that Gaudi REMODELED. Of course, he was the hottest architect in Spain at the time and the epitome of modernism for the Spanish, but still. He renovated the house to look like this.

Here's an interior lamp. And the organic feel won't be stopping anytime soon.

I think I found the only place in the house that has straight lines: an atrium in the middle that lets natural light into the house. And even then, Gaudi ornaments the walls so that the straight lines don't really appear obvious.

Gaudi was among the first to incorporate hyperbolic arches into his designs. Here's a hyperbolic hallway (that sounds so sci-fi... "hyperbolic hallway").

Outside on the roof, there are various sculptures.

And here's me at the back of the house.

Before our next Gaudi building, we took a detour at the Tapies Foundation, complete with really weird wire mess exterior.

After lunch, it was onto La Padreira, Gaudi's last completed building. This apartment complex features more of Gaudi's organic, non-straight, totally dynamic architecture.

The building looks sculpted more than built.

And another angle of the facade.

This is an example of the interior of a sample apartment, made to look like it would in the early 20th century. It was quite luxurious.

The most distinct feature of the building is the roof, which swoops and rises dramatically and is definitely NOT handicap-friendly.

Here's a few of the street below.

And me atop the building because I know you can't get enough of me......

The roof elements sort of reminded me of helmets. Again, the show off Gaudi's purely creative artistic side and his fascination with organic shapes.

Here's another photo that could probably go in a postcard or book.

Finally, it was time for the grand finale. The super cathedral. The one and only Templo de la Sagrada Familia.

Neither words nor pictures can adequately describe how monumentally overwhelming this is. It is HUGE. GIGANTIC. Heck, I'm going to have to start inventing words. It's GIGASMIC. MAGNORMOUS. TOWERANNICAL. Just an absolutely incredible sight, and one of the few times I've truly been blown away. Where my expectations were not only met, but completely obliterated like a rookie boxer facing Mike Tyson in his prime.

This was our first sight of the building as we came out of the metro stop. IT'S STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTIONS!!!

This is the Nativity facade. Along with the first eight towers, it was completed before Gaudi died in 1926 (construction on the cathedral began in 1882). It is richly adorned and does things stone shouldn't be able to do. To me, the stone almost looks alive, which is just ridiculous.

So much detail and articulation. It's not hard to comprehend why, after 125 years, the cathedral is only half done (inactivity during the forty-some-odd years of the Franco regime helped a lot).

My friend, Rachel, and I are amazed to be in the presence of something so incredible.

On the other side, the facade of the Passion is a lot less complete, although even when it is complete, it will not be as complex as the opposite side. Gaudi never got to finish this, so today, another artist is crafting it based on Gaudi's rough notes, as well as personal artistic touch, of course.

This thing is TALL. Those towers are at least 300 feet tall, and they are all made of stone (reinforced with rebar, I believe; Gaudi was among the first to understand the implications of such a technological development as rebar, which may explain how he could dream up a cathedral that, when completed, will be 600 feet tall. And I'm not kidding about that figure).

Okay, here's an interior construction photo that begins to give you a grasp of how huge this is. The scaffolding gives you a bit of a sense of the human scale. The columns? Massive. The roof? Really tall. Actually, that's what they're working on right now, because technically, the church still doesn't have one. If it rains, the inside's going to get wet. Also, note the tree structure of the columns. Tree structures are still considered high tech and modern today, but Gaudi was using them way back nearly a hundred years ago! It's a testament to his foresight.

Here's a look at construction from above. We took an elevator to the top of one of the towers, and frankly, you don't want to be climbing 300 feet of spiral staircases anyway.

Me. Magic hour. Gaudi greatness. I'm in awe.

Here's the inside of one of the bell towers. The stairway spirals around this central space, which is like something out of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, only on steroids. Of course, the stairway itself is less than three feet wide... you can't really fit two people through it.

At some point, the stair splits off and turns into this tightly wound, very claustrophobic and acrophobic stair case that is supposed to mimic the spiral of a snail.

Sagrada Familia was so amazing that I came back on Saturday just to look at it again. I definitely plan on returning, if nothing than to see this completed (hopefully by 2026, they say, but I'm realistically giving myself a timetable of 50 years before construction is complete, just to be safe).

We end with a night photo of Casa Batllo. In conclusion: Antoni Gaudi is amazing.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2006

This is going to be much shorter. I promise. Only 13 photos!! Aren't you proud of me? Hello...?

Today's metro stop was Espanya. Then we headed southwesterly in a direction towards a large hill that overlooks the city. This photo looks back toward the plaza that bears the same name as our metro stop.

Our first target? None other than the Barcelona Pavilion, by Mies Van der Rohe. An icon of modernism, this minimalistic, sleek structure is another building we've studied to death in school, so to see it in person was really neat.

Minimalism at its best. This building is all clean lines and materials.

It's very diagrammatic too. As though all Mies wanted to do was put several rods and planes together.

Here's the interior, complete with Miesian chairs we could not sit on.

And here's postcard-type photo of the Pavilion reflected on the pond that it technically includes.

Afterwards, we went across the street to a museum called the Caixa Forum. It's got an interesting tree structure as an entrance marker.

The museum is a cluster of buildings, and the roof is technically accessible, yielding great views of the surrounding buildings. Then we were told by a security guard that we were not allowed to be out there, thereby making the roof technically INaccessible. =(

Here's the entrance lobby. It was redesigned by Arata Isozaki, a famous Japanese modernist architect.

After lunch, we headed toward the Palau National, which is actually a natural history museum, I think. We didn't go in, but the building was pretty to look at.

It's got that whole Beaux Arts fancy stonework feel to it.

And then there's the view overlooking the city, which is fantastic.

Finally, we come upon Calatrava's Communications Tower, the project that made him famous and really launched his career. It's pretty cool. But we'll have more Calatrava coming up on the next update.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2006

Back in Barcelona, and with a free weekend (finally!) after seven consecutive days of classes, I decided to use this day to just set out and explore the city. The highlight of the day was visiting Parc Guell, a large urban nature park that Gaudi worked on for several years until the client ran out of money. Originally meant to be a modern green space for the elite, it was eventually given to the city.

To get to the park after getting off the nearest subway stop, I had to climb a steep hill. STEEP. Shades of San Francisco. In fact, they actually put escalators near the end of the street as you approach the park. Most likely because even Europeans might be gasping a bit after ascending all of this.

The high point of Parc Guell offers the best view of the rest of the city. Here you can see the Mediterranean, Torre Agbar, and Sagrada Familia. Notice how tall Gaudi's cathedral already is. Now imagine it twice as tall once everything is complete. Scary.

Apparently, the locals have a humorous take on those who visit the area.

Here's a super max zoomed in photo of Sagrada Familia as taken from Parc Guell (hence the graininess).

The same of Torre Agbar.

And this is where I took the above photos from. It's a monument on top of a figurative Mount Olive meant to evoke where Jesus was crucified. Gaudi, after all, was a very religious man.

Here's another look.

Now, the main attraction at Parc Guell is the lizard statue. As you can see, it's not that big. No one told me that. I thought this thing was HUGE! In the books, it looks like it's a massive monument, or something like that. In real life? It's a fountain. And small. Oh well.

This is like the official mascot of the city, too. If there's one image or icon that symbolizes Barcelona in all the tourist material given out or sold, it's this little fella.

Naturally, I had to get a photo with this famous celebrity.

Gaudi also designed this interesting rocky bridge. Just another example of his quirky but ingenious style.

And one last shot of the lizard.