Getting Caught Up to the Present

It’s Thursday and time to bring you up to speed on the last few days of my European adventure. Carin and I returned Sunday night from London after having tried Easy Jet for the first time. Admittedly, the flights were very cheap…less than $100 each way from Roma to London. The planes were brand new, service was good, and the flight was smooth. However, since Easy Jet typically flies out of the smaller airports in a metropolitan region, to get from our hotel in London to the apartment in Roma it took a subway, a train, a plane, a big bus and a city bus. That makes for a lot of travel in a little bitty amount of time. At least we were together and able to see it as a little mini-adventure after our “vacation” away.

So now we are in crunch time for my school work in Roma. My final review is this coming Monday (how could it already be here?) and my partner Ron and I feel like we have a lot of work to do but are in general in pretty good shape. If you do the math, we are currently in week 5 of the program…but that’s a little deceiving. We basically had the first week here “off” because we were always doing tours, visiting museums or gallivanting around the city. Weeks 2-3 were dedicated to selecting and analyzing the sites from which we could choose for our projects and determining who our partners were to be. That means that only in the last 2 weeks (weeks 4 and 5) have we been designing buildings.

Last week, our review was a little rough. Our concept for the project was a bit week and the execution was so-so (or so it was said…I’m not convinced!) Even though we had gotten good feedback from our professor all along, it was clear that some things needed to be tweaked. Now in the last week Ron and I have re-invented our concept, done a series of pretty detailed 3D massing diagrams, permutated our options to practically infinity, and decided on a scheme with which to proceed. Not bad for 3 days work. The review today with our professor was much more positive this time around and it seems we may be on the right track to developing a pretty interesting building. Look out Monday, here we come.

Essentially, our final idea is to design a museum of contemporary architecture in Rome. While here, we have been simultaneously impressed by the vast amount of ancient architecture and information available to us and disappointed by the amount of information on what is going on in Rome now architecturally. Our museum, called Roma Ora! (Rome Now!) will explore the architecture of the last 50 years in Rome (the post-fascist period) and provide a series of galleries which can display “recent” architecture, architecture of the present, and architecture of the future. We see the building as being able to host design competitions for urban infill projects in Roma, the fruits of which can then be displayed in the galleries. Indeed, we feel we are filling a gaping hole in the fabric of Roma’s continuum of information with our proposal. That’s the brief and skinny…now let’s talk about some more site seeing!

The Colluseum

Yesterday we were given the morning “off” from studio and able to go out and visit something we had not yet had a chance to see. My ‘crew’ and I decided to head to the Colluseum, once again a major landmark which requires little introduction. To someone who now lives in the 21^st century, my initial impression was that it looked much smaller than I expected. However, an arena able to seat 50,000-70,000 people is surely nothing to scoff at and it did impress. It was really amazing to see the under-floor labyrinth first hand…pictures do not do it justice. Its hard to imagine gladiators battling various animals and other men to the death there for the entertainment of the population. These photos share a little of the impression I was left with but do not really tell the whole story. You really do have to “see it to believe it”. Another landmark DOWN!

Today we head to Tivoli to see Hadrian’s Villa, yet another extremely important historical site. I’ll let you know how that goes tomorrow. I also need to let you know about going to the Castel Sant'Angelo the other evening for a night-time romp around Roma's main fort! What fun! Ciao.