I'm going on a trip and I'm going to bring...

Ok so, this entry is long overdue but we had the week of studio madness (read: no sleep) and our Internet has been out at studio since Thursday. After St. Peter’s Basilica on Monday, we went back to the Vatican on Tuesday morning to see the Vatican Museums which includes Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. The museum is spread out in series of rooms that are beautiful, architectural, and museum-worthy as the artwork and sculptures on display. Finally we did see the Sistine Chapel but you are not allowed to photograph or even talk in the room because the gases/moisture will damage the walls over time.

Tuesday night, Wednesday day and night, and Thursday morning were all consumed with finishing up our studio projects for our review on Thursday afternoon. Christine and I worked really well together and even though we were designing and 3-D modeling right up until early Thursday morning, we were able to crank our presentation somewhat in time. We did have a history walk that morning but we had all just stayed up all night; at one point we stopped and sat and I think a tourist walking by took a picture of our teacher lecturing to a group of sleeping students.

The reviews went pretty well. We had a fantastic outside reviewer named Nino (I can’t remember where he’s from) and he was very perceptive to our individual concepts and what we were attempting to do. He gave us great feedback about both what we had produced, different directions we could have taken, and what we should look to do in future projects.

Saunders kept referring to it as a “good two-week exercise” and I agree but it was rough because had to interpret our Baroque analysis, apply it in a contemporary manner, learn the basics of scripting, script (easier said than done), design a landscape, and prepare our presentation in a relatively short amount of time. Christine and I had flip-flopped between scripting and designing “real architecture” and in the end we found the balance where scripting helped us design something we never would have come up with before. We had studied this curving staircase by Guarino Guarini in Turin so we used the idea of a step or module that follows a curve/path to create a landscape where the system forms retaining walls, seating, the bar and restaurant furniture, and an amphitheater. Right after the review, I went to bed and slept my 12 hours until Italian the next morning.

our Internet keeps cutting out now, so I'll post pictures later but we're gone from tomorrow morning until Friday night on our trip to the hilltowns (Montepulcio, Pienza, Siena, Urbino, Abruzzo, and Assisi). I absolutely cannot wait, the Italian countryside is going to be so beautiful, we're all going to whip out our fall wardrobes, and there will be time to wander and sketch. So I'll update when we get back, off to pack, ciao!