Field Trip!

This is the first of two long journeys with our class. We traveled to Southern Spain to discover some very unique cities, take notes, and learn from the past.

Bob and Gisela boarding the plane in Barcelona.

City 1: Madrid

Highlights:

Museos del Prado y Reina Sophia

Churros con chocolate
Plaza Mayor

Clubs

Palacio Real Plaza Mayor

City 2: Toledo

Alcazar

Visiting the medieval brought me right back to my trip to Europe three years ago. Not much has changed since then except for the interior of the cathedral. Three years ago the interior was dark stone. Today the interior is painted white. In my opinion this was not a good change.

I apreciated the look of the natural stone before it was painted. Except for the paint, the city is timeless. The small winding streets, the swords and the look out over the river will likely remain here forever.

City 3: Cordoba

La Mesquita

This place was amazing. With the maze of columns of the older mosque and the newer cathedral built in the center, it was easy to see the mix of two very different cultures in Southern Spain.
City 4: Granada

Alhambra
City 5: Seville

Bull Ring
view from cathedral tower

Project 1: What is a plaza?

The basis of this portion of the project was to gain a better understanding of existing plazas in Barcelona. Falipe and I attempted to analyze the movement of people through three very different plazas. We captured this movement by taking a series of about 100 photographs every second from one location and putting them together in a video. These videos along with some diagrams of the movement of people through the plaza showed us how people respond to different elements in the plaza. For example, people move very differently if they are in a plaza which is very large with few boundaries such as the Forum Plaza than if they are in a plaza which is smaller and walled in by tall buildings such as the Cathedral Plaza.

Here are the links to our videos:

Plaza Catalunya: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6285088724117864257

Cathedral Plaza : http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6490002278646305144

Forum Plaza: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-491868742262637873

Plaza Catalunya

Cathedral Plaza

Forum Plaza

Daytime shot of Cathedral Plaza. The plaza is long and narrow with most of the traffic moving down the center.

Around the Town...

----- Filipe looking like a professional photographer. We have been working hard together on the first assignment. We are trying to analyze plazas in the city in order to get ideas for the designs of Plaça de les Glòries. Our approach has been to photograph each of the plazas at night from at least eight stories high. This has lead to some interesting adventures. (trying to get office managers to let us on to the roof and sneaking past security guards in hotels to get our signiture shot)


12:00 - All the church bells in town were ringing as we looked out over the city from the roof of the Cathedral.




Here is the view outside my window in studio. In case you can't tell, they are playing cricket. It looks like fun. Maybe, I will join them one of these days.


---Sean and Victoria analyzing their plazas.
---- Meg and Ben are hard at work in the studio trying to figure out the topography for our huge model of Plaça de les Glòries.










Agbar Tower.






Random Fireworks show. There's always a party in the streets of Barcelona.

First Impressions

Barcelona is a beautiful city. It is very dense. Packed between the mountains and the sea are roughly four million people. Our first week has been dedicated mostly to exploring the city on foot. Here are some of the pictures I snapped along the way.





The narrow streets of Old Town Barcelona.








View of the monument to Columbus from our morning hike up Monjuic.











We chose to walk up Montjuic instead of taking the gondola.