Ever wonder what it’d be like if the grass was purple instead of green? Well I have; the thought often comes to mind when doing yard work. I decided to take a photo while mowing the lawn today to compliment a witty “Living the Dream” post, but decided to change focus after playing with the hue adjuster in Photoshop.
I am back in Cedar Rapids for the summer, following a stimulating semester abroad in Rome and my own travels beyond. (Blog posts regarding those travels still to come…) I am interning at a prominent local architecture firm in downtown Cedar Rapids. Today was my first day; I believe it went well, but I must say I was quite disappointed in the total lack of activity around downtown. Whenever I am away for a long period of time I seem to re-envision downtown as a much more bustling place. Obviously the city center took a major hit from the 2008 flood, and a recent article in the Gazette explains ground level tenant space has been slower to reoccupy; but even so, it’s a bit discouraging when at 10am there are maybe five pedestrians out, just scattered traffic, and several premium on-street parking spaces vacant. (And people still think we have a parking problem) Downtown has a lot of good things going for it right now, and coming on over the next couple of years, so hopefully the situation will improve dramatically. Time will tell.
Once I get my travel posts written, I look forward to shifting focus back to CR. My first topic to tackle will be the controversial proposal to close 2nd Ave for PCI’s new medical mall (a letter to the elected’s could be called for). Also I plan to follow the renovation work to take place at the Veterans Memorial Building, now that City Hall will return there for certain, as well as new developments coming on board like the new convention center and the massive US Courthouse now under construction. Another matter that has recently caught my attention is the on-going demolition of flooded homes in Time Check. It’s time for another great summer in Cedar Rapids.
This past Saturday I went to the outskirts of Rome to check out IKEA. Just as interesting to see the inner city of Rome, are the contemporary suburban areas. The store is located just outside the A90 ring road near Anagnina, the last stop on the Metro A line, so it took a while to get there. A number of bus lines run from the metro station to the shopping center where IKEA is. The store was about what I expected it to be (after all, they in America) but I did enjoy seeing a European big box store.
I especially liked the parking lot, which had natural “green” parking spaces instead of pavement. While the driving areas were still asphalt, the actual spaces were left as turf. A plastic honeycomb shaped structure is laid down and filled with gravel and topsoil, permitting short turf to grow. This reduces storm water runoff, partially filters water as it permeates into the ground, and is much more attractive. It also allows trees to be planted between spaces without needing large landscape islands.
I haven’t looked into cost comparisons between this system and all-pavement. While I imagine these systems require some degree of regular maintenance, it seems like they’d be much more sustainable (lifetime and environmentally) than all asphalt, which gets cracked and uneven quickly, needing to be entirely repaved after 10 years. Alternatively I’ve also seen parking lots here with the spaces paved in brick or pavers, to control settling from the weight of vehicles in addition to some permeability.
On Friday I went to the Cimitero del Verona (Verona Cemetery), when I was close by on a visit to my studio site at Porta Maggiore. It is the primary municipal cemetery in Rome and opened in 1812. It covers an immense area (see map) and is organized in a grid layout. Toward the front of the cemetery the blocks were filled with various smaller monuments and family tombs. Further in, entire blocks are occupied by large mausoleum buildings, two or three stories high. Built at different times, there are a variety of different styles. The newer ones are pretty plane, resembling a typical contemporary building in Rome. Inside are levels of individual tombs accessed by staircases. I was intrigued by how many of these, essentially buildings, have been built solely for burials. It is literally a city for the dead. The cemetery was very peaceful to walk through on a sunny day. I occasionally saw a grounds keeper or another visitor, but otherwise there were not very many people there. See photos here.
We had a four day weekend in Rome for Easter, so a friend and I decided to take a short trip to Siena Friday through Saturday (April 2-3). Siena is a small city in the Tuscany region, about 250 km north of Rome. It was a very relaxing trip and the weather cooperated nicely. We spent a lot of time sitting in Piazza del Campo, the major square in the old town and famous for the twice-annual horse race held there. The irregular semicircular piazza (photo below) slopes down to one point so people gather there and sit and lay down, unlike most piazzas that are flat and have few places to sit. There were hundreds of people there during the day enjoying the sun, but at night activity is mostly limited to the perimeter restaurants, bars and cafes.
On the piazza is the Palazzo Publico, originally a town hall built in around 1300, with the Torre del Mangia campanile. We went up the tower for great views of Siena and the Tuscan countryside in all directions. The Palazzo is now a museum, which we went through too. Most interesting was a temporary exhibit on Bauhaus architecture which included several drawings by Walter Gropius and other Bauhaus and modernist architects, plus a number of architectural models of their works.
We stayed at a campground located outside the old city, which rented small trailer cabins. It was actually quite new and nice – and inexpensive. It was a pretty nice campground with its own restaurant and bar. Two bus routes ran between the city and the campground, but on Saturday we decided to walk back into the city instead. We happened upon Basilica dell’Osservanza, a modest brick church and monastery standing alone in the countryside. Originally built around 1490, it was rebuilt after being almost entirely destroyed in World War II. The exterior brickwork was attractive on its own, with the cupola (roof tip of bell tower) entirely in brick as well. Inside was small and minimal, and still regularly in use. It was refreshing to see. A few other churches we saw in Siena also had more modest interiors.
Architecturally almost all of Siena’s old buildings have brick facades, instead of stucco like in Rome. This was much more attractive, without crumbling, dirty stucco covering the real walls. In more contemporary areas surrounding the old city, the buildings are pretty similar to those in Rome and other cities in Italy. Overall Siena is a very attractive, pleasant city. The surrounding Tuscany landscape was the most beautiful scenery I have seen so far in Italy (though the weather and time of season probably had something to do with it). I really enjoyed walking through the countryside and getting to explore the small, charming city as well. It was a great short break from school and Rome. See all photos here.
The second half of spring break my friend and I were in Paris. We flew from Prague very early in the morning on Thursday (March 18), and arrived into the city a little after 8am at Gare du Nord (North Station), a few blocks east of our hostel, located probably a mile or two north of the river and the center of the city. After finding the hostel we took the Metro “downtown” near most of the major museums, sites and tourist attractions Paris has to offer.
First impression of Paris – it is enormous and a little disorienting if you don’t have a solid sense of direction where you are. Not really what I had been expecting, the different sites seem much more disjointed. Unlike Rome where the central ancient city is a deceivingly small area, Paris is just the opposite with everything further apart than one might expect from a map view. The overall scale of buildings and blocks in Paris are of course much larger than in Rome. Certainly more orderly (considering sventramento, the later slicing through of wide avenues through the city), but more difficult to comprehend at a human scale due to its urban massiveness. There seems to be less hierarchy between major and minor streets, so it is not as easy to orient oneself to a particular prominent thoroughfare. An aspect of Rome I may have criticized before, the juxtaposition of ancient and newer neighborhoods of contrasting scales and configurations, is actually quite useful for someone unfamiliar to be able to tell distinctly when moving between different portions of the city.
On our first day in Paris we went to a few of the major sites: Notre Dame, the Pantheon, and of course the Eiffel Tower. The spatial quality around the Eiffel Tower was not what I expected. It seemed much less grand on the ground than I had imagined. We walked up to the second level (not the very top) which still provided a great view of the city in all directions.
Friday morning we met up with my friend and classmate Jackson who was also visiting Paris that week and actually staying in the same hostel. We took a regional train out to visit the Palace of Versailes. The gardens were massive but unfortunately not in bloom yet as we visited in mid March. I enjoyed the Hall of Mirrors. After a few hours Spencer and I returned into the city for lunch and a visit to the Louvre. The museum was enormous, but we actually didn’t stay there very long. We then took a long Metro ride out to see Parc de La Villette that I wanted to check out. It is a large contemporary park (1980s) designed by Bernard Tschumi, with 35 “follies” – large red cubes placed on a grid throughout the park that are all deconstructed into various forms and functions. Like most places, it was not quite as I had imagined, but it was certainly interesting to experience.
On our last day Saturday we visited the Pompidou Centre. I enjoyed the contemporary exhibits much more than those in the Louvre. For lunch we ate at a cafe nearby. On our way to the bus stop to the airport, we stopped at La Défense. We flew out of Paris Beauvais, a very small rural airport, and got back to Rome around midnight.
I’m glad I made it to Paris. Given our short time there and the massive size of Paris, we mostly had to stick to sightseeing and didn’t really get to explore much of the city as a whole. Knowing very little French and being generally fatigued after a week and a half of traveling were also factors. Overall it was a good week though and we were able to see a lot of interesting and significant places. See all my Paris photos here.
Spring break was three weeks ago now, following a week-long class trip to the Veneto region of Italy. My friend Spencer came to visit and we traveled to Prague and Paris during the week with a couple days in Rome at both ends.
We flew from Rome to Prague Monday afternoon (March 15) and were there through early Thursday morning. Despite colder temps and cloudy skies, first impressions of Prague were good. The Prague Airport is nice and new and transportation into the city was easy and inexpensive. A 26 CZK (about $1.50) transit ticket got us a city bus ride and Metro trip to the city center where we were staying. Prague is a transit-intensive city with several metro lines, bus routes and surface tram lines. Like everywhere else I’ve visited in Europe, the bus and tram systems use the honor system where passengers must validate a transit ticket when they board, but oddly the subway metro system also uses this form of payment, instead of a typical access-controlled system with turnstiles or automatic gates. It was quite unusual to be able to just walk freely into the metro. Similar to Rome, a standard ticket permits 75 minutes of unlimited travel.
On Tuesday we walked around the city center hitting most of the significant places and sites. The city is large but the old center is quite compact with everything being pretty walkable. Except near the train terminal, everywhere we went was well-maintained and clean. Streets were mostly asphalt or cobblestone with sidewalks paved in decorative cube stones. The urban layout is much more consistent and contingent than in Rome where medieval streets mesh with modern wide thoroughfares and areas are disjointed by ancient ruins. Prague’s architecture is definitely distinct from Rome and more quintessential European. The majority of building facades are painted and pastel tones, making for a very colorful city.
Worth mentioning – the Czech Cubism Museum, housed in the House of the Black Madonna (top photo), the first and most prominent example of cubist architecture in Prague, built in 1912. The exhibit included cubist paintings, sculpture, furniture, and architectural drawings. Very interesting to learn more about an architectural and art movement so specific to Czech, and Prague in particular.
Another major site was the Prague Castle, an enormous, eclectic compound looking over the city of Prague. Dating back to the 9th century AD, several additions of the centuries has made it one of the largest castles in the world, including the Gothic cathedral, St. Vitus. We walked up to the castle, which permits fantastic views of the city, and walk through the outside, not actually going in. We did stop in the cathedral, which was my first Gothic cathedral to experience in person. The space was incredible. The interior height is emphasized by the structural expression of the Gothic style.
For dinner we had some typical Czech fare – dumplings, pork, sauerkraut, and the pub’s beer sampler. We ended up sitting at the end of a table shared with two other men. Evidently most dinning out in Prague is done by reservation.
Wednesday, among exploring the city center more on foot, we took the metro to the Žižkov Television Tower, to take in the 360 view from the observation level. Additionally we stopped back at the Nový Smíchov shopping center just a few blocks south of our hotel in the middle of a busy, redeveloped neighborhood called Anděl. The three level shopping center was comparable to American malls on the inside, but the exterior was tastefully hidden behind a long street facade of existing four-five story buildings, with a contemporary glass entrance opening up at one end to a street space surrounded by several other modern glass buildings and a busy tram stop. Nový Smíchov included a movie ciniplex and a full-sized Tesco store, a UK-based big box retailer similar to Walmart.
That evening we ate at a pretty good Thai restaurant and returned to the hotel pretty early because our early flight to Paris in the morning. We had to get around 3:30 to catch a night bus back to the Prague airport. It was very convenient, going right by our hotel. Prague was a very nice city to visit, modest and well-maintained. Architecturally it is a historic city that does not resist contemporary interventions.
See all my photos from Prague here.
Three weeks ago (March 8-13) we took a class trip to the Veneto region (province) in northern Italy. The studio was split into two groups, the other going south to Sicily. Ours was a bit smaller with only 21 students, so it was pretty relaxing and generally laid back. The weather was colder than the previous week including some snow, but our first day on Monday (March 8 ) was actually quite nice, clear and sunny.
We arrived at Venice Marco Polo Airport midmorning and met our bus. We stopped at an Autogrill for a quick breakfast and proceeded to our first stop at Carlo Scarpa‘s Brion Cemetery. Scarpa designed an L-shape addition that surrounds the existing rural cemetery for Giuseppe Brion and his wife. A nice old Italian man was there to show us in. The predominant material used was concrete, along with metal, wood, and mosaic highlights in a specific place. The cemetery was a beautiful and intriguing place. In a rural location sitting below hills of the Alps, the setting was serene on a gorgeous day.
At lunch time we stopped in a town called Bassano del Grappa, that sits at the foot of the Alps. We walked from a main road into the old city center that had more than one town square before reaching the Ponte Degli Alpini, a covered wooden bridge design by Andrea Palladio in 1569. Bassano del Grappa was the first town we stopped at in Veneto, and the northern influences from Austria and Germany were evident in the architecture, culture and restaurants. My friend and I ate at a German restaurant.
Later that day we stopped at Villa Emo, by architect Andrea Palladio, built in 1559. Interestingly this villa was for agricultural purposes, so in place of elaborate gardens were instead farm fields. The villa itself is very long and slim. The back is left unfinished (just basic brick and stone) facing the fields. The interior and front loggia were decorated in frescoes. I enjoyed walking behind the villa and seeing the agriculture fields beyond, still in use.
For the first two nights we stayed at a nice hotel in the city center of Verona, a good sized city. Tuesday morning we visited Museo di Castelvecchio, a castle built in the 1350s by the Della Scala family for defense against invasion and outside rebellion. It had various uses over the centuries as Verona had a number of different occupations – under Napoleon radical changes took place including the construction of army barracks. In 1925 it became a museum. In 1958, a new organization of the entire building was planned and undertaken by Carlo Scarpa. His interventions helped unify the different additions and improve navigation through the complex. The attention to detail, tectonics and material connections that Scarpa is known for clearly stood out. We spent about two hours here exploring the museum and sketching.
We had a little under two hours to explore the city of Verona and grab lunch before regrouping to go to Mantua. This day was much colder than Monday. In Mantua we visited Palazzo Te, a Manarist palace from the 1530s with fantastic frescos. Following we walked into the city stopping at Alberti’s Basilica di Sant’Andrea, currently under heavy renovation. Then we continued to Palazzo Ducale, an enormous complex that is now a museum. While there the snow fall began to really pick up so we returned to Verona for the night.
Wednesday was characterized by snow. We left Verona in the morning heading toward the city of Vicenza. It was a nice longer bus ride through the Berici Hills en route to our first stop at Villa da Schio. This was a much more “hands on” tour, given by a descendent of the Trento family, for which the palazzo is still in hands. Significant about it is the natural air conditioning installed using the cool air from deep quaries in the hills nearby. The caves recently have been used for growing mushrooms and making wine. We had wine tasting there with our packed lunch.
We continued to Villa Rotunda, a 16th century Renaissance summer residence designed by Palladio. Used as a party villa, the building has a centralized plan with four identical porticos. Situated 45 degrees off the north-south axis on a plateau above the surrounding land, direct light is able to reach each facade at some point during the day. While we were there the snow continued to fall and accumulate, which was actually quite a unique experience to see it with snow. Inside there were some corner side rooms, but otherwise we were only in the central rotunda space that occupied most of the building. Once outside we walked around all sides and a light-hearted snow ball fight inevitably broke out. Who else can say they’ve done that at Villa Rotunda? : ) With cold wet feet we went to Vicenza and checked into the hotel, where most people, including myself, took a nap before dinner.
Thursday morning we walked in to the old city to see a number of buildings by Palladio. Of note the Basilica Palladiana, a market building constructed in the 15th century as the seat of government (called Palazzo delle Ragione) and reconstructed in the 16th century by Palladio. He added a new outer shell with a classical loggia of marble, obscuring the original Gothic architecture. Adding a new outer layer presented spatial challenges at the corners, requiring the end arches to actually be smaller. Also the new shell came extremely close to other adjacent buildings.
Also in Vecenza we visited the Teatro Olimpico, the oldest surviving enclosed theater in the world. Designed by Palladio in the 1580s to fit inside an existing old, irregularly shaped fortress. Completed by Vincentzo Scamozzi after Palladio’s death, it was based on his sketches. Included were seven permanent false perspective stage scenes (see photo) that still remain today. We stayed to sketch the theater while a tour group came through for an impressive audio-visual lighting show highlighting the various artifacts and features of the theatre.
We then took a bus to the city of Padua where we visited their Palazzo della Ragione, a civic basilica built in 1218. Claimed to have the largest roof unsupported by columns in Europe, the upper level was a massive open space now used for exhibits. Ground level is still occupied by several small market buildings and now other restaurants and businesses as well. The remainder of the day was free to explore the city. I stopped in a few different churches that were much different than the churches I’ve seen in Rome. The northern European and Venetian influence was quite noticeable.
Friday morning we took a brief train ride to Venice. We spent a few hours at the Punta della Dogana museum, which is housed in the former customs house, renovations designed by Tadao Ando. The building is triangular ending at its narrowest end with a belvedere tour at the end of the pier. Inside was divided in linear rows which you wind through and around to explore the gallery. With a second level throughout much of the building, there is no prescribed linear pathway through the exhibits. Instead visitors choose their own way through. The second level was open to below in many areas so visually the entire museum was quite connected, but actually getting between levels and different exhibit areas was not as simple. At the narrowest section before the tower is the museum store with a modest cafe. The exhibits on display were pretty interesting, some particularly graphic but indeed intriguing. We had a brief discussion as a group afterwords not only about the building but the exhibits as well. See my sketch to the right.
At lunch time I made my way over to Piazza San Marco (St. Mark’s Square – left photo below), the dominant square in Venice where St Mark’s Basilica and its associated campanile are located. About a thousand years old now, the basilica is one of the most famous examples of Byzantine architecture. I was looking forward to seeing it, being one of the select churches I specifically remembered from arch history, now four years ago. The scale of the church and certainly the piazza was much larger than I had imagined. Construction work was being done at the base of the campenile and parts of the building facades bounding the piazza were covered in scaffolding. The basilica was beautiful, but its current situation was pretty tacky with crowd barriers everywhere and a makeshift souvenier shop set up at the entrance.
After regrouping briefly with the whole class we went to see a modest bridge designed by Carlo Scarpa. Then a small group of us took an obligatory, but nonetheless enjoyable gondola ride around the canals. Besides general exploring, a friend and I also checked out the Faculty of Architecture campus of the Universitá luav di Venezia, not far from our hotel with a Scarpa designed entrance (above right photo). We ended up walking around inside and in the library where students were working. It was interesting to see the facilities and to an extent, the work style of architecture education in Italy.
To end the trip, that evening we had a group dinner at a seafood restaurant. It was much less elaborate than the larger group dinner in Perugia, but still good. On the walk back we stopped for gelato, but it was not the best. In the morning we left early to fly back and returned to Rome by noon. It was an intense trip and we got to see a lot of different sites and visited a number of cities.
See my trip photos here.
Yesterday I went to the Museum of Rome in Trastevere, one of several museums in the Museum System of the Municipality of Rome. Located in a former monastery hidden in the dense streets of Trastevere, this museum’s permanent collection focuses on daily life in Rome in the 18th and 19th century. A lot of scenes in paintings were right around the neighborhood so we recognized many.
Currently on exhibit were the works of contemporary American painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and photographer Stephen Shore. Shore’s exhibit Biographical Landscape was a collection of photos of ordinary and familiar scenes of the American landscape in the 70s, that one normally doesn’t stop to notice. It was a neat exhibit and very interesting to see, especially in Rome. I wondered what the Italians think of these scenes that are so typical in America.
The museum was relatively small and easy to get through in a little over an hour. Each exhibit only had a few signs with background information and let the art speak for itself. (Image from brochure)
It was a pretty good weekend in and around Rome. Friday night 18 of us took part in a special one-time cooking class with a guy Rob, who teaches some semesters for the COD Rome Program, and his companion Sabrina. A food connoisseur and self-described prostitute [not really] and pseudo intellectual, Rob showed us how to make a full course Italian dinner and talked about the importance of food in Italian culture. It was held at Palazzo Cenci, the floor above our studio space in an apartment of one of our professors. With an extremely small kitchen it was a pretty impressive undertaking. I think usually they try to be more hands on but there simply was not enough room. On the bright site we got a fantastic full course dinner for 35 euro and got to see it all being prepared.
The dinner started out with antipasta with an onion omelet, followed by a small salad topped with a small slice of a complex loaf-like combination of potato and goat cheese (don’t recall the actual name). The pasta was spinach ricotta ravioli made from scratch, followed by fried potatoes and chicken with a pear sauce. For a dessert was a creamy pudding dish with cocoa powder and a lemon liquor. All in all it took a little over five hours. Interesting to see, and some great food.
Saturday two others and I went to Tivoli, a small city not far from Rome. To get there we took the Metro line B from Termini and caught a suburban bus line from a further out station. In Tivoli we visited Villa d’Este, a 16th century Renaissance villa built on the steep terrain. It was a gorgeous day to walk around the gardens and see some countryside. After the villa we walked around the city center a little bit before catching the bus back to Rome. (Photos here.)
Sunday I went with two other friends to Ostia Antica, an enormous archeological site of the harbor city for ancient Rome. Originally at the mouth of the Tiber River, it is now a few kilometers from the sea due because of sediment build up over the centuries and change in sea level. It was fun to walk through the well preserved remains and see various mosaics and frescoes. The weather was not quite as nice this day and was quite windy. Overall a pretty active weekend.
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