Moved in to our apartment/dorm (RESA) on wednesday and it's pretty nice. We have a stovetop and fridge for a kitchen so we can finally start to prepare our own meals instead of having to eat at restaurants for every meal. Still no AC...
Our studio started on thursday and we had a chance to meet all of our professors and studio-mates from Clemson University (S. Carolina). I'm really excited about this studio because the head professor is a practicing architect in Barcelona named Miguel Roldan. It's a really unique experience and a great chance to hopefully see how an actual architect works and designs. If you are interested you can check out his website/projects here http://www.roldanberengue.com/. He's very active in the competition world here in Spain and it looks like his firm wins quite a few of them every year. This studio is going to be showing/teaching us how he approaches designs and his own methodology. The studio project is to design a civic center or sports complex in the expansion part of Barcelona. There's the old city/gothic part where there is no grid or real organization at all and about 150 years ago they developed a gridded city plan for expansion. We are focusing on 4 particular blocks and will be doing research on them starting this week. The head professor is not in charge of day to day teachings but is more like an overseer and will be coming in regularly to do desk crits. We have another architect who is training to become a professor who is there everyday for us. All in all i think there are 6 or 7 profs/architects who are dedicated to us for the semester.
On friday we had our first "seminar" class. In this class we are spending the semester researching specific architecture/a specific architect in Barcelona and then writing a paper and formulating a presentation. Seems pretty interesting. Our prof is taking us on a lot of tours around the city as part of her class to show us what we will be researching and also giving us a bit of history of Barcelona.
We have one or two classes that we haven't been to yet but will start this upcoming week. No classes on Monday though, WOO!
Some of us are going to the Picasso museum and a digital fabrication event/show/something here in about 5 mins. Ill post pics asap.
I've had my hands pretty full moving in and getting settled in the apt and school so I haven't had a good chance to write much. Our profs are expecting a TON of work out of us this semester (Miguel Roldan said we need to find a way to work 48 hrs every day of the week).
I'll let you know if i can break the space-time continuum.
