Sagrada Familia

One quick blog before leaving tomorrow. The class went to Antoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Church, which is the most famous building in Barcelona and one of the most famous in Spain. I have been interested in Gaudi's work and Sagrada Familia ever since I studied them in high school. Gaudi spent half of this life working on this church and it is still not finished. Because his plans and models got destroyed in the Spanish Civil War it has been a difficult job finishing the church the way he wanted it. Now because of CAD (computer animated design) technology they are replicating Gaudi's craftsmanship digitally and the church should be completed by 2026. And they are working really hard to do so, there were cranes and drills and all sorts of things at work when we went. What was there was amazing though. The amount of geometry and structural craftsmanship that went into the building is mindblowing. I sat there sketching the columns for about an hour and just walked around the building for a half hour. I didn't stop to look at the museum exhibits with the tourists because i didn't want to detract from the building's affect on my experience. The Passion facade in the back was the most stunning.

Work and other stuff

Lots of work has been piling up over the past few weeks. We visited these buildings, the Santa Caterina market and the MACBA (contemporary art museum) and did case studies on them as well as the big fish sculpture near the beach. We had to do digital case studies on each of those buildings and compose a video of our experience. I don't understand my teacher's obsession with the beach area. It's really artificial....the sand is put there by the city council after it washes away each winter. If it wasn't for the gehry fish (pictured in my first entry) which I like a whole lot I would not have any reason to go there. The MACBA museum was really wierd and had obscure modern art. One was a video of an overhead view of a small four-walled room with three hooded monks walking back and forth. It was a waste of my money. In fact I think the building is overrated. I like the design of the Santa Caterina market much better.














MACBA is on the left and Santa Caterina is on the right. I've done quite a bit of analysis and sketching of these over the past few days. I hope to be excellent at sketching at the end of this semester, which is what my field studies course pushes you to do as our teacher encourages us to sketch what we see on our travels and expand to different sketching mediums such as markers, pens, watercolor and pastels. I think I already have gotten a little better. Here is a sketch I did of the Gehry fish. I did it in my new pocket-sized moleskin sketchbook, which is small but great for travel sketching.

September 11 was a really interesting day. It is the National Day of Catalonia (the autonomía / autonomous region that Barcelona is located in). About 7-10 of us headed out of the dorms to see the festivities and we literally lost each other in a sea of people. It was amazing, the amount of national pride displayed in the people there. Catalonia truly thinks of itself as its own country with its own history. If you want to read more about that I produced a more in-depth blog at the class blog, http://archelona.blogspot.com .

Also on Friday we had a little get together for the whole dormitory building here and I met a lot of Spanish students. That was an interesting experience. Communicating with Spaniards is so wierd, they all know at least some English and we all know a good amount of Spanish (I have taken 5 1/2 years of spanish so I know a little more than the others) so often you have to switch languages in the middle of conversation. I thought that we would all get a negative reception because of the whole America image problem thing, but actually not really, they were all very interested in where each of us was from. A lot of them have better knowlege of American geography than some Americans (read: Miss Teen South Carolina). I thought one thing was strange....every time we mentioned that we go to school in South Carolina they say "isn't that where Michael Jordan is from?" and then we correct them and say that's North Carolina. One person even had heard of Philly Cheesesteaks which I found amazing.

On Wednesday we are going on our first trip. We are going to Madrid first, which I think will be interesting because it is historically the center of the Spanish kingdom. Then we will see the polar opposite of that when we explore Bilbao and San Sebastián, which are located in the Basque region. Basque country is another autonomous region that is perhaps more seperatist than Catalonia. We come back Wednesday of the following week.

I only have time for one quick entry....We have had tons of work. Every week we are expected to do a case study and two mapping sheets on top of our normal studio work, and we also have a huge paper to do for one class and a spanish culture project to do for another.














This week we all went on a bike ride down the port. It was a really relaxing experience. The smell of the Mediterranean sea and the breeze complimented the recreational fun of bike riding. Our site for our project is at this port. We also went to Parc Guell and I saw Antoni Gaudi's architecture for the first time. It was one of the things I was looking forward to most about going to Barcelona, and it was amazing. I was impressed by the intricate details in every corner of the park.