So I’ve decided to start posting every other day or so
rather than trying to write a daily post. Studio is beginning to start up, so
my life is about to get pretty repetitive and boring and I won’t have as much
time to write. It can be quite time consuming…
Yesterday morning, we had another Italian lesson bright and
early. O joy. I’m glad that our prof. is interesting because I could get really
tired of that class otherwise. I think that she is a good teacher – she understands
that we just need to know the basics to get by during our stay. After that
class, we had our first “Italian Rationalism” class. Sounds fun right? Yeah…we
just had a 30 minute class and the guy almost put half the class to sleep. Can’t
wait to sit through a three hour course on rationalism in Italy on a Friday
morning…The good thing about Friday, or should I say the extra special thing about Friday, is that we only have class until 12:30. Later on in the semester, this will be valuable time, as we can have that extra time to travel – go ahead and get to the place and have all day Saturday and Sunday to be there, then come back on Monday morning – no class until 2:00 on Monday, heck yes! Today, we went and got our cell phones. Cost 20 Euro. The basic call-and-text phone without a camera. It is pretty lightweight and small-ish, but funny to go back to the basics.
The rest of the day was pretty chill. Didn’t do too much. Worked on the project a little bit and just hung out in the villa. Slow night, but that’s ok – it was a slow night in Italy instead of Clemson.
This morning, got up and went to diagram some on the site before Italian class. Kind of interesting to see the place in the day vs. the night. In the morning, all of the people with a ‘lot of life experience’ are out getting their exercise and several people are taking their dog for the morning walk. At night, however, the same place is littered with teenagers hanging out under the cover of darkness. Some of the streets here are a bit questionable during the day, not to mention after dark.
After lunch, which was simply leftovers from this week, a
big group of people left for the beach. Denver and I, along with two of our
other friends, decided to go to the top of the chair lift again and check out a
field that one of the professors said was up there for public use. We get to
the top of the chair lift and start walking up the hill, where the supposed
field is awaiting our arrival. Instead, we find a large defensive fort from the
medieval ages that has currently been overtaken by a restaurant (…see what I
did there…?). Further up hill, we begin walking along the ridge and find a scenic
overlook. The wind is gently curling over the mountain, pushing the clouds
along the ridge, slowly beginning to reveal another fort further up the
mountain. Really cool sight. We don’t find this next fort on today’s adventure,
but decide that it is worth looking further into later in the semester.It still surprises me how similar the foliage is to what I am used to at home. On our excursion today, I spied the Italian version of the white oak, black birch, black locust, and hydrangea. It is really helpful to me to be able to identify some form of life that surrounds me. Even something as simple as the plant life has really helped me feel more at home.
After dinner, which, again, was leftovers, I started diagramming our site more in depth. This time, I was looking at the scale of each terrace as it related to the human figure. For instance, let’s assume that the average human is around 6’ tall (just to make the numbers easy). We compare this to each vertical stretch of space. With the first terrace being 15 meters (around 50’), this vertical is roughly equivalent to the height of 8 people standing on each other’s head (50/6 ~ 8). This is a strange but helpful way to look at vertical spaces. The more people the space can fit, the bigger the space will feel (in general), and the more public the space becomes. The tighter the space to the human scale, though, the less comfortable the space becomes, and people will naturally tend to move away from these and toward the more open spaces. Architects play on this to move people through the spaces that we design in particular ways so that the people who visit the site can experience what the space has to offer to the fullest – direct people toward the “good” and away from the “bad.” But what is “good” and what is “bad?” That is where architecture comes to play. The “good” may be a view, a feeling, mood, action, location, etc – it is up to the architect to define and act upon this. Maybe that’s why we have to go to school for 6 years to draw lines and shapes on the computer for a living.
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