Flight home

I flew from Madrid back to Los Angeles today.

I am very grateful to RTKL Architects and the Gesundheit Family (University of Southern California) for giving me the opportunity to go on this research trip. I feel very lucky because not only did I get to travel to the Netherlands specifically to research Dutch floating architecture, but I even got to visit Germany and Spain for a more general type of architecture tour. This will be my last post for this Aquatecture blog, as the purpose of it was to document my travels through Europe. Now, I will continue working on my research publication.

This blog is long in the sense that the first part of my trip (3 weeks in the Netherlands) is hidden beneath my subsequent travels to Germany and Spain. So I thought it would be a good idea to show some photos and renderings I consider to be highlights from the ‘Aquatecture’ portion of my trip. See images below.

Thank you to everyone who has been loyally reading my blog!

Last full day of trip!

Visited the Museo del Prado. Walked around the city, especially Las Ramblas and the Passeig del Gracia.

Museums in Madrid

Visited the Museo Reina Sofia, which is famous for having Guernica. The painting is a lot more frightening in real-life than I expected. I did however, get a sense of how massive it was in the movie ‘Children of Men,’ as there is a scene where it is hanging on the wall. Also, I saw these strange ballet costumes designed by Oscar Schlemmer in 1927. (See photos below). I was strangely intrigued by them because they looked so surreal. These costumes were designed for the Triadic Ballet, (or das Triadisch Ballet in German) and are supposed to look Bauhaus somehow.

Weekend in Mallorca

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do everything in Mallorca that I wanted to do. On August 8, I flew from Barcelona to Mallorca. I wanted to visit the historic towns in the Northwest section of the island, like Deia, Valldemossa, Soller, etc. but it turns out that those areas were a lot more difficult to get to than the guidebooks led me to believe. So I wasn’t able to visit those very quaint and magical looking towns. (I am a total sucker for that type of thing). However, I did get to explore the downtown Palma area, especially in the area around Juan Carlos I street. It was less dense than Barcelona, a little less urban, and a little more quaint and small-town in feeling.

Gaudi and Gehry

Busy with Gaudi! Casa Batllo, Casa Mila and the Sagrada Familia. The sculptures illustrating the biblical scene at the back entrance of the Sagrada Familia (men with Darth-vader style masks) looked modern and dream-like, like they were fresh out of a Dali painting (see photos). I also Had to visit the Fish Sculpture designed by Frank Gehry for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, which I learned about in a paper I wrote for a Civil Engineering class at USC about the use of BIM in projects designed by Gehry Technologies.

First full day in Barcelona

Visited Gaudi’s very famous Park Guell, the Fundacio Joan Miro, and walked along La Rambla. Based on the photos I had seen of Park Guell, I expected there to be more mosaic Salamanders everywhere, when really, most of the mosaics were near the entrance and the majority of the park was just regular stones and trees. Aside from the mosaics and tiles near the front, most of the Park Guell is designed with materials (stones) shaped in these curving forms that almost gives it the appearance of growing out of the landscape. Many of these stone columns, balconies, and benches and seem almost like they are growing out of the earth. The design very much controls how you socialize. For example, Gaudi built seats/chairs out of stone attached to the columns (see photos) which forces you to sit individually, one person at a time, at pre-determined distances from each other. These chairs also look like outgrowths of the column.

Flight from Berlin to Barcelona

Spent most of the day at the airport but went for a walk in the morning before my flight, to check out the Mitte area one last time. Berlin definitely feels like a larger more dynamic city than Amsterdam. Look at the pictures below and compare these historic buildings to the canal houses in Amsterdam, in terms of scale and proportion.

Reichstag and more

Spent most of the day at the Reichstag. Really wanted to see the Norman Foster addition. Other than that, visiting the Reichstag was sort of like Disneyland, or my experience visiting the Vatican in Rome – long lines, lots of tourists, etc.

Pergamon and Altes Museum

I have so many pictures from today, that I really think the pictures say everything. Yesterday I did a general tour of the city and today I actually went into specific buildings, museums, etc. that I was interested in.

Berlin segway tour

Today I did a Segway tour of the city. Visited Bebel platz, Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin Wall, location of Hitlers Bunker, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Brandenburg gate, and the Reichstag.

The good thing about this tour was that I saw things on the segway that I would never would have noticed normally, like a sniper tower which faced the Berlin Wall (see pictures). This is a better way to tour than simply walking by foot (too tiring) and much better than traveling by tourist bus (too passive of an experience). See my photos below. Notice the ones of the Berlin wall. You will notice a pipe on top of the wall. The tour guide explained that piping was given to East Germany by West Germany, to use to improve their sanitation system. Instead of using the piping to develop the plumbing infrastructure, what East Germany did with these pipes was that they put them on top of the wall (which you can see in the photos), and covered the outside with asbestos and sharp glass so people couldn’t climb over the wall.

One of the great things about all great cities is the juxtaposition of different buildings with different functions from different points in history. I remember for example, as a kid, going to a city in Israel that had a water park right next to an Ancient Roman hot springs, which was right next to an alligator park. This juxtaposition of all these different time periods and crazy functions struck a cord with me, even as a kid. It’s really the sign of all great cities – to have things coming together instead of separated by function, as we do in the suburbs. In Berlin, this juxtaposition is especially startling. For example, on the segway tour I saw a new apartment complex on top of location of Hitler’s bunker and a Sniper Tower right next to important art museum, the Martin Gropius Bau. Also, the Peter Eisenman Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is located above the historic location of the bunker of Joseph Goebbels, who killed all 6 of his kids with poison in this bunker so that they wouldn’t have to grow up in a Nazi free society. I guess this juxtaposition is just surprising because Germany has so much tragic history (WWII, rise and fall of Berlin wall) that seems so recent, compared to other places I have been to.

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