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.