Casa Batllo

Friday was fun. We all slept in a little bit and then all met at the City Musuem at noon in the Gothic Quarter. It was so incredible inside. The museum is built on top of the Roman ruins of 2,000 years ago. When you go into the museum there is a hall way with a basic history that takes you from prehistory to modern day of the city. You then go into an elevator and go down. As you go down, the "floor number" 2007 AD decreases until it reads 12 AD. When you step out of the elevator, you walk right into the depths of the Roman ruins that began the city of Barcelona. I was told it is the largest excavation of Roman ruins in the world. The rest of the group walked through, but Meg and I walked a little slower and just took in everything. We spent and hour and a half walking around and learning about everything we saw. They had reconstructive drawings of what the site looked like 2,000 years ago. There were descriptions about all the walls and columns. It was amazing. There were platforms raised a foot above the ruins that we walked on and the path weaved through the ruins. It felt incredible to be walking along side walls that were built so long ago. We could not grasp the idea that these structures were so old and pretty well intact. When I would touch a stone I would get a chill thinking about the person who put that stone there or who lived in that house. I cannot explain what it was like. We were not able to take photographs unfortunately, but photos would not have done this space justice. We then walked up to the two levels above which told the history of the city from the end of Roman rule to modern day. There were some incredible models of the city along the way, showing the development and growth of the area. It ended by showing us the church where Christopher Columbus was supposed to be recieved upon his return from the Americas. He was not received there because of a change in plans by the king and queen.
We then walked to Casa Batllo by Gaudi. It is a privately owned apartment complex that does not have a single straight line in the entire building. There were no construction documents for the project. Instead, Gaudi oversaw the construction and based everything off of a plaster model that he built himself. You could tell that he was inspired by nature. The curves and forms. He completely allowed his imagination to do the designing. I took a lot of pictures and took a few videos of it as well. We had these cell phone-like radios that we held to our ears during the tour that told us about Gaudi and the building. It was very imformative and took about an hour and a half to walk through. Gaudi was ahead of his time and truly laid the foundation for digital fabrication. Frank Ghery is the Father of digital architecture, but Gaudi had the ideas before the technology was available for the projects (hence why Sagrada Familia is taking so long). Barcelona is very obsessed with Gaudi and Picasso. These two have a lot of things named after them.

We then walked back to our apartment fro lunch and then headed to studio. We all out went for a group dinner with Christi and celebrated Meg's birthday. It was a good night. Barcelona seems to never sleep. But we all cherish sleep whenever we have the chance.