Gracia

Wednesday was another slow morning. The lack of sleep had really been catching up with us and we moved real slow out of the apartment. It was a very chilly morning and had dropped down into the 30s. (We were getting very spoiled having the temperature in the 60s). We had our sketching class at 9 and met at studio. We took the metro to Gracia which was a town that became part of Barcelona in the 19th century. It was not as active as the part of Barcelona that we are used to. The plazas were also very different than those in the Gothic quarter. The plazas in the gothic quarter were not planned and were formed when a void was created between several buildings. The plazas in Gracia were planned ahead of time and the buildings were built around it. It was a cold morning so we did not do as much sketching. Our pens had turned to ink-cicles. We saw a private home that Gaudi had designed there which was very interesting. The area used to be a lot more open, but became more dense when it became Barcelona. When Gaudi, designed the house, it was in an open area with few neighboring buildings. I did buy postcard stamps at one of the plazas so I can send some postcards to people during our field trip to southern Spain. It was good to get to other parts of the city that we are not used to.

After the sketching class most of us came back to studio to work on our site model. It has not been going the way we were expecting so we had a change in plans. The chipboard we were using just was not very good quality and it was taking a lot longer than we had hoped. We decided to use wood and simplify the model. It made it much simpler this way to build the topography and now all we have to do is build the existing buildings on the site out of chipboard. We are hoping to finish the model before we leave for Madrid. We worked on the site model until we had to go for our firm visit (which is almost every Wednesday). We went to a building that was an old factory and was converted into a gym. The additions and renovations were done by an architect who is friends with our porfessor Eugena. He had won the competition to do the project while he was still a student, which is very impressive. We went back to our apartment afterwards and picked up some frozen pizzas on the way. We relaxed for an hour at our apartment and had some pizza pizza. It felt good to just sit on our couch for a little while. We dragged ourselves back to studio to finish our project due the following day. Monica and I finished at midnight and then I headed home to do my Spanish homework. When I got back to the apartment, I tried to call home twice but I just got the answering machine both times. I called Mike and talked to him for over an hour using Skype. I was able to call his cell phone directly which is pretty cool. We talked about him coming to visit and tried to get that all settled. I was planning on calling home afterwards but I could not keep my eyes open. I was out as soon as my head hit my pillow.