Barcelona: Day 16 : Biking in a City .

Today was another day of studio class and today was the day where the professors had set up for us to rent some bikes and ride through the city to various spots of interest, particularly those that exemplified well the creation of public space. There were a couple of things wrong with their thinking. First, having 40 people try to ride through sidewalks and little bike lanes without getting lost, disconnected, or almost completely eating it, is very very hard. Second, there is no way to ensure that you will be done in the allotted time for the class. Needless to say we ran over the mark by an hour... Another thing is that the sites that they took us to didn't really seem to be super extraordinary in any way, except for 1 or 2. Sometimes people would get left behind and a professor would start talking and you'd miss a lot of what they would say.

I suppose this didn't really matter, since we don't really have to take a test or anything on any of that information anyways, but it was the principle behind it. We were however assigned a small exercise to do regarding mapping. We need to pick something that we like and incorporate both sketches and photos that we took along the way to exemplify one technique of creating public space. They were very vague about how to go about this and which sites to use, basically saying you could do anything and everything -- surprise, surprise, this is just how it is in Clemson.


Later in the day after scrambling for lunch due to our lateness with the bike tour we had the first day of our materials class. I expected it to sort of be like a structures sort of class, but it seems much more interesting than that. We'll be taking day trips and some walks and get a chance to go inside some really neat buildings. We watched a movie on one of Rem Koolhaas's designs, and the way some of the things function in the house, and went over a bit of a simple schedule of things that we will doing over the course of the semester. The teacher was really cool, he said that if we ever wanted to take a trip or something to feel free, just let him know so that he could move/cancel the class. I'm really looking forward to what we do in that class this semester.

The funniest thing? I think that so far studio is my least favorite class -- it's usually the opposite in Clemson. But we'll see how things go!