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    Barcelona! [and] Want a fellowship?

    By bryan boyer
    Feb 6, '06 12:53 AM EST

    With the fall semester finally over (Harvard has this weird hold-over system wherein finals are completed in late January after returning from the holiday), YK and I got out of Cambridge to clear our heads and, most importantly, thaw our toes for a while. Neither of us had been to Barcelona, so it was a bit of an adventure.


    Images from our trip to the cemetery in Igualada. See all the pictures from the trip here.

    Dinner at 9-10pm is a fantastic idea. That's about all it took to convince me. The fantastic food, bars, and everything else was just icing on the torta. In between rosemary chocolate bars and langoustines in oil and salt we made a few trips to see the local Enric Miralles projects, a faceted garden of corten by Carlos Ferrater, and even visited the wasteland known as Forum 2004.

    Since getting back the semester has started-- but just barely. This will be our first full week of classes and what an exciting week it promises to be. The semester is filled with the delights of professional practice, environmental systems, and the continuation of structures. I'm in Robert Marino's studio for housing, which is the last semester of core studio, and have been told to expect to spend a lot of time with structures. Every time I tell someone I'm in his studio they reply with the same thing: "Bobby!"


    The author, in the Soane House library, with a camera.

    Now, to some serious business. Last year I was lucky enough to be granted a fellowship by the Soane Foundation of NY. It was a fantastic opportunity that I used to further some research into the history of the house which I've been pursuing for a few years. The deadline for this year's fellowship is coming up on March 1st, so if you're a graduate student (sorry, this is only open to grad students) and researching topics relating to any of these topics I would encourage you to apply apply:

    The work of Sir John Soane, Sir John Soane's Museum or its collections. These include Egyptian antiquities, classical antiquities, casts (in general), sculpture galleries, the history of museums, authentic restoration, architecture and architectural drawings c. 1650-1850, architectural models, architectural theory c. 1650-1850, neoclassical sculpture, the Grand Tour (in general), Hogarth, George Dance Junior, Joseph Michael Gandy, Sir William Chambers, Sir Christopher Wren and Hawksmoor, architecture and decoration, Robert and James Adam and English Regency painting.



     
    • 8 Comments

    • thanks for the pix, bryan.

      interesting that when miralles' cemetery was new and i saw him lecture about it, it seemed then to be a beautiful and simple project, a masterpiece of rigour and restraint (i thought).

      when the scottish parliament was first published, i was shocked by its baroque messiness. i wondered what happened and whether it became an institution-in-drag because of the work of those who brought the parliament to fruition after his death.

      while i still think the cemetery is beautiful, your pictures remind me that the same hand was at work.

      Feb 6, 06 8:16 am  · 
       · 
      David Morris

      I studied abroad in Barcelona last year as an undergrad, and I must agree with you, the Forum is a complete wasteland. They had to close it down immediately after it began in 2004, and they didn't open it back up until May 2005. The big solar grid was a nice gesture, but I don't even think it works all that well.

      The best new project for Barcelona has to be the agbar tower, but I'm also a big fan of Walden 7.

      Feb 6, 06 10:19 am  · 
       · 
      bryan boyer

      Torre Agbar? Foster's Gherkin with more colors?

      Feb 6, 06 11:18 am  · 
       · 
      Medit

      here we go again with the damn Gherkin comparation.. *sigh*:
      Gaudí + Montserrat = http://www.archinect.com/forum/threads.php?id=P18396_0_42_0_C



      and I'm not sure the Agbar has to be the best new project anyway.. my bet now is on Cloud 9 (Enric Ruiz-Geli)'s Habitat Hotel... not built yet but, apparently, more interesting than the Agbar.

      Bofill is a joke, the Walden 7 was his peak in the 70's (after some other small good residential blocks).. but after that he discovered Venturi, Rossi, Jencks and Historicist Po-Mo and went gradually down (perpetrating the most infamous architecture one can imagine in France, mixing high-tech with huge doric columns). He's nowadays an architectural corpse (with excellent professionals with MBA's, beautiful suits and ties, etc.. but an architect completely lost in time).

      Feb 6, 06 3:41 pm  · 
       · 
      Medit

      by the way, both the folded roof structures and the huge photovoltaic pergola of the Forum esplanade you ask for in Flickr are also from Martínez Lapeña & Torres.

      Feb 6, 06 4:08 pm  · 
       · 
      David Morris

      I hate bofill as well, but going to Walden 7 was really amazing, and worth the 2 mile walk from the last train stop outside Barcelona. I think the best part about it was trying to figure out how to get there. Once you get there it's kind of a downer, but seeing it from far away is pretty amazing, and seeing the city from on top of it is equally amazing.

      Feb 6, 06 5:04 pm  · 
       · 

      Medit - how weird is that Montserrat and you used a frog - I live on an island called Montserrat and the mountain chicken is the well mascot of sorts.

      Feb 6, 06 10:56 pm  · 
       · 
      Medit

      Philia - the yellow frog is the mascot of Imageshack, which is the website I use to host images on the net: http://imageshack.us/
      they put the frog below the image, not me (I wasn't registered at the time I uploaded it)..

      actually, you can guess from where the name of your island comes from... Montserrat was already a mythic mountain in Catalonia well before your island was "found" and "named" Montserrat by, probably, a catalan from the Columbus or any other expedition back in the late 15th ct.

      the Moreneta is the icon of the iconic mountain.. and there is where the link with the Agbar, and, finally with Nouvel is (the bald, bearded head shining at the left is Antoni Gaudí).

      Nouvel himself explains the origins of his tower in his site.. and, really, it's quite far from the city of London

      Feb 7, 06 4:07 am  · 
       · 

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