"It is the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting."

My journey to some of the greatest architectural wonders of the world was similar to the one undertaken by Paulo Coelho's protagonist in The Alchemist. Sitting in summery Princeton I look back on this summer and I know that I discovered as much about myself as I have learned about architecture.

"He still had a long way to go... and some day this morning would just be a memory."

24"x36" ~ watercolor on paper

From a seat in the ruins of an amphitheater, I sat and watched the breathtaking sunset light up the Athenian Acropolis.

Drawing this took me back to the A'Level Art days, complete with the standard 300-rupee Winsor and Newton paper, watercolor box, wooden board and masking tape.

This was also a way to make an architecture drawing project more interesting because people are important and without them architecture is just background stuff. Here they are one and the same thing. Some detail photographs follow.

Carthusian Monasteries ~ 40"x54" ~ acrylics & ink on paper

My search for the right Fermata del Autobus was successful.

The bus I took left a Florence full of tourists wearing shorts and sneakers, carrying maps, and eating ice cream on sunny pavements. In thirty minutes I arrived at the Certosa del Galluzzo (also called the Certosa di Val d'Ema), a peaceful place made more serene by the fact that no one here spoke English.

I have written more about the monasteries here.

Hagia Sophia ~ 18"x24" ~ watercolor on paper

18"x24" ~ watercolor on paper

"Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light" (Le Corbusier).

Almost as a response to the last post with the Parthenon ceiling, here is a drawing of Henri Labrouste's ceiling for the Bibliotheque Nationale (Richelieu) in Paris which was built in the mid-nineteenth century.

This library was just minutes from where I interned for two months this summer, and I went over a few times during lunch break.

Pantheon ~ charcoal on paper ~ 25"x45"

"Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep."

I was struck in Rome especially by the sheer magnitude and beauty of art that religion has inspired and funded. If religion is a human need then so is art. Le Corbusier's quote above reflects that as well.

In this drawing I wanted to capture how the light strikes the interior of the Pantheon. It started off very painstakingly, and then stayed on the wall, incomplete, for several days. Yesterday I just played some loud music and worked on it with a lot of post-sehri and post-iftar energy to finish is ASAP, so I could move ahead.

When I was done my hands and feet, and the entire white-tiled floor, were covered in black charcoal.

Detail shots

8.5"x11" ~ pencil on paper

There are certain monuments that are overwhelmingly awe-inspiring because they are not only formally beautiful in the semi-ruined state in which they exist but also embody a strong sense of symbolic and historic meaning. The Colosseum is one of them.

2009: In a small street in Berlin, I had arrived at the AEG Turbine Factory exactly on time, but a hundred years too late.

I have written about the timeless beauty and architectural influence of Peter Behrens's architecture of 1909. Now that Modernism with all its idealism has been put on the shelf alongside other architectural "styles," I wanted to revisit the columns of the building in this drawing, zooming in to the point that the they are almost abstracted.

In Berlin, no one I asked knew about this building. And few people I know would understand why I went all the way to Berlin just to see these columns.

40"x54" ~ pastel on paper

Detail

8.5"x11" ~ watercolor on paper

8.5"x11" ~ pastels on paper

And then I took the Eurostar to Rome, a city founded by Romulus and Remus in 753 BC, territory of rulers such as Julius Caesar and Mussolini and Gods such as Bacchus and Jesus Christ, the setting for epic drama of love and betrayal, a founding city of the Western civilization and a Mecca of modern-day Christianity.

Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, a small town near Rome, was more impressive than I had suspected.

I dragged myself out of bed before 10am, the time at which the hundreds of residents of my industrial-size hostel were supposed to leave their rooms each day, took the Metro Linea B to the last station, Ribbibia, turned right and went through the pedestrian tunnel, turned right again and tried to enter the snack bar to buy tickets to Tivoli, but it was closed and I realized that it was Sunday and my Googled instructions had now left me on my own.

Luckily I was in Italy where there is always a way, even if it takes a lot of waiting and worrying. Finally I got on the blue CO.TRA.L bus at the next Metro station and I was off. To get to Hadrian's Villa, one can either get off on the way, just before the final uphill drive to Tivoli itself, and walk a few miles down a side street. Or one can go all the way to Tivoli and get a bus that goes all the way to the gates of the ancient palace. I missed both and ended up in a deserted bus station deep inside Tivoli on a scorching day. Of course, I had been contemplating profound things such as the future of architecture until I realized the driver and I were the only people in the bus.

So I walked back through the town in which all the ice cream shops were closed. Finally I saw the CO.TRA.L bus going down and I got on it. I got off at another spot and realized this was some other villa, so again I got on the next bus, after asking several people for directions (Ciao! Parla Inglese? Great! Do you know how I can get to...).

This time 2 American couples, who were as lost as I was, were harrassing the bus driver to make sure he would inform them about the correct stop for Hadrian's Villa. In the end, we still had to walk what felt like 5 miles in the sun at noon. But I was excited to finally get there. I had five hours before I had to meet Sucharita at Roma Termini.

The villa was grand and spectacular. I got an audio guide (something Andrea Fraser has taught me never to do) but soon got bored of hearing what the spaces might have looked like. I was taken by the amazing beauty of the place in ruins. Interesting compositions, even on the small digital camera I was now using, made me really happy, so I rushed from room to room, and through hallways and arches, and over bridges and pools. I finally began to understand the significance of the classical orders. They were exquisite, even in ruins.

I found an echo of this lack of interest in the historic and a preference for the visual in Andre Gide's book, where Olivier discusses a poetry passage in a Bachot exam:

"I should have said that La Fontaine, in painting himself had painted the portrait of the artist -- of the man who consents to take merely the outside of things, their surface, their bloom. Then I should have contrasted with that the portrait of the scholar, the seeker, the man who goes deep into things, and I should have shown that while the scholar seeks, the artist finds, that the man who goes deep gets stuck, the man who gets stuck gets sunk -- upto his eyes and over them; that the truth is the appearance of things, that their secret is their form and that what is deepest in man is his skin."

I call these memory sketches.

Caught without a functioning camera at a moment of elation and wonder, faced with a sight so perfect in composition, energy, serenity or movement, I had urge to immortalize what I experienced. So I did these very, very quickly so as not to lose the “impression” of what the moment felt like. These were sketches not meant to be seen by others but I think they are interesting because to you they are scribbles but for me they conjure the scene once again.

The first is a quick sketch of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, late at night. I sat there for a few moments amidst a crowd, and calls of the tea and corn vendors on way back to my hostel on Saturday night. The second is the expansive horizon of Athens, comfortably embedded in the hills, viewed from the Acropolis. The third sketch records the calm ruins of an amphitheater at the same place.

İstanbul! Capital of both the Roman and the Ottoman empires, a bridge between Europe and Asia, home to the Hagia Sophia whose sheer elemental force invokes silence, and adorned with exquisite mosques whose call rings through the city five times a day, a city in which extreme opposites coexist, a surreal world, sensuous and sensual, the city of temptation, there is no other word for it.

If Athens surprised me, Istanbul simply delights and dazzles. It’s religion, food, drinks, nargileh, lights, shops all sparkle and beckon. It is bursting with life and energy. It is so eclectic it’s dreamlike. Exquisite mosques and grand bazaars coexist with excellent restaurants, hammams, bars and clubs. You’ll see women in scarves but also others dressed even more fashionably than the women in Paris, and some making out with their boyfriends in public. I even saw gay and lesbian couples holding hands. This is bizarre but truly incredible to me.

Built on a hill overlooking the sea, it is an architect’s dream. You can take the ferry to Asia, which is visible on the other side, for 2 Turkish Liras (less than $2). The great number of local residents and tourists give the city enormous energy as well as style.

I went to the Istiklai Caddesi (a main shopping and food street) and my response could have been comparable to what I felt at Times Square. There was everything from Swatch to Citibank to the Virgin Music store. The book shops were incredible. There were no tall buildings but historic ones and many, many more restaurants with delectable food. It is a walking street with an old red tram that goes along it every once in a while. A million people walk along it each day, and even at 3am it is crowded and well-lit. A more than perfect public moment, Mario would say.

Istanbul’s originality is comparable to Dubai’s fakeness. It is a city rich in history and culture yet teeming with a modern spirit. Tempestuous like the waves of the Bosphorus strait, and serene like the interior of Hagia Sophia, it is home to the old and the new, traditional and modern, religious and secular, modest and scandalous, spiritual and heretical.

The architecture of Istanbul is beautiful but also functional: people pray in ornate mosques, live in old classical buildings (modern on the inside), party in ancient neighborhoods in chic clubs, and drink beer, wine and raki on the stone pavements. When I was finally ready to visit the Blue Mosque, I went at prayer time, and entered even though it said the mosque is closed to visitors for thirty minutes.

While the mosques were ornate, and there are so many of them, the Hagia Sophia had a rugged, brutalist, geometric quality to it, which was very interesting. Bora told me that a lot of this architecture uses pagan symbols. Just like the Pantheon in Rome, these buildings have square bases and round domes. The square represents this world and its imperfection. The circle is considered perfect and represents the sky and the gods. The Hagia Sophia is vast on the inside and there the ruggedness is replaced by Art Nouveau-like lamps and decoration.


I had dinner with Bora, Anas and Sefdeh at what we called a fancy restaurant that overlooked the sea and the city. A big, orange moon hovered just above the sparkling horizon.

I went to the giant cistern and saw the tilted and up-side down heads of the gorgon Medusa, whom Perseus had slain because she could turn to stone anyone she looked at. It was such a perfect moment because it connected my visit to Florence and obsession with the sculpture there to the same sense of awe I felt here. This was one of hundreds of ancient cisterns scattered under Istanbul.

When I visited the inside of the Hagia Sophia, there was some renovation going on. It was perfect: tremendous chandeliers hung low on thin wires, which resembled construction lines, and a tall, red metal staircase rose to the highest point of the dome. This and the new lights that hung on wires gave me some fresh photography subjects because I loved the contrast between the ancient architecture and the modern technology.

I sat at the café at the Istanbul Modern, looking out onto an amazing panoramic view of the city, and contemplated my stay there. Anas had told me on MSN that I had missed a chance to do something crazy, something I rarely do, because I did not get on to the boat at Angelique. The boat, though, was a metaphor and looking back on the last day, I knew I had taken it.

"It was as a grown-up man that I first stood on the hill of the Athenian Acropolis, surrounded by ruined temples, gazing out over the blue sea.

"Mingled with my happiness was a sense of astonishment that came to me as: so it really is true, what we were taught at school! How shallow, how feeble must have been the belief I had acquired then in the actual truth of what I was being told for me to feel such surprise now!"

I read this in Sigmund Freud's essay The Future of an Illusion, in the little book I started after The Counterfieters, yesterday as I had Nargileh at a place near Tophane.

Florence, a city whose size is comparable to the Princeton campus, home to the Medici family, center stage for players such as Michelangelo and Machiavelli, and Galileo and Savonarola, and the birthplace of the Renaissance itself; that is where I headed after Paris.

If Paris is an architectural museum, Florence is a tomb. If the streets of Paris are congested, those of Florence seem suffocating. If it weren't for the colorful facades and intricate window blinds, it would resemble very much a slum. It is saturated with tourists carrying maps and reminds me of Disneyland. I love the shop windows. They are super-modern/contemporary.

In Florence, I had the most divine pasta. It was garnished with the perfect mix of subtle and strong flavours. I also had some really rich chocolate ice cream, which I loved.

The streets are all curved and narrow, "to prevent wind tunnels."
I took the bus to the Carthusian Monasteries at Galluzzo (or Val d'Ema), and took a tour there guided by a monk. Le Corbusier might have taken the same tour several decades ago. I was the only non-Italian in the tour group and though I didn't understand a single word of it, the experience was transcendent.

All the time I was there, I kept thinking that there was some puzzle here that I was supposed to be solving, deciphering, unraveling. Why did Le Corbusier come and spend time here? I began to notice the harmony in the architcture -- a sort of complex simplicity. It was built in 1341 and its age itself gives it a mysterious quality. Individual chambers enclosed monks who vowed not to speak except for 10 minutes each week. Their apartments were all they had around them and in them they meditated. Each chamber has an interior garden with windows opening onto amazing views over the countryside below. Each is furnished only with furniture that is essential and functional, but whose elegance reminds me of the Bauhaus and Victor Horta.

The ceilings are low and the passages intimate, contrasting with the more open courtyard. Was I just imaginging the parallels between this and the Villa Savoye?. Also, going through these chambers, the galleries and the churches, all of which are linked together, you lose your sense of orientation. The experience of navigating through the rooms and courtyards is one of discovery and full of surprises and the architecture subtly guides the visitor around. It is a kind of architecture devoid of overt ostentatious ornamentation and pomp, yet rich in a temprered understated quality of spatial experience in the promenade it creates.

Below: Galileo's house

Yet, despite all this, for my architecture drawing project in Florence, I have mostly sketches of sculptures to show so far. I spent most of my time looking at the sculpture. While architectural styles come and go, and are dependent on the materials, ideas and processes of their age, the beauty of the human body is eternal. Biomimicry has always opened up avenues of inspiration for avant-garde architecture. There are other things such as form, composition, movement and scale that link architecrture very closely with the arts.

It was almost convenient that Italian museums did not allow photography, and that later on my camera refused to function. It gave me an opportunity to slow down and spend time with my sketchbook in the various museums and the outdoor sculpture piazzas.

Below: Three sketches of Perseus (1554) by Cellini, drawn from the sketch version in the Bargello Museum, and the full-size version in the Piazza della Signoria.


Below: Michelangelo's David, in the Galleria dell' Academia.

Below: Brunelleschi, in the Galleria dell' Academia.
Below: Machiavelli, the great evil political theorist, in the Galleria dell' Academia. Seeing this transported me back to Professor Viroli's lectures during sophomore year.
Below: Cyparissus in the Galleria dell' Academia, who Apollo "loved because of his beauty" and who was so heartbroken when he accidentally killed his deer that the cyprus tree was created and named after him.
Below: Three sketches of the The Rape of the Sabine Women (1583) by Giambologna, drawn from the versions in the Galleria dell' Academia and the outdoor Piazza della Signoria. It consists of three figures in frozen in at a moment of vigorous motion. It challenges the idea that sculpture has only one best vantage point, because presents exquisite and exciting compositions in all directions. One could learn more about architecture from this sculpture than many buildings.


Below: Fisherboy, but I forget whom, in the Bargello Museum.

The sun shone warmly on Paris. The very air was saturated with a sense of poignancy. All the sounds of guitarists on bridges and of jazz concerts and of the metro rush combined to form one bitter-sweet harmony which said adieu.

Though I already have plans to return in the winter, every moment was full of lasts. It reminded me of the Killers' Exitlude. I would have embedded it here, but youtube.com is illegal in Turkey, where I now am.

I went to the Orangerie Museum with Seung-Jin and Gary. There was a fair in the Tuileries and everyone was bathed in the orange glow of summer sun. The architecture of the museum is remarkable, complete with a I.M-Pae-like attention to detail. The environmental design and signage was intricate and stark.

There were giant Monet paintings, and there were a number of Cezannes. I could stand in front of a Cezanne painting for a whole day without getting bored.


But this beauty was, of course, expected from a place such as this. It merely produced raised eyebrows and nods. What was unexpected was the work of a more contemporary artist, Didier Paquignon, born in Paris in 1958. I am including here some samples. He is a master of scale, of manipulation of color in a way that is realistic but at the same time says, "I am a painting." I love that! His depictions could be Cezzane-like but his subjects are so modern and machine-age.



And, of course, every day there was a concert at the Hotel de Ville, the festive music from which echoed out into the Marais and Rue de Rivoli. I loved the fact that the stage design incorporated the sculpture so that it seems there were placed there for the concert. It reminds me of the treatment of the tigers at Nassau Hall for Commencement.

And the building that never ceases to inspire and amaze me, the Centre Pompidou. The esplanade in front is a phenomenon in itself. It is the perfect "public space" that would excite any urban planner or architecture historian. Artists, musicians, performers, all gather here and amuse and entertain. In the backdrop are the exquisite, vibrant colors of the "architecture." This is the place Gordon Matta-Clark chose to inact his anarchitecture. I wish that were still here.




We went to the Sacre Coeur, and looked out over all of Paris, curated and preserved like a museum, but alive with the spirit of the 21st century. I had a moment of epiphany and relized that I am secretly a bourgeois, posing as a socilaist. I love Paris, and yet I am setting off to write a year-long thesis about its struggle as an urban metropolitan center, with regard to the challenges posed by the public housing arhitecture in the suburbs.



And quite randomly, we happened to walk upon the Tour de France which, in its final-final stage on the way to the Champs Elysees, was passing through St. Michel. The roads were blocked off and we we saw, first the cars and police motorcycles, and then the cyclists, zoom by.

“‘I don’t know whether I shall write. It sometimes seems to me that writing prevents one from living, and that one can express oneself better by acts than words.’

“‘Works of art are acts that endure,’ ventured Olivier timidly; but Bernard was not listening.

“‘That’s what I admire most of all in Rimbaud—to have preferred life.’”

Days have flown by in a flash. I would have liked to write about Nice and the bonding experience that it was for us kilo interns, of my attempt to get into the Paris catacombs, of the tragedy of leaving Paris and kilo, of Florence, where I saw some of the best sculpture and had some of most incredible pasta, of Tivoli and the dazzling Hadrian’s villa, and of Rome, where I am right now, and to which no quick words will do justice.

It is for this reason that I quote lines from André Gide’s novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (English title: The Counterfeiters) to find an excuse for not writing. My sketchbooks are filling up faster now that I don’t work 9-7, and though Andy’s camera which I have been using so far refuses to function anymore, I will use the one Angela gave me to photograph some pages really soon.

More images from Nice here. Tomorrow I head to Athens.

At the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles, I had a Howard Roark moment.

Photo by PictFactory (Creative Commons License)

I was at the top of the world. I stood on a thin metal parapet, the landing of a narrow staircase supported on the roof of the building. I clutched the delicate iron framework and could feel the ripple of the heavy concrete mass underneath, and the earth from which it rose. The vast horizon, with mountains on one side and the sea on the other, made me dizzy, and the warm sea breeze made me unsteady, so I held the metal more tightly.

And I thought this was divine. Architecture is the attempt by human ingenuity to reverse the process of atrophy in an expanding universe and this building on which I stood was a masterpiece and a milestone. It represented shelter and audacious idealism. It was carved and sculpted by a giant. Surely this must be forbidden and shunned by all religions; for it was intoxicating and I felt like I had sinned.

Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion

On Tuesday, 14 July 2009, Seung-Jin, Emily, Gary and I celebrated, along with all of Paris, the 220th anniversary of the supremely influential French Revolution.

Photo by Seung-jin Ham

I awoke from the kind of deep sleep in which you dream of many things, losing all sense of time and place. It was dawn and I was in a small room at an inn in Portbou, Spain.

It was Monday now and the next train into France would leave at 9:30am.

[to be continued... maybe]

Barcelona: a city said to have been founded by Hercules 400 years before the building of Rome; Antoni Gaudí’s city; a city brimming with elaborate, vibrant, boisterous Catalonian spirit; and a city in which I knew no one and had no place to stay when I arrived at the train station at 11pm on Saturday night.

Getting There

Barcelona had never been part of my itinerary for this summer. When I found myself stranded at Belfort, forced to lodge in a cheap hotel for the night, I considered the option. Perhaps it was the annoying but very catchy song from the movie Vicky Cristina Barcelona that did it. In any case, I found next morning that because it was Saturday I would have to wait till the afternoon to get a train to either to Paris or to Ronchamp where I half wanted to return for another day. Incidentally, there was a train leaving very soon for Avignon, a train that required no reservation, and one whose final destination was a place called Port Bou. I diligently checked my Eurail map and found Port Bou to be a small beach town just south of the French-Spanish border. Barcelona looked so close from there.

So I spent the day reading the last few hundred pages of Les Miserables on the train.

I was thinking of spending the night at Port Bou but when on my arrival at 8pm I inquired about the next train to Barcelona, the lady at the counter urgently gestured to me, indicating that I should get on the train right opposite us. I did not have a ticket and asked if I could buy one but she wanted none of that. She was very intent: “This is the train to Barcelona. It’s leaving NOW! You have to go now!” And so I got on.

And now as we rolled down into Spain, with mountains on one side and the endless sea on the other, the ambience changed. People were speaking more loudly, and in a different language that sounded more organic with the rolling of the Rrr’s, and there was more laughter. And luckily, the conductor when he came to check our tickets didn’t peruse the list of countries on my Eurail pass.

Before Sunrise

The train pulled into the Barcelona Sants station. The reassuring thing about underground train terminals is that they all look similar -- I could just have been getting off an RER train in Paris. As I emerged into the station, I saw a sign pointing toward a McDonald's. It gave me a strange sense of orientation in a new place. I was in a world I knew well, even if I didn't speak the language.

Perhaps it was a good thing I didn't know then that the information booths in train stations in Spain can be unreliable and frustrating. For now, I just followed the advice of a man in some kind of uniform who said I would find hostels and hotels if I walked out the station and toward a certain direction for ten minutes. I knew not to be alone this late so I tried to keep close to a couple who were also walking in the same direction with their luggage. Barcelona, though, was full of life and lights, and the voices of joyful people. It was a Saturday night and groups of dressed up young people were walking by. I arrived at the

Mies and Gaudi

Friday, 1pm: the next train to a small village called Ronchamp was leaving in an hour from the Paris Gare du Nord. I had thirty minutes to pack for that trip, and possibly others.

Visiting Le Corbusier’s chapel of Notre Dame du Haut would suffice as justification for a day of unexcused absence from work. I had run into a group of Princeton students on my way back from a shisha place the night before, and together we had set off for an establishment known as Social Club. As a consequence I was unable to get up in time for work on Friday. The other kilo interns had departed for Amsterdam for the weekend and would not be going to work either. So I—in the spirit of a true KGS alum—decided to take the day off.

I had looked for an itinerary that didn’t require a reservation, so I just stepped into the train and by 6:30pm I was in a small town called Lure, waiting for the shuttle that would take me to Ronchamp.

Finally I landed in a small village in the middle of nowhere: what was Le Corbusier—forger of rules for a new machine architecture, and conceiver of utopian urban schemes such as the Plan Voisin—doing here. While the man calls for regulation and standardization, his architecture transcends that. It is sculptural, harmonious, thoughtful, and serene. It denies mass-production and repetition. It embraces the individuality of the artist, and acknowledges human inhabitation. That is what draws me to Le Corbusier: his unrelenting conceptual idealism and his built works complement each other. To study one in isolation is misleading. The five points are not enough; they need masters such as Gaudi and Horta and Corbusier and Mies to articulate them. This idea undermines some precepts of modernism—such as the belief in a supposed International Style—but it redeems modern architecture.

The chapel was outside the village itself. I walked uphill for 20 minutes on a completely deserted pathway. The setting sun was brilliant and formed bright yellow outlines on the grassy horizon. Bees were buzzing, and it smelled like spring. It reminded me of the journey of the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings.

I reached the top to find that the gates had been shut at 7:30pm. That explained why I was the only person for as far as I could see. On the bright side, I had the chapel all to myself. I walked around the boundary wall, catching glimpses of it. It was symbolic of my quest to become an architect: alluring but elusive.

I saw hills of fresh mud, which was the landscaping for the new addition that will soon be constructed there. It is a Renzo Piano project and has been the subject of much controversy. I entered the construction site, deserted as it was, and climbed a large hill to get a better view of that fleeting wonder.

The sun was setting now and I began to wonder where I would spend the night. A car came along from the other side of the hill and a man began to lock the gate to the construction area. This would have locked me in so I called out to him. He was kind enough to wait for me and let me out. I asked him if he was going downhill and if I could go with him. He turned out to be a surveyor for Piano’s project. On our way down, Denis—that was his name, if I remember correctly—explained how complicated the project is: the Fondation Le Corbusier wants the chapel to retain its quality of being visible at the top of the hill from all sides, so Piano’s project will be as hidden as possible. There are constant deliberations about things such as old trees that must be preserved, forcing the new design to accommodate them. When you’re talking about names such as Corbusier and Piano, he said, everything is a very big deal.

It turned out he was going to Belfort, the closest real city to Ronchamp. I would either need to find a train back to Paris or look for a place to spend the night in the vicinity, and in either case Belfort would be a good place to head to. And so he dropped me off at the Belfort train station.

In a blog which has to do with Le Corbusier, and which is called works-in-progress, it is fitting to post some sketches from my carnet.

I want to get this out of the way before I write something about Ronchamp and Barcelona. Yes, Barcelona!

We start with everyday objects. Missing here are the trash can studies. I want to do a whole series on them later on, with some thoughts about the significance of their design.

The Paris Metro monitor has screens that allow the driver to ensure everyone has boarded before he or she closes the doors. Sometimes they close the doors anyway, crushing old ladies' shopping carts.

On my way back from Germany, I noticed the drastic change in object design. Straight perpendicular lines gave way to ornate curves.

Often, when I take a break from AutoCAD and Illustrator at work, I look through magazines and books from the library and sketch. Drawing is the act of making a mark, but it is first a form of seeing, or reading. Even the most widely known buildings and objects can be better understood when read through drawing.













And here, finally, are four of the five classic orders. Apparently, all architects should know these. Even though I think that is silly, I still drew them because I was curious and because Andy would say (that Paula would say) that it is good to know and understand the rules before breaking them. And Ed would say (that Claude Perrault would say) the same.

Two kinds of people go to Poissy, a small suburban town in the 5th ring of the Paris region: those who live there and those who go to see Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye.

By our bewildered looks as we stumbled off the RER A, it was obvious we were part of the latter category. And not just any tourist will make the trip to Poissy to see this modernist house; it is hardly to be found in regular guidebooks. An apparently plain, white concrete summer home that even the neighbors rarely know about is highly spoken of in lecture halls on the other side of the Atlantic in big American universities. Architecture students gape at slides, hear the stories, write papers about it, and slowly come to either hate it or love it. Or outwardly criticize it and secretly admire it.

Our group was comprised of ardent lovers of Villa Savoye. I had planned the trip with my coworkers, Gary and Seung-Jin (Yale and GSD grad students respectively). Seung-Jin’s butt mate at Harvard, Carl, who was visiting from Rome, had also joined us. And just as we were about to leave Paris that morning we met up with another architect (Carl’s friend’s friend) Rene, a grad student at UVA, and her boyfriend, Ian, who will be starting law school soon. Ian was the only one unfamiliar with the villa but he was quick to convert.

Photo by Seung-Jin Ham

We decided to walk the 20-minute journey from the train station instead of taking the bus. I was the only one who spoke a little French and somehow I became the person leading the way, following the little map I had drawn in my Moleskine notebook, but Rene was there to my aid when we wandered just a little bit off course.

Photo by Seung-Jin Ham

I can honestly say about Savoye that it is a building that far surpassed all my expectations when I met it in person. I had read about Le Corbusier’s five points of a new architecture, about thickening of space and phenomenal transparency, I had written about the house’s Palladian proportions, and seen pictures of the interior ramps and the circular driveway, but seeing it all together was strangely enlightening. It was all one thing, there were no points, features or lists; there was just the Villa Savoye and the experience of being in the Villa Savoye. The sculptural quality of the spaces, the promenade through the house, the vistas opened up by the carving of windows and balconies, and the lightness of the architecture were all admirable and coherent. There was a reason and intent for every little detail. Every element had a certain abstraction to it: a folded up concrete slab could be an outdoor picnic table or a high stool, or a bar when you have a party. We all spoke about how amazing it would be to live in this house, a non-academic idea that rarely emerges in a building such as this. I had a vision of rebuilding the Villa Savoye, with wooden floors and modern concrete, on the shore somewhere, and living in it.

I have rambled like someone too overcome with emotion to make any sense. Yet that is how I felt. Later we had a small picnic outside the in the lawn and then took a nap in the warm summer sunshine. We set off in the late afternoon, and had late lunch in Poissy before returning to Paris.

Real innovative progress took place in the small industrial towns of Germany, spreading from there to the larger cities, and then to the rest of the world. Stuttgart is one such town.

I headed to Stuttgart right after Dessau. Situated on a big hill, Stuttgart is home to the Weissenhof Housing Estate, a model neighborhood where several modernist architects were invited to design workers’ homes in the new International Style in 1927 under the supervision of Mies van der Rohe. It is home also of the little-known but extremely important Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, a thriving force for Architecture and Industrial Design in Germany, as well as of the Porsche Museum which I had no idea existed.

I had spent a little more than 24 hours in Berlin. In those 24 hours I had visited and got to know my two main destinations in the city: the AEG Turbine Factory by Walter Gropius, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Altes Museum. I had walked along the river, had a nice lunch, walked into the closing ceremony of a certain pride parade, saw much more of Berlin’s architecture at night, and ended up spending several hours of the night at a huge party called GMF which took place on three levels at the top of a Berlin skyscraper. I had had to take a cab home and had spent half the night at the bus stop right outside my hostel. I am glad it was Germany and not France or Italy. Finally I had passed out on my bed at 4am.

I was woken up at 10am because that was the check-out time at the hostel. I had missed my 7am train to Dessau and Stuttgart. I would have to renew all my reservations and contact my workplace to let them know I would be taking Monday off.

I arrived in Stuttgart at 11:30pm on the ICE train, which is Germany’s TGV and is much more impressive and comfortable than the TGV. I took a taxi to my hostel, and it pulled up on a mountain street overlooking the town below, with just a small entrance on the cliff. The rest of the building was on lower levels on the slope below.

I’ll go directly now to the three things I wanted to write about in Stuttgart. The first is the tram system. It was extremely impressive how these trams glided smoothly up sloping streets, through tunnels, on regular streets alongside cars, and down steep slopes. The map and guide was crystal clear and intuitive and it must have been the easiest train system to use that I have ever encountered.

The second is the Weissenhof Housing Estate. The Germans are not ashamed of Modernism like the French or Americans. The housing project was well maintained. The most remarkable thing was that these houses – most of them small and not luxurious – were occupied by real people living there. Each house had a small sign outside it, explaining the concept and displaying the plans. People parked their cars, got out with their groceries and walked into their home, even as others took pictures of the neighborhood.

Mies van der Rohe’s building was highly reminiscent of some of the dilapidated architecture I had seen in Clichy-sous-Bois. It made me realize that renovation and maintenance plays a very important role in the perception of architecture and, more importantly, that the same forms may have different symbolic value in different places.

Chair on display at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste

After walking around the Weissenhof Estate, I stumbled upon the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart. I reminded me of Harvard GSD and the Indus Valley School in Karachi and other places that seem to exude a spirit of creative energy. It is the Bauhaus of the 21st century. I was so excited to walk around inside that, for a moment, I seriously considered trying to learn German and applying here for grad school. Earlier that morning, I had met three German students from various parts of the country who had come to take an admissions test for the Industrial Design program at this school. They had had to send their portfolios earlier on for a preliminary selection process. They were super-impressed that I was a Pakistani studying architecture in the US here just to visit a housing project that they didn’t even know about.

Visiting the Dessau Bauhaus building was like going on a pilgrimage.

The Bauhaus is omnipresent even in today’s world. When it was forced to shut down by the Nazis and many of the architects emigrated from Germany, the movement found a new home in America and the influence of the philosophy reached New York and Harvard and the rest of the world.

The building itself is remarkable in its functional organization. It is a building I have written a 15-page paper about in Professor Esther da Costa Meyer’s class and made a 20-minute presentation on in Professor Spyros Papapetros’ graduate seminar at Princeton. So instead of describing it I will note here some impressions.


Because I had missed the first train out of Berlin, I had only two hours in Dessau, before my next connection to Stuttgart. The trains in Germany are very punctual. I took a cab to the Bauhaus (That’s all I had to say, obviously: “Bauhaus” – and we were off!).

As the cab pulled up, I noticed there was renovation going on in some parts of the exterior. They were replacing the worn flooring tiles with new ones of excellent quality. The Germans are great at recognizing the worth of their Modern Architecture, and maintaining and preserving it.

To the pilgrim that I was, the building seemed to glow in the warm sun, like a shining beacon ushering in a new dawn for architecture. I walked around the Bauhaus, stored my bags and jacket in a Bauhaus locker, had a sandwich in the Bauhaus café, used a Bauhaus bathroom, and looked at the exhibition inside the building.

The building and spaces were very impressive but it seemed like none of the pictures I would take would be as good as the ones in the library at Princeton. So much of the architecture we know about is only experienced through mediated images. Going to the Bauhaus, then, revealed some very interesting aspects that I had not known before, but was also a little disenchanting at the same time.

I could see very well the much-acclaimed literal transparency of the building, and the Panopticon-like arrangement which allowed the shrewd Gropius to oversee, from his office in the center, all that went on. But I also got a chance to read in the building Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzy’s idea of phenomenal transparency -- something that hasn't been written about this building but that I have wondered about. Because of the geometrical arrangement of spaces, “...there is a continuous dialectic between fact and implication. The reality of deep space is constantly opposed to the inference of shallow space; and by means of the resultant tension, reading after reading is enforced.” This can be seen in the following image where the reflection of the building in the window, the objects and people inside the building, and the awareness of the planes behind allow for a reading of the building on several different receding and advancing planes.

The AEG Turbine Factory, designed by Peter Behrens in 1910, is a major crossroads in the history of architecture.

The roots of Modernism can be traced to Peter Behrens and the German Werkbund. From 1907 to 1912, Peter Behrens' students and assistants included Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Adolf Meyer, Jean Kramer and Walter Gropius. All of these people were highly influential in charting the course of architectural history in the twentieth century.

In his capacity as "artistic consultant" for AEG, Behrens designed the company's corporate identity: everything from graphic design to product and industrial design, to architecture. One of the most historically significant of these works is the AEG High Tension Factory in Berlin.



The building combined, for the first time, elements and forms of classical architecture with the modern aesthetic of industrial design, articulated by the overt use of modern materials such as glass and steel alongside the more traditional masonry. What made the project truly remarkable was that this was a factory building that combined the grandeur of a classic temple with the functionality and good working conditions made possible by the newest developments in construction. In doing so, it created a whole new aesthetic form, paving the way for later modernist architectural innovation.

While I was in Berlin I visited the factory building because it is one of the six destinations on my project proposal for the Shellmann Prize, a fellowship that allows me to follow the path of Le Corbusier's travels through Europe almost a century ago.

Berlin: the setting of immense upheaval and reform in the last century, home to giants such as Peter Behrens and Mies van der Rohe, the last stronghold of the movement that was the Bauhaus, a city bold in its embrace and expression of modernity, the very streets of which exude an understated but distinct elegance in their simplicity.

Berlin might not be as “Beaux Arts” pretty as Paris, but there is bold and utilitarian experimentation in its architecture. It is not a city shaped by a tentative curator whose main concern is to preserve precious relics, but by craftsmen who are unafraid to design contemporary architecture in the spirit of the contemporary age.

On Friday, I took the night train to Berlin.

Adolf Loos would have highly approved of the Berlin street facades

If I had spoken a single word of German, perhaps I would have felt even more at home there. At the end of three days, I had learnt only one word: Hauptbahnhof (meaning Central Station). The reasons for this ineptitude on my part tell something about Germany. First, most German people I encountered were extremely respectful and I did not at all feel estranged. Second, most German people I met spoke at least a little bit of English. My three-day trip went by in a flash and I simply did not get a chance to buy a dictionary and begin my first German lesson. And lastly, everything in Germany is extremely intuitive and organized.

The process of “getting to know” a city is fascinating. You start by walking around and getting a sense of its identity, or DNA. This identity may be discerned in the smallest of things, like sidewalks, trash cans, the shoes people wear, the street signs, etc. In the Berlin streets, for example, the grass is untrimmed. The layers of the building facades and the visual imagery, or graphic design, tell the story of the city’s past, convey its present spirit, and hint at its future.

The night train to Berlin

The train stopped at Metz at what must have been 2am. It reminded me of my friend Stephanie who lives in Metz and who had invited me to visit her. I was sitting in the bar cart because I couldn’t bear the couchette anymore. It had been a shock to walk into the tiny compartment with six “beds,” three stacked on each side of a very narrow passage in which two people could barely fit. I had one of the lowest bunks and its ceiling was so low I couldn’t even sit up and read. So after a small conversation with the two American girls from Seattle and the German man above me (the last two were a French couple who went to sleep immediately – they must do this a lot), and after shifting restlessly in my bed for two hours, I left with my copy of Les Miserables to find food and a chair in which I could sit upright and read.

The blue sign glimmered in the night: Metz. People got out to smoke and breathe the Metz air.

To be continued (maybe).

The Altes Museum, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1825

Detail of the Altes Museum, revealing intervention at entrance

The Berlin Hauptbahnhof

Cities are like oil paintings.

They are built over time by the addition of countless layers. There may or may not be a grid, but there is movement and there are centers of focus. Older layers lay the foundation for new developments, yet at times they are scraped off in bold and calculated artistic gestures. The artist sets parameters but also lets the painting take its own course. Sometimes there is too much going on and so panels are added on the sides to expand the canvas. At other times the canvas is limited and additional elements have to be incorporated in the already highly complex fabric.

The Centre Pompidou in an aerial map of Paris. Photo by Pierre Metivier.

The Centre Pompidou is like a splash of color that has recently been added to one such old and precious painting, the city of Paris. Some Parisians find the high-tech/modern/postmodern style of the building jarring and contradictory to what Paris is all about. Yet for me the building is a natural part of the city and visiting it is always an uplifting experience.

In a city with so much historic grandeur, the idea of architectural change is met with horror. All the architecture that Paris needs already exists here, and its value will rise as the years go by. But more and more, the architecture ceases to be architecture and becomes art instead.

The Centre Pompidou. Photograph by Serge Melki.

Henri Ven der Velde and the gesamtkunstwerk designers of early Modernism would argue that buildings are a part of the continuum of things that surround us and which we like to design. They are containers of the human body just like clothing, furniture, the room and the city are containers of the human body. Our clothes are an expression of who we are today and not 200 years ago and similarly our buildings must express the spirit of the contemporary age.

Even Victor Hugo writes about the “crisis of change” in a positive light: “Certain things have been unlearnt, and that is good, provided other things are learnt. There must be no void in the human heart. Edifices may be pulled down, but only on the condition that others are put in their place.” So there is no modernism or postmodernism anymore, there is only good architecture and bad architecture. And though it is all very subjective, I would agree with Robert Venturi’s idea that architecture needs to be designed with awareness of one’s own time and of all the periods of the human history. The symbolic is as important as the formal.

During lunch-break yesterday, I rushed to Les Halles for the legendary Paris sales and I was struck by the Pompidou Center which was visible through a slit in an alley on Rue du Temple. I took a picture and only later realized why the moment was so powerful. As I compared the tall structure of the Center Pompidou with the Paris street façade, I noticed a lot of parallels. The pediment, for example, is clearly echoed in the steel structure, and so is the rhythm of horizontals and verticals (Tuscan columns of the 21st century?). The building has proportions that are harmonious in the way classical architecture is. This observation allowed me to understand why the building is a perfectly natural part of Paris in a way that the Forum des Halles finds it hard to be.

In the 1850s, Baron Haussmann gave Paris the Kärcher treatment, carving wide boulevards through the fabric of the city, and creating diagonals that link key points of interest.

The facades along these boulevards were made available to developers who, according to strict guidelines, gave Paris its modern-day identity. I have always been amazed that people actually live in apartments behind these ornate windows in the city-center.

Photo from http://www.skyscrapercity.com

While the triangles created by Haussmann give Paris many Gridiron buildings, I have wondered how the architects at the time articulated spaces behind the street facades and in the center of these triangles. Working on a SoHo project in junior studio last semester I realized that even in the New York grid there are awkward alleys and hollow spaces that only Google Earth reveals. Vito Acconci has been very interested in these forgotten urban spaces.
I see from my office window what happens when the ornate facades are projected backward into the triangular space. Small courtyards with tall concrete walls and strange corners intersecting one another tell the story of an older, more congested Paris.

There is an obsession in France about the problem of housing the "working class," or poor people. This is strange to someone coming from America, where there is very little recognition of the existence of the homeless. What exists in America though is a heightened awareness of racial equality, so no one group is ever deliberately isolated. Whereas Americans discriminate against the poor people as a whole, the French, it seems, find people such as the pied noirs unbearable.

For decades, the French have experimented with logements sociale, in an effort to "integrate" the immigrants, or at least to lure them out of Paris. Here are two old cartoons I found at a stall along the Seine. They depict some radical modernist plans for France and Paris respectively.

To explain Fête de la Musique to a Princeton student, I would simply have to ask them to imagine Princeton lawnparties taking place on a national scale.

At lawnparties different music bands perform at the eating clubs; at the Fête de la Musique, every public square, cafe, museum and bridge in Paris (and in all of France) is animated by bands playing different kinds of music.
So on Sunday all of Paris was one big concert space, and pedestrians replaced cars on streets. I walked around Paris with my friends from work (Seungjin, Emily and Gary), interns at kilo architectures. We ate lunch at the canal and then made our way through Paris, picking up free food from vendors at the open air market near Place de la Bastille, and walking along the Seine to sample some of the music. We met up with Ruben, another kilo architect, at the Saint Michel fountain and then headed for the Luxembourg Gardens. There we had a picnic with cheese and wine and cookies. By this time I was so exhausted that I had to go take a nap.

In the evening I went to the Louvre to catch the symphony orchestra concert but it was full by the time we got there. So we went to the Centre Pompidou. In the beautiful night the building glittered elegantly. Sitting on the esplanade, looking at Centre Pompidou, and hearing the festive sounds of the city around me was in itself intoxicating. Later there was confetti and loud music and a lot of people and it all seems like a blur now. I am just glad that the metro was open all night thanks to the Fête de la Musique.

Seungjin, Emily and Gary at the Fontaine St. Michel

I look forward to going to work everyday because of the really friendly people at kilo. The internship has helped me learn a lot about working as an architect in the "real" world. All kinds of practical (as well as absurd) considerations and requirements have to be accounted for in the conception of architectural design, and redesign, and re-re-redesign. Another essential difference from being at school is that one is implementing another person's (or group's) design concept and so it is all the more dangerous to get too attached to the project. You have to maintain a careful balance between giving your very best and taking a back seat when drastic changes are made, so that you will return the next morning and still go on with yet a new iteration. But if the process has made me disciplined and patient on the one hand, it has also reinforced my determination to go to grad school right after Princeton, so that I can become a real architect ASAP.

Overall, this summer is very different from the last because ten hours of my day are spent at work. Yet Paris is as fascinating as ever, both in its glittering beauty and in its deeper, darker mysteries.

On Saturday, I visited Clichy-sous-Bois, the infamous Paris suburb where the 2005 France riots started.

In November 2005 two Muslim teenagers got electrocuted in a power substation in Clichy-sous-Bois while trying to flee from pursuing police. Ten days of violence ensued, in which thousands of cars were burnt in the Paris metropolis, and all over France.

The police steer clear of Clichy-sous-Bois, BBC reporters were threatened when they tried to report on the condition of this suburb, and I'm told by Parisians that Sarkozy himself cannot go there. No Metro or RER lines connect it to the center. So I was a little scared of going there alone. But I felt safe precisely because I am really nobody important. With the right attire, I might just be able to blend in -- until of course I would take out my camera. I was positively frightened to do that.

I set off from my temporary home, the Cite Universitaire campus on the RER B line toward the Gare du Nord. At this train station I need to buy a ticket to Le Raincy/ Villemomble/ Montfermeil. It was all very interesting because Montfermeil happens to be the partial setting for Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, which I am reading these days.

It is not easy for us in these days to imagine what a country outing of students and grisettes was like forty-five years ago. Paris no longer has the same outskirts, and what might be termed the face of circum-Parisian life has wholly changed. Instead of the post-chaise we have the railway-carriage, and instead of the sailing-cutter, the steamboat... Paris in 1862 is a town with all of France for its suburbs. (Hugo 126)

Here I was, setting out into the very same suburbs almost a hundred and fifty years later. Now, it seemed, Paris was the same small town but with the entire world for its suburbs -- in particular, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and other French colonies of the twentieth century.
Because my destination was in a zone outside "Paris," I had to buy a new ticket. I found myself in line with African -- for they were dressed in traditional African clothing -- men, women and children that seemed out of place in Paris. Finally I got my return ticket and got on the RER E. I might not have bothered because I could have gotten in with my Pass Navigo and jumped over the barrier in Montfermeil like most other people. I knew from my little incident last summer that I should never travel in an empty carriage. The train zoomed with a speed that made the NJ Transit seem like Hugo's "post-chaise."

At Montfermeil I had to take the 601 A/B bus to one of the stations in Clichy-sous-Bois. I had no idea how to get a ticket for this bus but I found two friendly women who helped me out. And then I was on my way.

Landing in Clichy-sous-Bois was bizarre. It was undelwhelming because there was nothing there really, except some shops and long arrays of apartment buildings. I walked around like I knew where I was going, or like I lived in one of those buildings and was just going back home... everything was calm but there was an ominous feeling in the stillness.
I was awed because here I saw a perverse realization the the Ville Contemporaine and of the theoretical "garden city," a sustainable modern development where the modern man lives in tall buildings that rise from large green fields. It is all supposed to be very sustainable. And not only was this a realization, it was also a sort of fast-forward in history where I could walk around and see for myself and judge what had worked and what hadn't, after 60 or so years had passed since the height of modernist idealism.
To my surprise, a lot of subtleties started to emerge: for example, not all housing seemed to be dilapidated and sickly. There was an entire spectrum from the traditional French cottages in neat streets to the clean and well-maintained gated apartment enclaves to the large modern building that seemed airy, comfortable and middle-class, to the last, which comprised many, many very long buildings with the same entrances, windows, etc. It seemed like someone had a lot of steel and concrete and had multiplied one unit a thousand times to generate a building, and then had proceeded to multiply the building many times to create the Grand Ensemble. It was these buildings that lacked any sort of character. The clothes, bicycles, broken appliances, laundry and trash that hung out from the windows gave to the building its identity.

I took out my camera and started taking pictures. I just had to. Taking pictures is like stealing a little bit of the subject to manipulate it for one's use. You get to set the composition and tell the story. And so I tried to be as humble and reverent as possible. I got some stares but generally I seemed to fit in. A "bonjour" here and there sufficed.

The public spaces, the pilotes, the large windows, the absratct compositions in some of the better-designed buildings were really quite beautiful. It was like seeing the modern dream sort of work, but knowing that somewhere along the line it had failed. The problem, I realized, lies in the social and urban organization of space rather than just architectural.

Another very peculiar thing I noticed was that there was a helicopter continuously making rounds over the entire area. It just did not go away. I wondered what it would feel like to be under surveillance like that all day.

In any case, I had a sandwich at a Muslim place. It was adorned with Islamic art and had arabic all over. And the man behind the corner, who was Tunisian, was so pleased when he found out I was from Pakistan, I got a "Mashallah" from him. A few arab gang members came in and shook hands with everyone, including me. Wow I really was blending in in this place. Was I still in France though... I don't know. There was a little can for the collection of funds to build an Islamic University. There was a drawing on it -- a nice elevation of a grand building. He told me very few people had contributed. The people here seemed out of touch with the rest of France. Only the super-modern buses passing through were a reminder that this was still the republic of France.
Later as I took more pictures, I was screamed at by a young man, and almost followed. I held my breath and walked as quickly as I could away from the place, only to find that a lot of these housing projects had iron fences around them, inhibiting free movement and dividing the town between the rich and the poor.
To my amazement, I walked into a beautiful park, complete with a lake, dense trees, and people picnicking and fishing. None of these people were black or Arab, and the park was fenced off from the Grand Ensemble. The pictures I took are available on my Flickr page (click here).
I came back not with answers but perhaps with an awareness of the complexity of what I was trying to understand. The most troubling thing was the volatile nature of the social fabric in this great metropolis, which I experienced as an outsider. I could identify both with the bourgeois Parisian and with the frustrated Muslim teenager in the suburb. And I believe more than ever that it may now be the time to confront the divide by addressing it... and while that may sound too idealistic, you need only to listen to President Obama's speech in Cairo to begin to want to believe.

In the last three days, I started work at kilo, visited Le Corbusier’s Pavilion Swisse, went on a picnic with people at work, bought gorceries and the pass Navigo, and met up with some old friends. Yet while I am very much in Paris now, my heart is still in New York.

Le Corbusier's Pavilion Swisse at the Cite Universitaire

Thursday was my first day at work. The people at kilo architectures are very friendly and almost everyone speaks English. There are other students from Yale and the GSD but it seems like I am the only undergraduate. A few people only speak English and I got along rather well with them. Despite all this my first day was a little frustrating. I was assigned to make a cardboard model for one of several iterations of a residential project. The scale of the model was 1:200 (tiny) and I was using traditional an x-acto knife instead of a laser-cutter. So I felt incompetent as I struggled to understand the project and work on it at the same time. But because Lee Wen (my supervisor) was extremely helpful and supportive, I kept going. All of us had lunch together in the office at 1pm (we ordered Thai salad from a nearby place) and that was fun. By the end of the day I was sick of the little model and my slow progress on it. Somehow I felt I was not good enough for this job.

The second day, I had a secret resolve: I wanted to match Princeton’s laser-cutter and its effortless precision and speed. I know it’s silly to compete with an anthropomorphized machine but it worked. I did my Princeton thing where I get up and take a short break every hour. I finished it by the end of the day; it wasn’t perfect but it was good enough to get a complement from Lee Wen (which meant a lot to me). The best part was that I was learning and enjoying the process by then. As I sat there inserting walls using tweezers, cutting out windows, and laying out the landscape around the building, I was beginning to understand the scope of the project by psychologically inhabiting it. We also had a discussion about the merits of the concept behind the design.

At the end of Friday (Day 2), we had a “picnic.” We all went to a nearby park with a lot of food and drinks. This was a good opportunity to talk to some of the other interns. We may be going together to Marseilles to see Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation! And Emily (from Yale) even said she might be interested in going along with me to look at the public housing projects in the Paris suburbs.

On Saturday I met up with Gregoire and Stephanie, my friends from a New York internship in 2006. We met at the great arch at La Defense, which I had not seen before. It was enormous. I felt like a tiny laser-cut person in an architecture model of a scale out of this world. The horizon was expansive and in the far distance I could make out the Champs Elysees.

It was great to meet my friends again. All of us were surprised and pleased by my French. As we walked to another café in central Paris, Stephanie’s boyfriend (Etienne, whose English is as good as my French) and I talked in a mixture of English and French and it helped us both practice the other language in a very, very practical way.

Earlier in the day I had gone to walk along the Seine and get a coat for these unusually cold summer days in Paris. Of course, central Paris bombards one with it majestic grandeur, architectural detail, and strong sense of history. But I felt a change in the air as well. Near the Hotel de Ville there were people gathered in a square with a huge outdoor screen projecting the French Tennis Open. There were smaller enclosures where children were playing tennis. Behind the screen, in the distance, you could see the large side façade of the Notre Dame. This juxtaposition between the old and new made me aware of the past, presnt, and unseen future at the same time. Close by was the Centre Pompidou, which now seemed at home in this city, a shrine no less than the Notre Dame. I realized how expensive Paris is, and I was humbled to think that the opportunity for me to be here was made possible by Princeton.

Speaking of which, it made me happy to find out that everyone in France knows about Princeton and they get really impressed when they find out I am a student there.

Tomorrow, I will return to my 9-7 workday. Deep down I am a little scared about it. I told myself I am an undergraduate and I'm not getting paid for this. Yet someone is paying for me being here so I know that I will try my best. I think this internship is really the best place I could be right now, but I know I want to go to design school and become a real architect as soon as possible.

I am back at the Cité Universitaire campus after less than a year. Last time, I was here for 17 days. And yet everything is so familiar that moving in feels almost like returning to Princeton after a break.

British Airways and London Heathrow was a combination of nice and not-so-nice—nice because some of the flight attendants were very kind and friendly, and a little awkward because BA and the security at Heathrow always make me feel like I've done something wrong, like I don't belong; there's a sense that I'm being discriminated against in a way that I can't exactly pinpoint.

Anyway, Starbucks (to the rescue) and the efficient and quick processing at Charles de Gaulle airport was like a refreshing breeze. As I set off for central Paris from the airport (which is located in the suburbs of Paris) I began to see the public housing architecture that I have been researching and writing about all spring semester at Princeton.

Unfortunately I didn't catch the announcement that I had to switch trains at the first station in Paris. Soon I realized I was on my way back to the airport in the same train. I panicked and exited on the next station, baggage and all. This station just happened to be Drancy, which was ironic because Drancy was the site of the first Grand Ensemble, a horrific array of “modern” slabs with repetitive housing units that were used during the Second World War as a prison for Jews who were being transported to Auschwitz. It is the epitome of architecture gone wrong, both in terms of form and symbolism, and was later taken down. However, the stark contrast between the City of Lights and its forsaken suburb was evident, for there were no manicured gardens, gargoyles, or monuments here—only high-rise apartments in empty space, lots of graffiti, and people who didn't resemble Parisians.

Finally I got on another train and came to Paris. Tomorrow I start work at kilo architectures.

I am packing every single thing in A165 Forbes. Although most of my life over the last year is already neatly packed into labelled boxes, its difficult to store the artwork. I can get rid of many things but it is difficult to throw away art - there is something sacred about it. On Tuesday I leave for Paris. I will leave this room exactly as I found it many months ago, with no trace of my existence here.

The transience of life is strikingly similar to that of my stay in this room. When I move to the next room, I want the artwork I leave behind to serve as a tangible proof that I once existed.

Starting June 4th 2009, I will be working as an intern architect at kilo architectures which is located on Rue Réaumur in Paris. I am looking forward to the opportunity of working for founding partner Linna Choi.

I am a little intimidated. The working hours are 9am-7pm with a one-hour break. The last time I "worked" outside Princeton was at the Actors Theater Workshop in New York City. That was an extraordinary experience and it's interesting that I'll see some of the friends I made there in Paris this summer. That thought and the end of what has been my best semester at Princeton gives me more confidence in all this.

For my senior thesis at Princeton, I will study how the modern housing projects in the Paris suburbs are linked to the marginalization of the metropolitan area's immigrant population. This summer I will visit the suburbs of Paris to conduct preliminary research.

In September 2005, massive riots broke out all over France. Ten days of severe unrest were sparked by an incident in which two African Muslim teenagers, sons of working-class immigrants, were electrocuted to death at a power sub-station while attempting to evade the police. On some nights of the rioting, up to 1500 cars were set on fire (Cohen 98). Reports from The New York Times and The Washington Post noted the ominous presence of the massive social housing estates in the Paris suburbs (or banlieues) where the accident took place, as if the architecture itself had performed a role in the genesis of the horrific incident:

The Washington Post: With unrest expanding through the northern suburbs of high-rise apartments that house some of France’s poorest immigrant populations, senior government officials were debating how to curb the violence during Wednesday morning’s weekly cabinet meeting. (Moore A12, emphasis added)

The New York Times: In life, they were uncelebrated. In death, Zyed Benna, 17, and Bouna Traore, 15, have inspired more than 10 days of riots that have spread from housing projects in the suburbs of Paris to cities and towns across France. (Crampton 1, emphasis added)

The incident served as a spark that set off an explosion, the real cause of which was the deep social divide that the suburban space itself had come to symbolize and contribute to.
Indeed, commentators around the world pointed to the public housing projects in the Paris suburbs as sites of political contestation and social unrest. They especially noted the significance of the ominous Grands Ensembles, countless large housing estates constructed in the mid-twentieth century, each containing a minimum of 1000 repeated units. In the 2007 Architectural Record, Sam Lubell denounced the formal elements of these slab-like apartment buildings, calling them “tinderboxes for trouble” (14). He advocated for better design interventions to “stave off a sense of alienation and resentment” in the residents of these housing estates (Lubell 14). Steven Wassenaar, in his article for Volume in 1997, urges for “livable, spatial architecture (urban ‘healing’)” (7). Pieter Uittenhove, writing in 1997 for Archis, called the modernist architecture in the banlieues a “space of exclusion” (50). All three writers reject as a fallacy modernist idealism that “set itself up as a sort of Noah’s Ark to save civilization from ruin” (Uittenhove 51). In their rejection of Modernism, they focus primarily on formal architectural elements such as the use of industrial material, repetition of units, a lack of public spaces, and the abundance of “towering blank walls framing empty courtyards” (Lubell 14).

I posit that the architecture of the large housing projects, the Grand Ensembles, is indeed inextricably linked to the marginalization of France’s working class immigrant minorities; however, to fully understand the nature of this marginalization, we must go beyond just the aesthetic or functional form of public housing architecture and analyze the symbolic meaning it has acquired over the last half century. I will argue that despite the objective nature of spaces in public housing, individuals and groups living in them subjectively internalize the architecture that surrounds them. Conversely, over time, the very same residents project their identity onto the architecture: either mentally, when they associate it with specific stereotypes, or physically, by using graffiti and defacement as tangible marks of their frustration. In the case of the modernist housing projects, the tabula rasa architecture has performed over several decades as an instigator of social strife for the people in the suburbs, as well as a contested space loaded with meaning and symbolism. In other words, architectural space in the Paris banlieues is oppressive in two ways: it physically entraps its inhabitants and it serves, at the same time, as a symbolic record of that imprisonment.

The two-dimensional surface has always served as a testing ground for architectural concepts such as composition, volume, and the interplay of light and shadow. The same surface also serves a second important function: that of recording, interpreting and disseminating the object and spatial qualities of architecture.

While Le Corbusier’s work is the epitome of the role of sketch as creative experiment of ideas, Hugh Ferris’ charcoal renderings exemplify the latter role of subjective interpretation of space by artist.

Before he went on to become the most prominent protagonist of Modernist architecture – and one of the greatest architects of all time – Le Corbusier, or Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, traveled the world to visit architectural masterpieces and record them in his watercolor sketches. “Architecture,” he wrote, “is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.”

That is exactly what I would like to do. I want to follow Le Corbusier’s path across Europe to experience first hand some of the classic architectural wonders that inspired him as a young architect. I want to encounter and interpret these great buildings in my own sketches in order to give them yet another subjective reading.

I intend to visit some of Le Corbusier’s most significant destinations: in Berlin, the AEG Turbine Factory (1910) which was designed by his employer, Peter Behrens; in Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale (1860-7), designed by Henri Labrouste, where Le Corbusier spent long days studying the history and theory of architecture; in Florence, the Carthusian Monasteries at Val d’Ema (founded 1341), whose cellular interiors inspired his later work; in Rome, St. Peters Basilica (1506), designed by Michelangelo and others; in Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa (approx. 200 AD); in Athens, the Parthenon on the Acropolis (447-432BC), built by Iktinos and Kallikrates; and in Istanbul, the Hagia Sophia (532-7 AD), designed by Isidore of Miletus & Anthemius of Tralles.

I want to use charcoal as my primary medium of communication: “By using the one medium incapable of depicting the eclectic surface trivia that preoccupy Manhattan’s architects, Ferriss’ drawings strip as much as render. With each representation he liberates an honest building from under the surface excess” (Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York).

Charcoal has the spontaneous, soft quality of watercolor and the roughness of pastel edges. Its monochrome nature allows the artist to explore the subject in terms of tones – highlights and shadows sculpted by light to create psychologically inhabitable space on the 2D surface. I want to create the sort of “perspective poetry” in which Ferriss envisioned a great new metropolis.
The funding from the award will be used to pay for airline, railway and bus expenses; hostel lodging; food; art equipment; and emergency expenses.

My project will culminate in an online blog, a travel notebook with drawings and notes from various destinations, a sketchbook, and 3-5 panels of charcoal renderings, each larger than 4ft x 4ft.