Berlin Street Fair!

Here's me. yes, there was beer in germany - constantly... good beer. sigh, it isn't nearly as good or as acceptable to have a beer with every meal in the states (don't tell anyone, i was actually getting a little sick of it.... by the end) 

Sunshine!

And more wandering - good times. More museums.... 

IM Pei, blah blah blah ;)

Another museum, another geometrical glassy form attatched to an old building with beautiful concrete and stone. (the louvre pyramid was him too) 

Easter Monday = Communist Wanderings

and the AEG Turbine Factory! Inspirational piece of architecture out in the Berlin boonies... was cooler in books. Peter Behrens 

Supper w Helmut Jahn

Berlin's all about the architecture and architects - it was really fun. Supper in Helmut Jahn's Sony center, ritzy place, fun. A good Easter. 

Opera - a new easter tradition?

We saw Strauss's La Rosenkavalier - it was splendid, beautiful music and theater. 

Easter! In Berlin

Starts off with me hugging Karl Marx. Don't read too much into it.... 

Sat 15 Apr 2006 - Reichstag

Norman Foster finally! Cool dome wedged on top of a US-style capitol building - good views of the city, could see the different architecture East vs. West. 

Berlin - Jewish Museum

Being Easter weekend, we thought Saturday was the only day we'd be able to attend museums, so we made Daniel Liebeskind's Jewish Museum the one. It was as advertised, the outside worked a bit better then the inside. It was nice that it was more a Jewish culture museum then a Holocaust museum... 

Dinkelsbuhl Good Friday.

In which stuff happens slowly and nicely 

Window Frames!

Modern art in a Frankonian factory 

In which: Rediculous neglect of blog ends

Whoo... not doing so great keeping this updated. Briefly: last week in DKB not too interesting, tours of window factory and furniture, tour by night watchman, presentation of our work to Dinkelsbuhl community.

Friday lazy with cool family. I have this all typed up somewhere else better, it'll be in here soon. 

Travels through Soviet Lands

Haha.... really running joke for me was that we were in Russia.... the Czech Republic was communist until more recently then anywhere else i've been, and it still showed it a little. Def. in their trains and train stations - rocking the 70s colors when it wasn't army-drab. Train all afternoon through pretty beautiful scenery, transfer at Cheb across the border, got a chance to walk around a little in the town, then on a very dirty-windowed train for more sunset, passing some pretty drab towns and housing tracts, grey roofs rather then red (had to do with the stone rather then politics, but same effect), but still pretty country. 

Nuremburg Fri 7 Apr 2006

woo several times trying to write this foiled by not knowing how to spell nurnburg and then getting distracted while looking it up. anyway. friday morning we drove across more lovely german territory to get to the 'most german city in the world' chosen to be the head of Nazi Germany. We spent a while audio-touring through a pretty good exhibit (i don't care if people would sound like chipmunks, there needs to be a way to speed talking up to as fast as i can read, otherwise there's no point), then a tour of the parade grounds... pretty incredible the juxtaposition of the old war videos and the actual sites of the rallys - very scary, everyone there was so normal.... hmm have you looked at our president lately? coughanyway.... kober gave us some more insight gathered from hanging out with old germans in dinkelsbuhl and readings i think, pretty cool. very stressful ticket-buying in the train station (i ended up buying for 3 others) and 4 of us ran to catch the train to Prague for the weekend. Pic is from the steps on the front pedestal of the nuremburg field. 

Further into the past

We were driven a fair distance across lovely fields to the open-air Franconian building museum, or some other hard to translate name - they packed up historical buildings in pieces and accurately reconstructed them on the site of this museum, very cool and the oldest were from 1340.... a fair bit of age, couldn't imagine living in some of the old huts - and even not that old, pigbladder windows and blackened timbers.

Functioning watermill and kitchen, some pieces looked familiar.... furniture and wall finishes and all nice and a beautiful warm day. 

Little Town Life...

Pretty mellow, we found a place to eat good Franconian lunches for cheap and ate there a majority of our lunches.... lots of walking around slowly, patronized the gelato shop often, and the bakeries... Time spent in studio, sitting on the deep windowsill in the thick wall. Met the mayor, he decieded dinklesbuhl was not ready for our project.... haha. was rather uncomforatable, political to begin with, then not being translated into our language... One really fun thing was being invited out to a family's hunting lounge for a bratwurst and saurkraut supper - amazing-good, and fun to see that way of life - old grandpa Hans :) with a fun deep voice and accent and stories about the history of the town back to world war 2.... they were the Godebauers, more with them later... 

DKB

This is a picture of a good quarter of the old town... so it was small. Fun path around to wake up early and skate or walk around, which i did. Tour of the town with Kober the first morning, tours of his friend's architecture in the area another morning, tour of a brush-making factory as well - that was very cool, good brushes are made still by hand, the crunchieness of the new bristles is that of human spit... crazy. we recieved eighty dollar brushes for visiting... yay!a little scared to try it out, i don't clean my brushes very well on the road. 

Dinkelsbuhl

Small town Germany is probably over-idealized in Dinkelsbuhl - through random events of history it was really successful and rich in the 1500-1600s and then not enough money left to tear down houses afterwords so it was very preserved in that little-rich town style. the core city had about 1000 people, suburbs outside but the preserved historical core generates most of the money... very charming, really, steet roofs and heavy timber construction, winding cobblestone streets and shutters for the windows... cute cute cute in the sunshine. a little opressive in the clouds.... the weather was generally pretty good for us though. moody, really fast clouds for the first few days. Hard to not summarize a lot.... 

Stuttgart- to DKB eek!

Tony, Tom, Guillermo, and I ran into Sara in the train station, and we walked the main street to kill a few hours.... huge pedestrian street with beautiful trees, they are everywhere in Europe, especially in old bombed-out cities... incredibly dirty, but we discovered later it was really rare and the garbage collectors were on strike while we were there. cool buildings, fun supper outside! on a museum patio overlooking a large square/park people were just hanging out in. tom's banana beer became the unreplicable highlight of the meal.... beer on the train to ellwangen a messy idea on our part... very german.... but arrival in the dark to small-town dinkelsbuhl was pretty dark and scary.... 

Sun 2 Apr 2006 Stuttgart

warning - all architectural references basically in this post (a warning for brandon) A much cloudier day in Stuttgart made for unpretty pictures at an amazing architecture site - the Wiessenhoff developement - worker housing from the 20's by all sorts of big names - an (ugly as hell Best-Western looking oops did i say that cause it maybe would have been revolutionary back then) apartment complex by Mr. Mies, 2 Corbusier houses, Oud, architecture history pics coming to life one right after the other, very nicely restored. Tres cool. Didn't get to go in any, they neglect to mention the summer-only admittance anywhere, pout.

To the Staatsgalerie, a really post-modern building housing some decent collections, Egon Schiele paintings! for the first time in real life, very energetic. not necessarily pretty, at all, he really lets his psychosis pour out, but very intense. a cityscape really grabbed me, would be fun to see more non-people paintings by him. the people get hard to look at. a picture of the building had been hanging in my english classroom in concordia, random little connections. really an eighties building, colors and themes, beautiful stone though and fun use of GREEN! flooring that bent the light in fun ways.