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. 

Sunday Morning Church

We didn't actually make the service, but a cool project Brock had lectured on in third year was also in Munich and we decided to take a peak before Stuttgart. It was beautiful, double skin with screenprinted glass that worked! wood box inside that filtered the light to the simple metal screen back wall perfectly. very plain and simple and special.... and i didn't bring my camera... i'll get the few i took with other people's cameras and post them later. this is another of olympic park i wanted to get up, for a little while anyway. 

Munchen Evening

After all the sightseeing, we settled down for a traditional supper, good enough, horrible service though... kind of a german thing? really the french waitstaff has never been worse the brusque... so that was wierd. Back to the hostel for a bit of a break, then out to find one last bit of architecture, Coop Himmelblau's art institute... wierd to see in the dark, hard to grasp. Passing up the recommended student bar full of 30 somethings nearby, we had gelato and then found a cool white plastered vaults and blue neon basement - reminded me a lot of the ritzy bar jet in chicago - for drinks and happy kuchen... a good night. pic is tom and guillermo sitting in the olympic stadium. 

German Soccer Culture!

We had been warned by the highly decorated drunks already in the morning, but when we went to see Herzog and DeMuron's soccer stadium in Munich, just when the game was getting over, we were a little overwhelmed by the crowds of roudy scarf-adorned fans. got close enough to appreciate the building, a lovely version of the hideous stadium in basel. it really looked quite surreal, beautiful bubbly material pulled tight. overdone by the crowds, we headed back to the center on a very packed el.

i'm posting so many pictures because it was a lovely day producing fairly lovely pictures..... :) 

Olympic Park Munich

Beautiful stadium, incredible what we're still working on was done back in '72! so long ago, and it was all calculated by hand... we have it easier with computers, but i bet it could be done more delicately today, still... this was the olympic stadium, it had been converted into a piece of a really nice park, well used skating/biking paths, river, cool to see it still in use and not stranded in the middle of nowhere.

On the walk there we got to see the BMW museum that there's this huge hype about architecturally.... er.... it didn't look that special. critic, but... there was this 30 year old stuff next door that did about the same thing, looked like about as well, to say nothing of some amazing glass-dipping structures in italy that just opened... maybe i'll just have to see what it looks like when its done :P.

Tony and I had watched the movie 'Munich' in Switzerland and we were hoping to see some of the locations from the movie, but it didn't happen. probably shot in toronto anyway.

Pinkotech! munich

haha Pinkoteque de Moderne was the name of the modern art musuem, pretty fun/effective building with a large rotunda with fun sun shading on the top (picture). very cool furniture exhibit in the basement, nothing i hadn't seen before, but fun compilation - cars and motorcycles treated as art, more of the same old way famous modern/turn of the centure artists ;) haha jaded. more nazi buildings and really beautiful plazas afterwards, hard to associate gory happenings there. people sitting on the steps reading or relaxing in the sun... into the metro to the olympic park. 

Sat 1 April 2006 Marienplaz, Munich

Stopped the walk for the famed ringing of the bells/overdone cuckoo clock in the rathaus (town hall) in Marienplatz... it was cool, the crowds of people were intense, and the show was a little after the hour. kind of wierd, everyone looking up at something not happening yet. life-size figures spinning around slower then you'd like and knights jousting... funny. very gothic rathaus, shown here from inside a store... fun pic. change of direction got us to odeonsplatz, where all the SS guys were sworn in by the Nazi party - wierd overlay of history here... passed by the HDM mall, pretty cool, not worth really noticing unless you're an architecture geek, but i liked it.... 

Munich!

I'm back! Tons to write and tell about, but i'm supposed to be working on studio too, get as far as I can.... friday night's movie didn't work out, instead a leisurely stella (french beer, good) outside on a beautiful spring night... made it hard to leave paris.

night train brought us to munich in the morning, hosteller recommended the 'typical bavarian breakfast' of weissworst, bretzel, and beer.... so we wandered the main street/plaza of Munich, came across a large street fair to sieze the tradition, white sausages (with some excellent mustard) and our first 0,5 l of german beer... yummy! Beer garden tables and noisy germans. Churches on the way, both rebuilt from bombings, cool pictures of the rubble. Beautiful beautiful stained glass in one, blocky color on the bottom fading to clear on the top... 

Off again!

Midterms are over! worked harder then i needed to for a kind of half-rate project... we're working on a competition in studio, and the final submission has to be digital, so i thought i'd get started correctly and do a flash movie.... ouf. very time-consuming and hard to get write... and not very much gets conveyed anyway. oh well, it was kind of fun. and long enough... whatever.

Pleasant walk with the boys from studio to Gare L'Est last night to buy the tickets we'll use this evening to go to Munich for the weekend. Rather procrastinating we made our way to a nice french restaurant and had a very french meal - it was great. typical stick-skinny french waitress, my food didn't fill up half the plate but the honey and thyme sauce was so rich it was quite filling enough. mmm so good. nice to do that once in a while, as long as we're here. not putting too much hope in fancy german food, i'm excited for real bratwurst and apparently excellent bread. This picture is from a while ago, but it's part of a bridge over the canal we were walking around to find food. so it relates hehe.

Schedule for the next two weeks.... I will probably write in between there, this is a class = WORKing vacation, hardcore, and i'll have my computer with (bleh). Night train to Munich, Sunday morning to Stuttgart, Monday-Thursday in Dinkensbuehl, Germany.... (good luck finding it on a map...). It was our professor's home for awhile, so he got the local government excited to have us over and um, do work for them? sort of continuing our studio projects here, cumulating in an open house/gallery exhibit of our work. I'm ambivilant, it could be kind of cool in that producing work (and for an exhibition!) type way, or just boring.... hmm we'll see. will try to have fun. it's a small town so there's apparently forest to get lost in, and verygood trails...ee.... gonna bring my skates, if i can skate a couple times it should make up for nearly anything else.... sounds like fun there... Anyway, Friday to Nuremburg in the morning, then continue the trip to Prague for the weekend. Dkb for mon-thursday again, thursday night gallery opening reception party thing, later that night to berlin :) or friday morning to dessau to see the bauhaus if that sounds better. weekend in berlin, back to paris monday or early tuesday morning :). I'll be in Berlin for easter, hopefully german chocolate bunnies are as good as the cake.

Going to watch the movie Hostel tonight, to get properly freaked out for the 2 weeks we'll be staying in them.