Survival of the Fittest

I have survived potentially the hardest week here at Genova! Since I was in San Diego for a week, our review of our vertical tower design got postponed until this past Thursday, which also coincided with our research presentation, so needless to say I have been quite busy! However, I am now done and have slept, so I am at least coherent enough to write this blog.... So now I will tell you a little bit about our vertical tower design...

The city of Genova is built from the port upwards onto the mountains (or just really big hills) up behind it. Most old villas are around 6 stories high so it is a fairly vertical city, which then stacks on top of itself as you move upwards. The result has actually a very horizontal effect, with all the stacking the city reads as a series of terraces layering on top of each other. So our approach for the tower design was to continue this terracing idea into our outlook tower. We also incorporated the corkscrewing views around our site into our spiral design, and wanted the experience of climbing up the tower to be integral to the tower itself. You can see our result in the pictures, which is a tower made up of stairs which rotate off a central core to form a tower. Thus using horizontal features we were able to create a vertical tower that is more about horizontality, and thus meshes well with the Genovese tradition. Well so we think, you are allowed your own opinions!

The other project that we did was research, the topic of which we picked at the beginning of the semester. Tara and I researched the sculptural qualities of concrete utilizing two main buildings in our research, Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut chapel at Ronchamp and Pier Luigi Nervi's Palazzetto Dello Sport in Rome. These buildings could not be more different, in fact basically the only thing that connects them is the fact that they use concrete and they were built around the same time. However, our job was to compare and contrast how these buildings were sculptural although in highly different ways. It was rather interesting to study and compare these buildings, because both were approached differently in design--- Nervi took an engineering approach because he believed that a good structural solution would result in a natural aesthetic and Le Corbusier took an artistic approach and designed a chapel which is more of a sculpture on the scale of a building than an actual building. Anyway, this is all interesting for those of you who don't believe me.

After that on Friday I had an initial project study due for Golda, in which we were given three spaces throughout Genova in close proximity to study. Throughout the semester we will visit these spaces and determine what it is that makes them tick and basically whatever we want to discover,, and then we will have fun putting these observations into maps, which will hopefully visually describe the feeling and atmosphere of the spaces. It should be fun, however right now my spaces look rather like a James Bond film so it should be very entertaining....

My blog from my 10 day trip is coming, I promise! I will split it up by day like I did before, but hopefully I will have those up by today or tomorrow. I finally get to catch up on all that stuff now that studio has died down!

~Heather