Good day

So this whole picture thing is apparently not going to happen on this blog. Sorry people. But every time I try to upload one my internet freezes and I have to end the program. I've tried like 10 times. I'll put some on myspace. Just find someone to show you them...

Oh yea. An aside before I go into my awesome day. I had a CONVERTER/ adapter. The big box and all. I still blew it up. Haha. Then was in France I tried Alex's cuz his you could change the converter from high to low and on high it made noise and on low you could actually feel the electricity in the metal part. Crazy. Needless to say its back with Alex in San Diego now. Haha.

Alright. Now my day. Madrid has way too many old buildings. I suppose all of Europe does. Which was cool for the first week, and now i'm craving more modern stuff. Seriously. I wander around in search of it. However, today I visited the Reina Sofia Museum. And lets just say this, if you ever thought: "Madrid, yea thats cool, but there's better places," you're actually right. Amsterdam kicked Madrid's ass. Except this museum. I say so many Picasso's it was fantastic. And not just the finished works. They actually had a collection of his sketches so you could see all the studies that he did before he finished. Like small pieces of Guernica that you see and then you see the whole painting and you can just find all of the studies he did. It was really interesting. And then there were Kandinsky's and one of Corbu's and Man Ray photographs and Juan Miro stuff and a whole bunch of other stuff that I can't remember or show you because, oh yea, stupid Madrid doesn't like you taking pictures in their museums. Argh. On the flip side. The new addition to the Reina Sofia happened to be done by Jean Nouvel. Yea, that's right. Fricken cool.

Tomorrow I get to go to Barcelona and see all the "modern" architecture there. Because for some reason guide books consider Gaudi modern..... um..... yea... not so much. Anywho. I'm gonna go on myspace now and upload some pictures from Rome through Madrid. So yea. Go look.


OH WAIT! I have a funny something for all you architecture fans. A quote from Jean Nouvel out of the book "The Singular Objects of Architecture" which is a dialogue between him and the philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Under the heading Creation and Forgetfullness Nouvel states:

"One of the big problems with architecture is that it must both exist and be quickly forgotten; that is, lived spaces are not designed to be experienced continuously. The architect's problem is that he is always in the process of analyzing the places he discovers, observing them, which isn't a normal position. What I personally like about American cities-- even if I wouldn't cite them as models-- is that you can go through them without thinking about architecture. You don't think about the aesthetic side, with its history and so on. You can move within them as if you were in a desert, as if you were in a bunch of other things, without thinking about this whole business of art, aesthetics, the history of art, the history of architecture. American cities enable us to return to a kind of primal sense of space. Naturally, in spite of everything, this architecture is also structured by various realities, but in terms of their actual presence, those cities, as pure event, avoid the pretense of self-conscious architecture."

That last part i'd maybe put up a little debate with. At least with some city architecture. I just like the statement about going through American cities without thinking about architecture. As though our cities are void of any, at least mention worthy works of architecture. Haha. Nice.

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