Research and Ryan's Birthday

The last few days have been nothing but class and working on our studio project. We have a lot of research to do regarding the district of Gracia and we’ve come up with some great information as a group. We have to “map” the area and find suitable sites for temporary housing. The thing is, that we’re going really deep into the city as a whole and the specific areas in order to prioritize when different activities occur throughout the day and things like that. We’ve gotten really specific and detailed with some things that you wouldn’t normally do in a project back in the states. It’s like we’ve become urban planners and a whole bunch of other fields other than just architectural designers. Like, we haven’t even begun to design a building of any sort...at all. And what makes it even more funny (for me) is that I’m not even totally focussing on architecture. But, I’ve learned so much about other stuff, that I’m better off for it no matter what I end up doing with my life. All this information that we’re gathering needs to be displayed in some sort of graphical matter (because no one likes to just sit and read text of statistics and things like that), so that’s where my expertise really comes in handy. I can’t really explain all that we’re doing in a few paragraphs at the moment, but once we condense things down, and make it more graphical, it will be easier to talk about...


Yesterday was Ryan’s birthday and after we spent what seemed like forever working on research, we went out. We went to Hard Rock Cafe. There were 14 of us, so the wait ended up being an hour and a half. We hung out inside and talked and stuff, I went outside for a few minutes and took some pictures of Plaça Catalunya at night, and periodically “bugged” (flirted with) the hostess until we were seated.

I felt like I was back in the states again. The menu had English, there was American food, American music playing, we got to talk and order in English...it was great. When the food came, it was even better! Awesome, large portions of American food. The only thing that kept that whole experience from being 100% “back in America” was that there weren’t free refills...

After eating, we all went to the girls’ apartment for a birthday party. Some of the people from Clemson were there too. It was a lot of fun. It was a good birthday for Ryan. At around 2am, Scott L. and I decided we were getting really tired and took a cab back to the apartment. Everyone else came back less than an hour later.


Today, we had studio at 9am (which was hard to get up for), but our group kind of impressed Juan Carlos with the research that we’d done so far. At one point he was like “this is really good, you guys are getting off to a good start” and we were like “wait, there’s more.” So that was cool.

The rest of the afternoon is going to be used for rest and relaxation and more working on the project because we have a rescheduled studio class again tomorrow (which means more to present). At this time, however, it sounds like someone is using a jackhammer in the apartment, so napping is looking like it’s not going to happen. I’m gonna go down and check out what’s going on. Hopefully it won’t continue much longer...it’s really getting annoying.