Run…Runnnnnn!
After crawling our way out of the Catacombs, we didn’t take the weekend off. The Journees Europees de Patrimoni (annual European Heritage festival) allowed us into a few amazing structures that are otherwise not open to the public. We asked the students to take advantage of the opportunity and to find their way to both the UNESCO headquarters by Bernard Zehrfuss, Marcel Breuer, and Pier Luigi Nervi, along with Oscar Neimeyer’s PCF to capture a few vignettes.
On Monday, the week began with a site visit to the Louvre, where an architectural tour drew attention to the history and diversity of the museum’s spaces. The visit gave Tara and I the opportunity to introduce the conceptual framework of our Option Studio by asking the students to document (through axonometric drawings) two distinctly rooms at the Louvre and identify how the installation of the art (hardware and location) impacted their experience.
Although we planned to spend the next day in studio (reinforcing the ideas discovered at the Louvre), a late-night email notified us that if we wanted to visit Villa Savoye, we need to be there by 1pm on Tuesday (it was closing through the end of the year for renovations.)
To counterbalance Monday’s scripted tour, we returned to the Louvre on Wednesday for the students to wander and sketch at their own pace.
With an already busy week behind us, Thursday we began our ’22 Beyond Paris excursion with a 6hr train to Barcelona.
