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I have been busy taking lots and lots (and lots) of photos, but I've been lax about posting them. Herewith, a brief selection of the 326 photos I've taken in the last 6 days:
Day 1: Tour St. Jacques
Day 2: The Moulin Rouge! It's real! But I'm told it's ~100€ just to get in the door, so I don't think any of us will be checking it out.
Day 2: Blue Man Group strikes Paris! Seriously, though, I have no idea what these things are doing there.
Day 2: Ahh, nothing beats the old world charm of a ginormous arch. (This is either Porte St. Denis or Porte St. Martin)
Day 2: I take a picture of myself taking a picture of myself, while the security mirror reflects the whole meta-scene. This was taken in the Passage du Grand Cerf arcade.
Day 2: This was painted on one of the columns in "104", a totally free art installation/exhibition hall in the 19th arr. He looks happy, doesn't he? Although I don't know what's going on with the thumb growing on his left foot...
Day 2: One of the exhibits in "104."
Day 3: The one, the only, the Arc de Triomphe.
Day 3: The Citroen store on Ave des Champs Elysées
Day 3: Some of the finely manicured trees at the Jardin du Palais Royal.
Day 3: More from the Jardin du Palais Royal.
Day 3: Bruce tries to push his column down to the level of those in the background. Matt and Katie look on, in amusement and bewilderment, respectively.
Day 3: The theater at the Academie Fratellini circus arts school. Well, actually this is the model, but you get the idea.
Day 4: Churches and flowers: they just go together.
Day 4: The Eiffel Tower in all its cliched grandness (complete with couples enjoying the romance)
Day 4: Musée de l'Histoire de France, about 1/2km from my apartment.
Day 4: Apparently there are frequent free concerts in the courtyard at the aforementioned museum. Today was a saxaphone quartet and a violin/cello duet.
Day 4: A woman takes in the concert in the courtyard. I just liked the simplicity of the picture and the posture of the woman on the bench. A few moments before I took this the sun had been shining a bit brighter, making for better light and contrast. Oh well, maybe I can pump it up in photoshop :)
Day 6: Springtime in Paris, eh? It's raining and 50 degrees F.
Day 6: visited the Musée du Quai Branly, designed by Jean Nouvel. It was.... interesting....
Ever since emerging from the subway at the place de Republique, I've been intermittently pondering interior vs. exterior space. Where is the line between inside and outside? Is there a line, or is it more of a zone of transition? If it's a zone, what is the nature of that space that is both/neither inside and/nor outside?
The thought first arrived, as I said, when I came up the stairs of the subway and stepped into the middle of the place de Republique. It suddenly hit me that ever since I had walked into the terminal at the Detroit airport, I had felt like I was in an enclosed, limited space; contained; "inside." I ran back through all the places I had been since the trip began: terminal in Detroit, plane, terminal in O'Hare, plane, terminal in Charles De Gaulle, RER station in CDG, RER train, metro station (Gare du Nord), metro train, place de Republique.
I then ran back through the relative enclosure levels of each place, and found breaks in the collective seal: where the jetway meets the plane there is the feeling of breeze and an unfiltered view of the pavement; the airport terminal has a ceiling and walls, but the walls are transparent, affording a visual connection to "outside;" The RER station is enclosed, but is still open-air (free ventilation). So where did the "inside" stop and the "outside" begin?
Things got even more confused when I walked to my apartment. The streets were narrow and the building facades encroached so much that at times the sidewalk became almost too narrow for even one person. On a street with continuous built facades on either side, only 15' apart from eachother, a feeling of enclosure begins to creep in. I also pondered what role a roof played in this game, and how an open-air pavilion roof can define an area, but doesn't enclose it. It may be apparent what area is within the realm of "pavilion," but it's still all "outside."
This question came back to me yesterday afternoon when our class traveled to 104, an installation art exhibition gallery that used to be the city morgue.
These are both photos from within the boundaries of 104, but which location is "inside" and which is "outside"? Does it have to do with the existence of physical enclosure? Visual limitations? Source and amount of ventilation? Visual cues connected to a presumed typical condition of "inside" or "outside" (i.e. the direction of door swings, or the type/use of brick surrounding windows)? Temperature?
[aside:] Speaking of temperature, it's COLD here. Isn't Paris in the spring supposed to be above 60 degrees F? Maybe the conservatives were right and global warming really is a hoax....
....
.... and maybe I'll be able to succinctly answer all these questions I've raised within the next 24hrs. HAH!
Time for a switch! Up until now this blog has been dedicated to all things Digital Project (and most things ARCH562 - Studio). But that term has come to and end, and now it's time for:
Spring Term in Paris
The journey so far: had a brief layover at O'Hare. Flying in over Chicago made me miss the city. I thought I would begin my blog posting in the airport, given all the advertisements for wifi. But it turned out I had to pay $9.95 for the privilege of using said wifi, so the blog had to wait.
I had grand ideas of getting an aerial photo of Paris as we landed on Thursday morning. This idea, too, was not to be. As the airport is to the north of the city, and as I was on the north side of the plane as we descended, there was no good view available. So, instead, I give you a shot of the Parisian countryside. It's got nothin' on Alex McClean's aerial photography, I know, but it's the best I could do from seat 33A in a Boeing 767...
After arriving and settling in, I grabbed the camera and wandered around the neighborhood. I happened upon this display down by the Hotel de Ville. I wonder if I should forward it on to my Green Construction professor from last term...
That's all for now. It's almost time for the first official class meeting, so I need to hustle up to the place de Republique. Au revoir.
Screenshot from the fully compiled VRML file. There are supposed to be colors/textures mapped onto the ground and sky. I know the sky is invisible because it's beyond Cosmo's cutting plane, but the lack of texture on the ground surface is a little worrying. Oh well, we'll see how it looks in the cave this afternoon!
Attempting to upload the VRML file now, but it's 265MB. I think there might be a maximum allowable upload amount of 50MB at a time, but it's uploading right now and so far I haven't gotten any errors... I'll add the link here if it succeeds. The upload succeeded, so here's the link.
The Rhino site model is up on CTools, in a new folder within "Resources" called (appropriately) "Rhino Site Model." The file "compiled_model.3dm" is what you want, but it's just an empty file that loads all the individual parcels as linked block references. So, in order to view the whole model, you'll need to download all the other .3dm files and keep them in the same folder as the "compiled_model" file. Originally I had imported everything into one single stand-alone file, but that grew to 60MB with only 14 parcels, so I couldn't imagine trying to deal with it once all 78 parcels were in there.
Also, I updated the link for the VRML version of the model of the site. It is viewable, but it's rather wonky. See the addendum to my last post for a more detailed explanation of that wonkiness.
