summer in vienna

I’ve been home now for almost three weeks. I work at a magazine called Nature’s Best . It is small, and the staff is awesome. I have a great time there, and I learn new things there every day. Steve, the editor, is an incredibly friendly guy who started out with the National Wildlife Federation. Bob is formerly of National Geographic, and every day he has an absolutely amazing story from his travels to share. He is currently writing a novel about one of those journeys. I can’t wait to read it. Drew used to be at America Online and left before it started to dive. Chuck, who owns the office park, is an avid photographer, and spreads from one of his features adorn the wall over the reception desk. Everyone shares a passion for photography and nature. It’s like family. Recently, things have been going very well. I am planning to move out to San Francisco within the next few months. I am flying out in October to scope things out and have lunch with Michael Vanderbyl , who to my good fortune...

It’s the day I didn’t want to come. We have our last class. It is basically wrapping things up. Tate talks about bringing it back to the States. There is nothing bittersweet about it. No one says anything, and no one cries, but there is a mutual feeling of disappointment that the time has come to say goodbye. We are all dressed in black today. It is a sort of inside joke; Gregor always dresses in black, and we are meeting with him today to go out to a house he has designed on the outskirts of town. We take a bus out to the house. The bus drops us off in front of a fairly typical-looking house. We are all a little incredulous. Then we start walking, and finally we get to the house. It looks like something out of Lost In Space. The first thing we do is walk out to the back to the dock on the lake adjoining the property and view the house from there. Gregor insists we see the house from the lake. After this, we go on a tour. We start with the guest house, which is constructed of wood. Th...

We have a day off. Scott and I get up late, and have lunch at the nearby Café Hummel, one of the old Viennese cafés. Then we set off for the city center on a quest, he to buy gifts for friends and family, I to acquire a fountain pen. One Friday morning earlier in the trip, a group of us had met up with Tate, and he had showed us some bookstores and pen shops of interest. According to Tate, Vienna is the only city where you can find brown ink. Also, during one of our classes, he spoke of taking things back with us to remind us of the mindset we are in now, to guide us in the right direction, to bring back things we see and make us think like we are thinking now. I decide a fountain pen is an appropriate treasure. We hop on the J, and get off at the Opera as usual. It takes Scott all of ten minutes to find gifts. Then it’s pen time. We wander for a bit, trying to find shops at first. The only shops we find are along the main drags, Mont Blanc vendors who sell pens at prices way beyond pr...

In the morning, we visit the Ring King. I almost missed out on this. The group tried to go yesterday while I was still traveling, but to my luck he was not there. Today, he is. The Ring King is a man named Max who, aside from creating beautiful rings, practices general mayhem. the ring king, max. Max and a few of his friends hold photo shoots and cause general , including one called “Pool Massacre,” a sort of macabre poolside party, complete with a chainsaw-wielding maniac and a beautiful girl eating a severed leg. He leads us through his studio/shop. There are display cases, postcards, artwork by an artist with whom he shares his space. In the back of the shop, he shows us a computer program connected to a handmade mill that produces whatever design he creates on the computer. He says his friend, who built the mill from spare parts, used motors from a car window because they are quieter. homemade mill He takes out a box of t-shirts, some of us buy them. A few of us buy rings. I take s...

The feeling of meeting someone extraordinary is like few other feelings in the world. This weekend I had the good fortune of meeting several. Friday. Scott and I get up and chat with Jeff for a while, then we exchange e-mail addresses and say our final goodbyes. Suddenly we are on our own, if not for a little while. We spend the afternoon packing and getting ready for our trip. I get somewhat jealous as I see Scott pack his bike helmet. On the other hand, I am looking forward to meeting up with my family in Ireland and being at my brother’s side as he marries the girl of his dreams. I only wish the timing had been better. At three o’clock, we meet in front of the Institute to board the bus for Gars, a small town near Horn. In Gars there are castle ruins in which opera is performed every summer. Tonight we see Don Giovanni under the stars. The bus ride doesn’t last long, and we get to Horn ahead of schedule. We eat dinner in a restaurant, also contained in the ruins, and I explo...

Today is the last day with Jeff for me and Scott. He leaves tomorrow for a water polo tournament, and we won’t see him for the rest of our stay. We meet tonight for a final dinner. Class today is short. We talk about cameras, drawing, and bikes, in preparation for our weekend trip to Horn. I feel somewhat excluded from the discussion, as I will be traveling to Ireland for my brother Will’s wedding on Saturday. I am profoundly excited about the wedding, but I can’t help but suppress a tinge of disappointment as the buzz generates for the bike trip. We finish up class, and don’t have anything scheduled in the afternoon, we are extremely tired, and it is unbearably hot, so we do what any reasonable person would do in this situation: travel a ways out to the Danube to go swimming. It is important to remember there are three iterations of the Danube in Vienna: one is the Donaukanal, or Danube Canal. This is closest to the city and moves quickly. No good. The second is the Danube proper....

Today begins with followup to yesterday. After Kevan and I present briefly to the group our experience with Erwin Bauer, Tate instructs Naomi to go up to the whiteboard at the front of the room. “Draw every dance you saw last night,” he says. At first Naomi is a little overwhelmed. But then, sure enough, she starts. She makes a stick figure of the very first sequence, a man using stilts of some sort to move across a beam used for support during rehabilitation. Someone chimes in: “The one where they had their legs tied together like a three-legged race!” Another: “The one where she’s on the harness and she’s walking across people’s hands!” This goes on for about twenty minutes. When we think we are finished, Tate thanks Naomi and she sits. “Let’s get a picture of this board.” all the movements we could think of. It is impressive to look at. “I’ve never seen anyone move like that,” Tate says. I think we tend to agree. The subject today is Hans Hollein , a modern Austrian architect who he...

Today is about dancing. In class, Tate draws a series of lines on the board. It is a simple diagram of the top of a BMW 3 series convertible closing. “It is a dance,” says Tate. We move on. Tate talks about Josef Hoffman, who grew up in Brno in what is now the Czech Republic, and went to the same school that Adolf Loos flunked out of. After coming to Vienna and becoming involved in the Secession, he helped found the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshop). Hoffman loved patterns, and was known for drawing on graph paper. One contemporary remarked that he drew “like a frog laying eggs.” Tate talks about a book about a woman who makes a pilgrimage to Vienna in the 1920s to work with Hoffman. She goes, not knowing whether Hoffman will give her work or turn her away at the mere idea of taking in a female student. Female architects at that time were absolutely unheard of. Hoffman ends up taking her in. I start to think about how to circumvent accepted social norms to find and work with the b...

Class today is awesome. We start by talking about landscape architecture. Artifacts, symbol, iconic, abstraction, citizenship, stewardship, peace, transformation. We are going back home soon. How do we bring back what we have learned to the States and apply it? There is straw and there is steel. What will we be? How do we get into infinite shades of gray? Into layers? We are extremely operative outside of the nonverbal. We must give ourselves permission to do things where definitions do not exist. Tate talks about visiting his son in Germany this past weekend. Lee lives in a region of Germany called Franconia , part of Bavaria in southern Germany. It is a wine region, and there is a holiness with which they treat their ground. He cites Whitman, and tells us to do the reflective practice with how we live. What do we have to say with what we make? “The poetics solve the pragmatics,” he says. “Change your perspective. Raise questions of the status quo.” Then we talk about photograph...

We wake up and get to the train station. The ride is about 5 hours, and the route takes us through the Austrian and Italian Alps. There is an historic railway in Austria between Vienna and the border near Italy called the Semmering Pass Railway. It is considered one of the most beautiful railways in the world. The Alps tower above us, and we cross beautiful brick bridges over sweeping green and trees. We go in and out of mountains. We can’t take our eyes from the windows. We arrive in Venice early in the afternoon, crossing the lagoon, coming out of the train station to the Grand Canal. We make our way to the bus station across the Canal to ride the shuttle to our hostel. The bus takes us across the lagoon again, to a camp site about 15 minutes away. We check into our tents. Our first order of business is to find accomodations in the city center. Unable to find anything within our price range on the internet, we go back across the lagoon on the shuttle bus, which charges a fee af...

No class today. Instead, we meet outside the Institute. Tyler is with us for the day. We take the U-Bahn to Mariahilferstraße to see an A1 mobile phone store. It is unlike any other retail experience I’ve ever seen. The facade is two stories, glass, and every half hour or so, fog fills the glass so as to obscure the view of the interior. Aloe plants are positioned every few feet along the length of the facade, with the A1 logo carved into the leaves. The first part of the store that a customer experiences is a sort of lobby, with stairs to the left and a ramp to the right. The stairs lead downstairs to the retail area, where customers can shop for phones, the ramp to an upstairs lounge. The shopping experience is so nice. Customers grab a small, acrylic device which acts as their “shopping cart”. They take this around to different video screens, where they can download ringtones or games. The phones are displayed on different screens, with the corresponding model attac...

1. Cultivate your inner child. While it is important to mature, it is equally as important to retain youthful tendencies. Lowering your inhibitions leads to discovery. Discovery is the primordial soup which makes up the creative process. 2. Develop/respect/love process. Paul Klee once said, “Nothing good can be rushed.” Just ask Tom Friedman . 3. Increase questioning. Never settle for the status quo. Don’t get too comfortable—remain a stranger. Change perspectives. Travel puts you at risk. Know the difference between tourist and pilgrim. 4. Fall in love. What are you passionate about? What drives you? What inspires you? Love as if you have nothing to lose. A lust for life is healthy. 5. Design is not about celebrating the pretty object. Design is about function and purpose and message. It is basic that design should intrigue the eye, form is intrinsic. It is more important that design works. The interesting thing about what we are doing and seeing is that we won’t know for fifty ye...

Every day we are fighting battles. Today I lose one. Class is great fun, as it is every day. We follow up on threads, about the monastery and about Pawson. Tate shows us the work of an artist named Walter Pichler who creates absolutely brilliant drawings, who has “an incorruptible instinct for effects.” We talk about the world of posters. Tate shows us one for a festival in Bosnia that takes place every year, even when shells were falling during the conflict there 15 years ago. People still came out. But amidst all of this interesting discussion, I am nervous. I am nervous because I know in the afternoon, we are visiting a water tower. And we are going to go to the top. People are afraid of some pretty stupid things. I have a paralyzing fear of heights. The idea of losing my balance or having the floor fall out from under me while I’m up any more than 50 feet or so makes me dizzy with anxiety. But maybe this tower won’t be so bad. It won’t be very high, or ...

Our last day in Prague is spent tying up loose ends and bidding our farewells to the city. A few of us go to the Jewish quarter to see the Jewish cemetery there. We decide not to pay the steep entrance fee and view it from a window from the street. Stones and markers lie askew in rows marking the final resting places of hundreds of Jews. Overgrowth obscures the stones and covers the ground. It is crowded, it is falling apart, but there is a certain beauty to it. The way the stones are arranged, the way the light hits them, there is something there that warrants an €8 entrance fee that people are willing to pay. After the Jewish quarter, we walk around some more. We go to an architecture bookstore. I go off with Drew to photograph the Dancing Building. We split up to do some last minute shopping and have our final moments with the city before we meet to go to the train station. It is a sad parting, Prague has been so amazing in so many ways to all of us. We don’t have class Tuesday...

Fourth day in Prague. We are up at the crack of dawn to drive into the quiet Czech countryside. Our coach arrives at Novy Dvur about an hour early, so we sketch and take photos until the monks are ready for us. The absolute peace and tranquility of the place is like the surface of an undisturbed lake, lucid and perfect, save for the sounds of birds. One monk comes out in his white robes to receive us. We have a short meeting with him, as he explains the protocol for being at the monastery and talks a little about monastic life and Novy Dvur. After the meeting we have another hour before mid morning prayers and then a mass. We sketch and shoot some more. It turns out there is a European Scout troop here from France to help with construction of a guesthouse. They are young, and there are maybe fifty of them. We all file into the church for the services. Entering the church at Novy Dvur is a catharsis. The structure is all white, and the simplified lines and curves are accented by a vacuu...

Third day in Prague. Today we see a house designed by the great Adolf Loos. We go at different times in two different groups, and I go with the earlier one. The house sits atop a hill next to a main road in Prague. It was built in the 50s for the wealthy Müller family. We have an enthusiastic young tour guide who is knowledgeable and friendly, although we sort of wish we could explore and experience the house on our own. Moving from room to room, one really feels the delicate way in which Loos treats space. There are no clear divisions between levels; rather, each room is designed for its purpose with the necessary space. This method of architecture is a Loos specialty; it is called “raumplan”. There are almost no doors. The individual experience of each room provides a myriad of possible perspectives. There is a roof terrace with a stunning view of the surrounding skyline. It really must be felt. “To be silent where nothing can be said, not to do anything but to const...