summer in vienna

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...

Second day in Prague. I wake up feeling refreshed and invigorated. After breakfast we meet outside. We start off for Prague Castle to see Plecnik’s gardens, but first we stop off at the Lennon Wall. It is a section of wall along a tree-covered walkway near the Charles Bridge that is a symbol of the anti-totalitarian sentiments shared by Czechs during the Velvet Revolution. The wall garnered attention and became the center of much controversy in the 80s when people covered it in graffiti. Police would repeatedly try to whitewash over the graffiti, but people continued to paint and write on it. Apparently at some point the police gave up (maybe when the other wall fell?) because today it is adorned with portraits of John, Beatles lyrics, and sentiments from pilgrims around the world. Someone takes a blue Sharpie and writes “VIENNA STUDIO 05”, and one by one, we all sign our names around it. Naomi pulls out a paint marker and transforms a swastika into a person dancing. W...

We arrive in Prague. We check into our hotel which is within spitting distance of the west tower of the Charles Bridge. We break for lunch and free time until 4:30, then we walk to Vlado’s office. The route there winds through the inner streets of Prague, from the river in. Once we arrive, the first thing I notice is that the surroundings are very modest. In the entrance hallway to his building, graffiti is scrawled across the showbill-covered walls. It smells dank, of moldy standing water and urine. We go upstairs and enter his office. Meticulously constructed cardboard models cover desks, shelves, tables. There are two computers in the entire office. There is a poster of the different established routes to the summit of Mount Everest, and a makeshift bed made from a crate and a mattress. It is not uncomfortable. Vlado appears. Vlado is a steely-eyed man in his late forties–early fifties with a chiseled face, hardened from his communist past. He smiles slightly, gracefully,...

Today we prepare for our brush with monastic life. On Sunday, during our side trip to Prague, we will be transported hours out of the city into the Czech town of Novy Dvur, where there is a Cistercian monastery. The purpose of the pilgrimage will be twofold: one, to take in the architecture of John Pawson; two, to maybe catch a taste of theta waves. Tate lectures in the morning on Plecnik and Frank Gehry and Vlado Milunic. Plecnik was a Slovenian architect who was a protegé of Otto Wagner. Vlado Milunic collaborated with Frank Gehry on the Dancing Building (also known as the Fred and Ginger Building) in Prague. We meet Vlado tomorrow. The connections are firing like the synapses in a developing child’s brain, and it is wonderful. Maybe I have time later to discuss Plecnik and Gehry and Vlado and Vaclav Havel. All important names. So we go to this church in the afternoon after Tate shows us our rendezvous point for the morning at Südbahnhof train station. On our way, we take...

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Today is a big day. In the morning, Tate talks about Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, drawing, and alleswirdgut. Kraus was a massively influential Viennese journalist at the turn of the century, Loos was an architect who took the ball from Kraus and ran with it, drawing is something we need to be doing more of, and alleswirdgut is an architecture firm we visit in the afternoon. Without going into too much detail, Kraus attacked things that were immoral, hypocritical, and false in Vienna at the time. Although hard to define in terms of what exactly he hated or disliked, one thing was that Kraus was impartial in his attacks. No one was safe. He would attack the disturbing trend of married men patronizing whorehouses, then he would attack psychoanalysts like Freud for trying to rationalize the hysteria that this behavior was causing, and then womens’ rights, citing a celebration of the masculine through a reduction of the feminine. He even criticized the Secession. His aim was “to regen...

Today I encountered the most wonderful stairs. We are on a “Wagner crawl” (think pub crawl, only Otto Wagner). His work is amazing. Wagner raises questions of taking archetypes much like a glass bottle in your hand and smashing them against a Corinthian column. That’s the effect he produced when his work went up during the Secession. How can you do something different? Better? Will people accept it and praise it? No. When Wagner’s buildings were erected, people would howl and jeer. William Blake once wrote, “What is great is necessarily obscure to ordinary men.” The mastery of subtlety, the attention to detail, the celebration of things coming together, the confluence with Mackintosh and Klimt, and even a touch of Brunelleschi, is breathtaking. And this is just a subway station. We visit one of Wagner’s children, a building adjacent to the Naschmarkt. We stake out the entrance, waiting for a tenant to open the door for us. We are patient. Then, ...

Yesterday, I attended a Catholic mass. I am not considering becoming Catholic (it doesn’t take attending a mass to convince me that Catholicism is not for me). I went because I wanted to experience a mass in St. Stephan's Cathedral in Vienna’s city center. Several of my friends here are Catholic, including my friend and bunkmate Scott. When the idea of attending mass on Sunday was brought up in conversation, I was initially turned off. However, the more I thought about it, the more interesting the idea became. A Catholic mass in a cathedral in Vienna. It occurred to me that it did not necessarily have to be a religious experience—at least not in the way it was meant to be. One thing about Catholicism that interests me is its diminutive nature. Catholicism to me is basically one big self-imposed guilt trip. You are taught to feel small and inconsequential. God is all-powerful, God knows all the answers; man is fallible by his intrinsic nature, and responsible for the de...

Steph asked me what the reaction was like here to the attacks in London. I don't watch TV here. This in itself makes a huge difference.I don't even know if Jeff has a TV. Maybe other Viennese watch, I can't say whether or not it's any more or less than your average American. At any rate, there is no FOX News, no MSNBC, no CNN. I haven't read any Viennese papers since having arrived here. To get my news, I read BBC News online. In comparison, my news is less sensational, stripped of the startling graphics and music on 24-hour cable networks, of O'Reillys and "pundits" and talking head experts. Scott found out about the bombings first. When he told me, I was sad, then angry and frustrated. I didn't feel any less safe or any more vulnerable. It's quite amazing how clear in the head you can be when TV networks aren't telling you how to feel. I haven't talked to any Viennese about the attacks. Austria is not the first place you think of when...

On Friday, we don't have class, so we meet up with Tate in front of the main cathedral, Stephansdom, so he can show us around to bookshops and pen shops. We go to one awesome graphic design bookshop, which I will be returning to. We hit an art and architecture bookshop, where the aforementioned subjects are divided in the middle of the room. We go into several pen shops. It is our task to find a good fountain pen while we are here, and some brown ink, which is not sold anywhere else, apparently. It is hard to find good ones that aren't cheap, or too expensive. You can spend up to a few thousand euro on a Mont Blanc. After shopping, we go to Centimeter III, a restaurant where I ate last year. It is as delicious as I remember: warm bread covered in three kinds of cheese by the centimeter, Bernwürstel (sausages wrapped in bacon on a bed of fries with mustard), and Budweiser that isn't the cheap American kind. We meet up later on at our homestay to hang out before going out. We...

On Thursday we have a history lesson, conducted by Lee Tate. He goes over the history of Austria, from when the Hapsburgs took over in the 13th century to when Franz Josef died in 1916 and the end of World War I in 1918. Learning the history of Austria is important to having a complete grasp on the place. It is quite fascinating. In the afternoon, we go to the Belvedere Palace and Gardens. When we get there, Tate instructs us to be silent as we go in, and pay attention to how noisy it is outside on the streets and what it's like inside the palace gates. We walk in, and the transition is magical. A lawnmower motor runs in the distance, but other than that, impeccable tranquility. A long, wide, straight path leads up to the entrance to the Palace. "Don't turn around until you get to the end of the path," says Tate. We walk. I take photographs. When we get to the Palace, we turn around and have a breathtaking vista of the city. It is very nice. Inside the Palace, there i...

I found out quickly that by having expectations of having expectations for this trip, I had set my expectations too high. Thinking conventionally is not going to help. Class began this morning with a drawing lesson. Drawing is going to be an important element of Vienna. Tate opens by sharing some thoughts on drawing: 1. You draw by drawing, not by thinking about drawing. 2. Mies van der Rohe used to say less is more. Not in drawing. In drawing, more is more. Hoffman drew on graph paper. A contemporary once noted that he draws "like a frog laying eggs" (i.e. a whole bunch at once). 3. Proximity speaks of availabilty. Keep your sketchbook out and ready to fire. 4. Lastly: you must fall in love. Don't judge. He shows us drawings by Ferrari, le Corbusier, Aldo Rossi, Coop Himmelblau, Frank Gehry, Scarpa, Paul Flora. I discover it's not what I draw, but how. Why. Tate likens our drawing skills to a quiver of arrows. "Today, you may have 2," he says. "You mus...

I will spare the generalities. Suffice it to say that yes, Vienna is beautiful. Yes, the food is great. Yes, I'm having an amazing time. I could do without the rain. The first day of class, Tate says in his usual demeanor, "Formulate questions." Then he adds: "Dare to believe all the answers are here." He likens us to sponges, ready to absorb. He draws a dot on a whiteboard. He draws lines above, below, intersecting up and down. "The matrix is as deep as you are thirsty." See. Question. Sketch. Rest. Repeat. Vienna is not going to be about design, or architecture, or anything so specific. It is a laboratory in everything. Tate presents us with ideas, then challenges us to make connections. I am reminded of the idea of 'gesamkültur', presented by Peter Behrens, the concept of total design. Delete labels, reduce everything to forms, then start over. What is in the essence of something that makes it matter? We move on. Tate talks about a discussio...

I am in Vienna. I am also exhausted. > Travel was good, uneventful. No problems. A little about our homestay: our host is a guy named Jeff Crowder, a graduate of San Diego State University. So, Austrian by blood only, which is nice ... the first thing he did when we got here was offer us a cold Stiegl. Very cool guy, sort of a surfer dude. He's been living here about 8 years, teaching English to Austrians and living the Viennese lifestyle. Living here is going to be fun. The apartment consists of two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a hallway that includes a kitchenette, washing machine, dishwasher (thank God). Our room has two twin beds with a desk in between. We have a window with a view of ... another building. There is a computer with cable internet. Jeff also got us a cell phone to keep in touch (so much for disconnecting completely, haha). It's on the fifth floor (sixth, in the U.S.) and there's no elevator. A neighbor has roof access. All things considered, very nice acc...