Although Venice was VERY touristy, I really enjoyed my time there. Typically, not knowing if the street I’m going down is the right one or not drives me crazy. However, this was the case the entire time we were in Venice and I loved every minute of it. Whether we knew where we were going or not, every turn leads you to a new maze or an unexpectedly low ceiling. I loved seeing all the different shops and knick knacks.
I was especially happy that we were able to go to Murano and see all the glassworks there. It was amazing to see the pieces they made and the range from classical to more modern work.
The Biennale was a fun stop on the trip as well as all the Pavilions were so diverse in what they displayed. My absolute favorite was Romania because it had a swing set and a ping pong table. It was really fun and a successful exhibit because it got attendees to interact with it.
This past weekend the class took an excursion to the Veneto region of Italy, located in the Northeast of the country and along the Adriatic Sea. Our first stop was at TipoTeca and it was fascinating to learn about how people use font and typography in design, especially how they curate different types of fonts. After that we went to an interesting cemetery that used lots of concrete and used various waterways. It was interesting how the concrete was done in such a way to appear so weightless despite being such a heavy, blocky material. The cemetery also used Asian motifs. There were very similar themes in his work on the art museum we visited in Venice where geometric concrete shapes stepped down against the canal and also used Asian motifs. The museum even filled the room with Asian artwork. The garden was similar in that there was water running through it. For our last day in Venice we visited the Biennale exhibition in a large public to the south of San Marco Square. It was interesting to see how so many different countries chose to represent themselves, and I particularly liked Denmark’s pavilion and its focus on a connected city and bridging modern design onto historic sites.
This week we went in saw a lot of furniture. Very interesting and confusing furniture. Some very functional, some not so functional.
I have been collecting what I call “stocker pictures” of people’s shoes for my sketchbook. I have had to be a little sneaky at taking pictures of shoes in order to sketch them. It’s easier to take the picture when the owner of the shoes is not moving away from the loud crazy Americans.
We also got to go to the Armani Museo. It was interesting to see how strange he is as a designer. He is very classic in all his silhouettes. Every single one (on all 3 floors) had a very similar silhouette than the next. He and I definitely have very different taste in style and fashion. It was nice to see fashion through his lens.
This week was back to back days with many things to see. I was able to leave a few marks of my own doodle art at ______
In my head, Venice is a magical city that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, so visiting it was a dream come true. At first we arrived to Treviso and it was such a cute little town. Everyone in this town was so nice! We went for drinks, met some locals, watched soccer games and cheered all night. They also had the best gelato store, it was so fresh. When I first arrived to Venice, I went outside of the train station and looked around for a few seconds… it was exactly what I expected and more. The buildings were right at the shore, people were commuting in boats, and the metro system was based on taxi buses.
Venice
As a class, we went to a museum with many floors and multiple attracting pieces. Then, we headed to lunch and we got to explore the city. We walked between some fancy shops, and we walked between the market where everyone was trying to sell Murano glass. I got all my friend’s souvenirs from Venice and that gave me a piece of mind. After walking through its tiniest pathways and taking the boat to get from a destination to another, we met with the class to visit a store where they made the glass. That store was on a different island so we had to take the boat bus!
On the boat, I was splashed with sea water and my hair changed completely, it loves sea water. It looked a lot better so I wasn’t too upset about it.
My Hair Going Wild
At the store, we weren’t able to see them make the glass, but the ladies were very sweet and gave us a souvenir at the end. However, my favorite part of this weekend was at the Tipoteca Italian Fondazione; we got to assemble our names and make posters. I really enjoyed the work especially since it was like a puzzle and the men that were helping us were the sweetest people on earth.
Our Poster
I wish we spent more time there but other than that, this weekend is to forever be remembered.
When I arrived in Zurich on Saturday, I needed to eat. A google search for “vegan” lead me to a cafe a few blocks from the main station, but avocado toast was 20 USD! Switzerland is expensive. I found a veggie burger in the area that was 16 with a student discount, but the prices were unexpected.
The brutalist-inspired structures were a nice break from the Milanese neo-classical buildings.
After eating, I had to decide if I wanted to spend the after noon exploring, or try to visit both design museums before they closed. It was three o’clock and they both closed at five, but I walked to Museum für Gestaltung in the Zurich University of the Arts. It was the smaller of the two spaces for the day, and they had an exhibition cover design from branding and graphics, to product design of pens and electronics, to a collection of William Morris print blocks and textiles. The other exhibition in the space covered the design of protest.
The museums had case studies of different types of design. Here is a pen progressing through prototype stages.
Next, I walked to the new Ausstellungsstrasse location. There, I visited the permanent collection, full of everyday objects from Braun Razors to actual sketches of fonts by the influential Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger (creator of one of my favorite fonts: Avenir).
This chair by Mario Botta was a great example of post-modern furniture.
I really enjoyed their collection showing the history of furniture in Europe. In particular, the collection of 80’s post-modern furniture caught my eye and I took the time to sketch a chair and a task lamp.
Task lamps are quickly becoming my favorite category of design object.
Sunday was my day to explore. I had a ticket to Basel in the northwest for any time during the day, so I woke up early, checked out of my AirBnB, and walked back toward the interior of the city. My first stop was MAME, a third wave coffee shop owned by a Canadian couple. My coffee was carefully extracted through a V60 and I made friends with a Portuguese man while sipping my floral coffee.
The Swiss National Museum was near the train station so I walked over to see what they had. They had an exhibition about design called “In Search of Style” which traced the development of the Arts and Crafts movement from John Ruskin and William Morris through the Weiner Werkstätte and Josef Hoffman. I took a few hours examining prints from The Grammar of Ornament and seeing important pieces of furniture and product design I’ve engrained into my memory from my History of Design studies.
I wasn’t allowed to take photos of the exhibit, but the gift shop was selling original prints of The Grammar or Ornament.
In the evening I took the one hour train from Zurich to Basel. Rather than taking public transportation to my AirBnB, I walked two hours along the Basel riverfront to Germany and then over to France to meet my host in Huningue. Along the way, I saw kids doing backflips off of a bridge into the river, and walked through a really interesting industrial area where people had turned the abandoned crates and pallets and used them to build small bars and art studios along the riverfront. Huningue was a cute small town. It was hard to believe that Germany was on the other side of a pedestrian bridge and that Basel, a city of 175,000 people, was accessible by walking through Germany for 10 minutes.
A photo of Germany and Switzerland from France.
My host offered to drive me to Vitra on Sunday morning, and I arrived on the campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany at 10am. Virta’s campus is a collection of incredible architecture hosting two museums, a 4 story showroom/shop, as well as factory space, a conference center, and a fire station. My day started at the exhibition space designed by Frank Gehry which tracked the interior architecture of night clubs from the 60’s through today. For me, it wasn’t that exciting, but it was my first encounter with Gehry’s architecture first hand, so I walked through the building and found the opening of spaces and surprised around every corner delightful.
The Vitra Campus used iconic furniture as outdoor seating.
I had an architecture tour of the campus that started an hour and a half later, so next I walked to Vitra Haus, a building designed by Herzog & de Meuron, which looks like a pile of houses stacked on top of one another. I’ve never seen such a collection of designed good in my life. Vitra’s flagship store, it housed tables, chairs, lamps, toys, and everyday objects. I walked through the store for an hour and a half and systematically sat on every chair of interest, including a ton of Eames designed furniture (Vitra was Europe’s manufacturer of Eames’s furniture and had good working relationship with Herman Miller). In Vitra Haus, I kept coming across chairs that I really liked, and on the top floor I found an exhibit about the designer Jean Prouvé — an engineer turned designer.
A weird display of Prouvé furniture in Vitra Haus.
At 11:30, I met my tour guide and two fellow tour-takers. My new friends were from California, one an interior designer and his partner a doctor. Our tour guide was an architect from Sweden and she brought us into the restricted interior part of the campus. We started at the Buckminster Fuller Geodesic Dome, then a prefabricated and modular building for a gas station designed by my new design interest Prouvé, then walked us over to the real gem of the campus: Zaha Hadid’s first structure. This fire station was a flying collection of heavy concrete magically suspended in air with no parallel lines and no obvious structure. It was absolutely incredible. The craziest thing about this building is that Hadid had her studio for 12 years before she was awarded a project, and this project was a building for a volunteer fire-fighting team that was funded by this private company.
Zaha Hadid’s first building was this volunteer fire station on Vitra campus.
As the architecture tour continued, we learned that the Vitra campus had burned down in the 90’s. Each of the buildings that were put up after the fire had the task of being architectural masterpieces, but had the task of not overwhelming the important building by Hadid. It was really interesting how architects approached the problem. One used a bridge to frame the station, and others used humble materials. Our group was great since we were each well-informed about design, and we casually chatted about our design interests as we walked through the factory and other buildings on campus.
The largest building, the community was worried about the size. The architect finished the building with this wavy fiberglass and used an amorphous shape to make the building visually smaller.
The tour ended at a conference building by Tadao Ando. Before the tour, I had a vague idea that he built with concrete, but I had no idea how unique and memorable his architecture would be. We entered the building through a narrow entryway and entered a conference room finished with warm plywood, board formed concrete, and glass. Our tour guide pointed out the level of detail; the lines from the concrete pour lined up perfectly with lights, windows, and other elements in the architecture. Nothing was left to chance. Ando dug a courtyard into the ground an designed the house from an elliptical base that allowed light to penetrate into the ground floor and basement. The floor plan was asymmetrical, unpredictable, and full of surprises. Natural light penetrated in all of the right spots and narrow entries between curved and straight walls opened up into voluminous spaces.
This room was a library that had natural light in the reading nook.
After the tour ended, I spend a few minutes picking wild cherries and exchanged information with my new friends to keep in touch. The last building to visit was the owners’ of Vitra’s personal collection of chairs. I started in the basement and found Charles Eames’s personal office reconstructed. When he died, a large portion of his estate was sent to Vitra and they have a great archive of his work. The ground floor contained stacks and stacks of iconic chairs, much the like that stacks of a library. It was ordered chronologically starting with object by Morris & Co, Frank Lloyd Wright, and moved through mid-century and contemporary designs. I couldn’t believe the collection. Any chair important to the story of design history was in front of me, and I took the time to observe and sketch.
Chairs on chairs on chairs on chairs on chairs.
The rest of my day was travel. I grabbed a soup from the cafe and walked twenty minutes in the rain to the nearest tram station. The tram took me over the border to Switzerland and I took the first train to Zurich. I had a few hours to kill before my train to Milan, so I walked to the old town and found a vegan hotdog vendor. I connected to the wifi and found that the birth place of the dada art movement was very close, so I walked to Cabaret Voltaire and walked through the space, imagining the shenanigans that probably took place over the years.
Classic Swiss design in the train station.
It was an action packed weekend, and when I arrived back to my apartment around midnight I slept.
