What I Came Here For

I find it ironic that I never talk about classes or school and that's the reason I'm here. My first field trip is tomorrow. We are going to be in Rome from Thursday through Sunday, getting to see some modern architecture and some old/ancient architecture: Roman Forum, St. Peters as a few examples. I'm pretty excited, especially because every night after 5 we have free time so I can go see everything else that they aren't taking us to.

My Italian Art class is awesome! Today we went to Santa Maria Novella and the Duomo for our lectures. Next week we are going to the Duomo museum and the Uffizi Gallery, and some upcoming classes are up the Duomo dome and San Lorenzo. It's probably the best way to learn about art and architecture when your right in front of it, and when your teacher knows so much!

Conversational Italian class...well not great. I do really good on tests because I can read it, but I am awful at speaking it.

Sketching and Drawing is really cool too. So far we have gone to sketch the Duomo, Piazza Signoria, Pitti Palace, and the Hospital of Innocents. I'm glad I took this class because I already feel like I'm getting better at sketching, which I thought was a lost cause.

Studio is very cool as well. We just finished our site model and did precedents so now we are starting to analyze our site. My professor is very cool and thinks that trips are the most important thing for an architect, which is nice for when we are gone an entire weekend and don't get a lot of studio work done.

Urban design is my last class and it is also pretty neat. It's just a lecture series of all the studio professors. They show us their work and teach us about planning cities. It's cool when you are getting to see some work of architecture firms that you actually hear about like Metrogramma [Alberto Francini is the professor that works for them], Morphosis and RoTo [Paola Giaconia worked for them and is a professor], Andrea Ponsi [pretty awesome and insane architect], and my studio professor Filippo Caprioglio [actually not too famous but has his own architecture firm and is very intelligent].

I definitely have some great classes that I'm learning a ton from, even though I am only in class for three days of the week. And I'm definitely getting taught by some very intelligent people.