Week Two of Class

This past week was our second week of class. We received our second studio project and found out where the site is that the project is supposed to be designed for. It is just a 2 minute walk from our studio on the main street called Narodni that the National Theater is on. We got to choose our own program for the building we are designing which was unusual because usually they give us the program such as a theater, library, gym, etc. I chose to do a wellness center, which would have yoga, massage, a pharmacy, Pilates, and a sauna.

On Tuesday we had Bees and Beekeeping class again and our teacher took us to the bee farm. We had to take a 30 minute train ride out into a more rural part of the Czech Republic. When we got off the train we walked for about 10 minutes until we came to a river where we could see houses and a boat on the other side. This was where the bee farm was and our teacher explained to us that eight families live on that side of the river, including him. The boat came over and took us across the river where we walked to a small house and then saw the bee farm which wasn't more than about 15 2'x2' boxes. The boxes house several frames of honeycombs, where the bees store their honey and where the queen lays her eggs and the new bees are born from. We saw a new baby bee coming out of one of the honey combs and we also saw a wasp fly onto the comb to steal some honey and watched the bees fight him off. Our teacher then took us into his "lab", which wasn't much more than a small classroom, and showed us how they artificially inseminate the queen bee and the device that they do it with, which was designed at this bee farm. We also learned that this bee farm takes the honey from the hives and produces honey wine with it. The class was very interesting and in a few weeks we get to go back and see how they make the honey wine.

The next day, Wednesday, during studio time we went to an exhibit near the castle about a style movement called Biedermeier. The movement was trying to make design simpler and came before modernism. The exhibit had a lot of furniture, glass, clothes, and paintings. Some of the glass and paintings were interesting but overall I didn't like the exhibit very much. Afterwards we had seminar and our professor Paul talked about Greece and how the Grecians set up their cities. Next week we are talking about Rome which I am looking forward to since John and I are going to Rome for Thanksgiving break.

That night I went to see a documentary about Annie Liebowitz that was playing at a theater downtown. She is a very famous photographer that used to work for Rolling Stone and now works for Vanity Fair. I recognized a lot of her photos that I didn't know that she took. The documentary followed her as she started to take pictures and got a job with Rolling Stone taking pictures of everyone from the Rolling Stones to John Lennon to Bruce Springsteen.

On Thursday we had studio again and we just worked on our new project. Then in drawing our teacher took us to a gallery that was having an exhibit on the Soviet occupation in the Czech Republic that took place in 1968. The exhibit was all black and white photos and it was cool to see because I actually recognized a lot of the places that were in the photos where there were soviet tanks and soldiers and where people were protesting and doing demonstrations.