El dia de Sant Jordi: St. George's Day

OK--so we all know about St. Valentine's Day, but how many of us have heard of St. George's day? Did you know that it's also International Book Day! Interesting, huh? This is basically Catalunya's equivalent to Valentine's Day, and, because of the added meaning of Books and Literature, the gift from women to men is usually a book and from men to women a flower, most commonly a rose.

Luckily, although it is our final week of classes and we are ridiculously bogged down, Bri Bob and I had to head over to Barri Gotic for some supplies and got a chance to see el dia de Sant Jordi in action. It was so warm today that there was one girl selling chocolate who had to hold an umbrella over it! Professor Vidal and Christi bought all of the girls roses...it was really sweet. I felt special-haha. I got the aldana boys each a little something from el Mercat de Sant Antoni. I put it on their beds because they're all at studio.

Just got back from dinner with my friend Anass, no worries-it's totally platonic, people. He's a chef so he made a pretty sweet meal of salad, bread, and mushroom beef and this awesome fruit-thing for dessert. We grabbed a cafe and now I'm headed back to studio to finish up my work. Happy St. Jordi's, and such

Torre Agbar por Jean Nouvel: Agbar Tower by Jean Nouvel

So--this ginormous building that I hated so much in relation to its context in our studio project at Placa de les Glories, may just have something special after all...

Agbar is the water company, so it seems only appropriate that the building incorporates water into its design with the reflective windows, and the varying cold to hot colors about the exterior. Without the tour, though, we never would have known that Nouvel carried his idea through the building. This is the basement whose stairway is made of volcanic stone to represent the connection between the land and the earth's core as you go from ground level to beneath the earth's surface.

Additionally, the area that is submerged is called "hell" and the lighting shown is the ACTUAL lighting. Why you would want people to feel like they were in hell while attending a conference in the auditorium I do not know. Nouvel designed the aud by himself, wanting to be sure that the acoustics and the emotion of the space would fit its use. The walls are made of a hard material but they are masked by a metal mesh sheath set a few feet inside of the wall to give it the appearance of continuity. The chairs are comfortable enough to sit in, but not enough so that you can fall asleep...unless you are Bob--in which case the comfort is not a factor.

Through the skin by the aud to the skin of the main tower you can see the glass panels, windows, and colorful facing

The interior literally reflects the exterior...with mirrored panels placed at specific angles to reflect light deep into the spaces. Nouvel even specified the existence of colorfully painted squares on the wall to represent the square windows that let light through the colorful facade.

Upstairs, Ben checks out the views from the cafeteria

Oh Placa de les Glories...*sigh*

OK--so how rockin' is this cafeteria?? The colors and squares themes play out in every aspect of the building, right down to the furniture and decoration...the office floors are even made of magnetic squares that can be moved should they want to rearrange!

Felipe seemed pretty impressed!

Finally, we made it up to the very top of the Tower...which is pretty flippin' high. Cool views, but I think I almost enjoyed the elevator, with its changing colored ceiling light, as much as I did the destination!

We've reached the top...consider yourselves lucky that we got into the building, let alone the top floor which overlooks the company President's office floors.

Just to give you some sense of scale...this is us...on one floor of this monster...

and while I call it a monster, as I originally tried to find the reasons that this building just didn't make sense (since it doesnt match its surroundings in the least), I found it hard not to like it. The explanations seemed valid enough for the building itself. I guess I don't mind Torre Agbar so much, as long as I'm on the inside.

:)