More Videos:

This is my video about the differences in studying architecture at Clemson University and studying in Barcelona.
http://youtu.be/bqdk5hKLXXA


This is another small video about the slow paced lifestyle of living in Barcelona and the novelty of living in a metropolitan city with a small town paced life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=066CrJkmoVc

Videos

Well, I'm back in the States. Feels so strange to be back in a place that was supposed to be so familiar and now seems completely different. I guess it's not the place, maybe it's a little of me that's different. Anyway, I've been trying to upload my videos that I made this week, but I've been having technical difficulties and such so last night I separated myself from the frustration and am trying again this morning, a little late but better late than never.
I've uploaded them to my youtube account and here's a link to the first one:

"I miss butter"   http://youtu.be/Wjz7cQqVaGw

Professional Issue Video

When it comes to architecture in Spain, it's a safe haven for creative minds. Building codes that typically restrict architects' ideas but here in Europe, architecture flourishes within a vibrancy only able to exist in a world without strict codes. Just like the professional world differs, the academic atmosphere is very different here in Espanya. At home, we are bombarded with talk of ''studio culture'' you know the type of culture that consists of endless days that turn into nights that turn into days again pouring over drawings and models in the studio with your classmates, eating copious amonts of fast food and pouring coffee into our systems. Here, my experience has been a little different; for starters the studio closes, that's right  closes, at 9 pm and never even opens up on weekends. What does that mean for me? No all-nighters or wasted sunny Saturday afternoons in studio! For my professional issues video, I've decided to expand upon these differences and similiarities to analyze if studio culture is universal for all architecture students.
Here's the link to my prezi mind mapping if you have any ideas
https://prezi.com/secure/8ed36a7d5088b3ca3acda59243fc93615e653a05/

Public Issues video

It may sound a little redundant but what Spain has  really enamored me with in a cultural sense is that laid back lifestyle here. Everyone's happiness and leisurely state of mind is contagious. It's a refreshing energy here that's seems to exude healthiness making such a stark contrast to the rigorously fast paced American lifestyle. To organize my thoughts I've put together a generalized prezi to get my mind going in the right direction for the video documenting these ideas.
https://prezi.com/secure/7a5cf4404fcca14e9ce29fb451d74870ee607ad6/

Personal VIdeo Idea..

It finally occurred to me, what I wanted to focus on for my personal video documenting Barcelona.
My professional and public issues have a lot of "me" in them and to be honest, they are the subjects that I'm truly interested in and have captured the essence of my Catalan experience here but there is one very important life aspect that I haven't mentioned in my previous blogs- that is Spain's obsession with olives.
Olives are everywhere here! And if they're not olives, it's olive oils! They put it on everything! I must say, this absolutely thrilled me when I first got here, because its use is so abundant when back home it's outrageously expensive and never used but after 4 months now of pouring olive oil into my body I feel like it's oozing out my pores so I decided to base one of my videos on it.
To brainstorm how I will organize the video I made a little prezi, mostly because it's fun, but decided to share it with you guys if you were at all interested or more importantly had any ideas to make it more thorough or even just more entertaining. :)
 https://prezi.com/secure/9522973caf22baa8dfb0a6f693107291fcda53f7/

Plan of Attack

According to what I now understand is that I will be making tres videos to help document my experiences this semseter; the content varies from personal to professional to public. So essentially, I'm beginning planning the easiest the personal engagement. I'm thinking that the personal and professional might actually make a nice transition since I'm thinking of focusing on my personal experiences with the slow, relaxed social schedule of Spain from the way they casually indulge in tapas and sangria for hours to the oh so-flexible-it-is-barely-there time schedule of Spaniards lives. This laid back schedule contrasts sharply with the go-go-go mentality of the average American who values hard unflagging work. This feeds in nicely with the professional aspect that I've noticed in the Spanish way of design. To relate to architecture, one could compare the 3 projects Clemson students tend to do in a semester with the 1 project Spanish students complete in a semester. In Spain, the world of design is very detailed but doesn't seem to have the same rigorous timetable that it does in America, the work comes on a much less forced schedule which results in very different types of work. I really liked Bethany's video of her the ''au pair experience'' she had and found the video very interesting because it seemed very personal and yet professionally informative. I want to acheive the same kind of duality in my video.
I don't know I'll have to continue to develop these ideas but that is just what initially came to mind. I also haven't chosen a social or political issue to explore in the final video either. Over the next week or so I'll be working to better organize my thoughts and methods for conveying them in a storyboard.

Picture>1000 words

Photography continues be an incredibly influential art, it can capture the spirit of a person, an event. It can provoke emotion in a way that no other art can, it can bear a vivid truth that haunts us or inspires us or entertains us in a very special way. Now I am not attempting to make grandios gestures through my photographs, I'm simply trying to capture the spirit of the moment that I'm experiencing at the time. Here in a whole new world, I'm perpetually provoked to capture these moments through an obscene amount of photographs- I'm obviously not succeeding very well in my attempt to acheive quality over quantity here- , some good some not so successful. But it's true that whether I'm choosing them consciously or not, certain ''tropos'', aka rhetorical means, are present in these photos that help tell the story I choose.
This first image of Plaza Majorca in Madrid, I included people sitting at an outdoor restaurant in the frame but conveniently excluded the annoying SpiderMan street buskar off to the left. This helps tell a very particular story of a more traditional Spain, a Spain where traditions of spending long afternoons eating and drinking in the public squares alive, and strategically excludes the story of the Spain that lures obnoxious tourist acts like the over weight Spider Man wanna-be. I wanted to think of Madrid in this traditional sense because it was definitely a city of tradition in my experience, hence the sepia tone.

One more example of how I tried to use a little rhetoric is in this photograph of the Gard D'Oriente in Lisbon. This picture's angle really helps to capture the dynamic lines of the train station. It is a remarkable piece of architecture with dynamicism and movement unlike anything I've seen so to emphasize this even more so I attempted to  capture the spirit of the building at a lower angle running down the facade.