I'm a couple weeks behind again, the internet is too unreliable and we've actually started doing a bit of work since week one.
Airports. YDL - BCN - ALC.
Long layover in Montreal after leaving from Dulles (IAD) in Washington DC. Worked on my Mr. Palomar essay on the plane ride. Even though it was only about 6 hours long, with the time change it was morning in Barcelona of the next day.
Nice wide open terminals but without an outlet in sight. Plenty of Spanish men with good-looking shoes though. Found Angela and Si waiting for the same plane as us to Alicante. We didn’t know what our professor looked like yet while waiting, but we were suspicious of some guy in line for the plane and kept eyeing him not-so-discreetly. Such creepers.
Canopies over the Alicante parking lot. Roof treatments, covering, screening – all important in such hot weather. Met with the other Cal students shortly after landing, good to see people after such a long trip. We really clogged up the airport entrance standing around with our luggage.
Passed by small farm houses in La Vega Baja on the way to Guardamar del Segura, which is about half an hour away from Alicante.
Provocative piece of art/billboard/graffiti. 
Las Marinas, one of the biggest sub-urbanizations in Spain. Filled with high-rises, many empty because they are mainly vacation homes.
Urban decay in Guardamar.
Guardamar’s fabric is interesting because of the speculation and tourist business that is a major part of its economy. The traditional one story homes are juxtaposed with the tall rental apartments. People raze the old homes and build high to earn money through renting. Many expect their neighbors to do the same, so everyone else but the façade remains unfinished. Five-story-high blank walls stare down at aging homes.
The remains of the castle of Guardamar. On the highest point, the city used to be completely within its walls hundreds of years ago until an earthquake tore it down. The people used the ruins to build a new city at the base of the hill, leaving little of the castle behind. A cycle of ruin and renewal that continues today. This will be the site of our project.
View from the castle towards the city below.
Leaving the castle…
…to grab some beers. 
“Fisherman’s Cottages” on the beach. Illegally built, but the myth is that they’re traditional homes of people that made their living from the sea. More likely the homes are just speculation and vacation rentals that stay empty most of the year.
They’re all quite beautiful and it reminds me a lot of Newport Beach, but the city is reclaiming the shoreline and as leases end the homes are being demolished.
Alex…making a point.
Aborted developments around Guardamar. Great formwork and spiral concrete staircase but the speculation bubble burst. Though zoned to be developed in the future, who will take on the extra cost of clearing a site to be redeveloped? The structures are scars and monuments to a time past and will probably remain so.
Flamingos in the salt ponds. (For Tiffany)
Las Salinas. Another large part of the economy in the area is salt mining because of the Mediterranean. (The seawater is so salty it’s almost unbearable while swimming.) Supposedly the salt from the was used to fund Columbus’ expedition to the New World.
The mercadillo that is the subject of our initial study. It reminds of me a lot of the swap meet back home but so much more rich. The mix of locals buying their produce and tourists viewing the spectacle is an interesting dynamic. It is a ritual critical to the city and life rather than just a commercial logic.
Interesting juxtapositions of abandoned sites and the street displays.
Layering on the facades of boarded up homes with merchandise and new facades of shops.
I really loved the accumulation of street furniture for display. The ephemeral – temporal quality of all this stuff that shows up for a morning and disappears by the afternoon.
We took a tour to a couple local cities, one of which was Torrevieja. The development there is a little out of control, catering too much to tourism and allowing itself to be overbuilt into a sprawling tourist center. Guardamar has a very different feel and is more controlled, it feels more cozy and homey. Yet it is clearly in danger of becoming something like Torrevieja because growth does need to occur for the city to survive. The challenge is to maintain its character but it seems the city has little interesting in preserving its older parts of the city. A guest from the town hall showed us that the entire center is zoned to be developed up to 4-5 stories of density. It would be a shame to lose the cadence that exists of the apartment high rises and the single story traditional homes.
Torrevieja.
Manchego cheese – a Spanish staple. We were to diagram its lineage and the qualities of the cheese, but first must come the experience of tasting it. So delicious. I love how Alex is cutting the block of cheese with an Olfa knife – doing it as architects do.
So this is our studio space.
Shots of the apartment. It’s pretty nice but I seriously do miss my apartment in Berkeley, especially having all my own things and everything organized. Yes, very OCD. 
Initial diagramming assignment.
It's made up of a bunch of deceptively short vignettes (totaling less than 130 pages) that I find fascinating for Calvino's ideas about perception and making meaning. Maybe I'm reading too in-depth for this short assignment (why am I only on page 40) but I'm enjoying it. You have to love the very-appropriate Albrecht Dürer illustration of a perspective machine on the cover. The structure of the book has got me thinking of Hindu and Buddhist mandalas, particularly this one. Mandalas in general graphically organize the universe into specific geometries like a square, and the Vastu mandala most directly relates to architecture. We definitely saw this in architecture history class and talked about how it influenced temple design.
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