built ON the river

So this week- a normal week I guess you could call it- Jam packed every minute of your day, it just came and went. My parents also came and went before rushing out on Friday for their Mediterranean excursion.

Girona. A simple town-sized city.
Tuesday we went to Girona for field trip and history classes. The small time city was stunning with its quaint charm and winding old streets. Besides its overly huge cathedral -mind you it has the largest nave of any Cathedral in the world, at 22 meters ( I believe), and beautiful little stairways that peel away from what you already thought could be the smallest street ever, the city is built along their river. And when I say built along the river, it is not like Bilbao where the building were set back from the waters edge creating a pedestrian edge between the buildings and the water. But rather in Girona the homes are built directly on the retaining wall for the river, sometimes even cantaleavering a small amount above the water.


This then, unlike Bilbao, forces the people to walk amgounst the buildings in the shade and then with a break in the building creating an avenue of light that leads to a bridge to cross. The river is not only the edge but the buildings help to redefine that edge, a very solid edge.


Along with this idea of edge, when we went to the small town of Olot, after visiting Girona, we went to visit a resturant built by the firm RCR Architects that created this idea of 'illusions' between edges. By this I mean that they used large amounts of glass- but just in the right places- that it created this feeling where you weren't sure where the buildings inside and outside began, they made the edge between nature and man undiscoverable.




This idea that they have created in many of their pieces and their philosphy that we were able to learn about from the 'C' in RCR Carmen at a firm visit later that night, is that nature is nature with help from man, so one must create an equal balance that one does not over take the other when building architecture. And when they built this resturant they did not want to create an edge between the outside and the inside, they wanted them to flow together, almost to act as one space-- elimating the edge.