Fin.

“What mountains?”, I asked myself.

Early 2005, and my brother had described to me his new flat in Madrid.  Before Facebook, before Skype, I think it must have been in an email, or even a letter, the contents of which I can scarcely remember.  What stuck in my mind was his mention of the mountains he could just about see from the terrace.  That was the moment that the story of my relationship with Madrid began, long before I arrived suitcase in hand in April 2012.

I just didn’t expect there to be mountains (the Sierra de Guadarrama) just outside Madrid.  In my mind the mountains of Europe ran across the middle through Switzerland and Austria, down into Italy and along the French/Spanish border, dividing the countries.  I didn’t know how high up Madrid is, elevated over 600m above sea level on the mesita that occupies the centre of the Iberian peninsula.  I didn’t even know that I didn’t know these things, never having particularly given a lot of thought to the place.

Nine years later, I still feel that I don’t know the city that well, but when I think about that moment it does make me realise how dramatically the extent of my ignorance has shrunk.  I’m sitting in a Madrid suburb on the day of my departure trying to reflect on the time I’ve spent here, attempting to call to mind the way things were in order to get a clear idea of how things are.  Objectively speaking I know my way around well enough, I suppose – having had an endless stream of visitors I know every inch of the tourist beat, and the main areas of the city centre are comfortingly familiar.  I even eventually dared to drive in the city, and oddly enough it didn’t end in disaster.  I still feel a little lost from time to time though.

Here are those mountains I mentioned, by the way:

But how do I best sum up two years?  With lists?

Places I’ve been but not in the blog

Sierra de Guadarrama (on various occasions)

Salamanca

Barcelona

Cordoba/Sevilla

Merida/Badajoz/Elvas

Sierra de Gredos

Madrid bars visited

I’m not even going to try…

Nope. Too dry.  It doesn’t tell any kind of story, just highlights how poorly I’ve documented all this.

How about considering how well I’ve completed my objectives?  Did I really set any?  My Spanish has got to a functional level, at least.  I have managed to get through two years, however, without even the most incidental involvement in any project actually IN Spain.  If that doesn’t tell you the depth of la crisis for the construction industry I don’t know what would drive it home.  Understand the culture?  Getting there, but I’m only just now beginning to feel able to watch the television and read the paper with a meaningful level of understanding.   That remains a work in progress.

The trouble with attempting a conclusion, of course, is that it isn’t really over.  Just as my association with this place began long before I came here, so it will continue after my departure.  As well as my brother here, now I have exponentially increased my links to the place (you know who you are!) and have a work-related excuse to continue returning.  I may even manage to fit in the occasional blog post.  Fin.?  Not remotely.

Excess by the sea – Calatrava’s City

In a fairly spontaneous trip to the coast this weekend, I went to Valencia, hometown of Spain’s immensely famous engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava.  This icon of expressive building structure was what we all wanted to be when we were at uni – Calatrava was the paradigm of what we could achieve with our dual discipline studies: more than an architect with some fundamental engineering principles or an engineer with aesthetic sensibilities; rather a seamless combination of the two superficially conflicting disciplines.

Yet, all I’ve heard about in connection with the firm (it seems unfair to put all the blame on an individual, just as it is ludicrous to lavish all of the glory upon one) during my time in Spain has been spiralling prices, and unbuildable vanity projects.  It may well be a function of the crisis-hit country, but I’m unable to go back to the time before the economic crisis (which seems so very distant now, anyway) to check.

Here’s an example of some of the criticism that’s been levelled at the most recent Valencian show-pony, La Ciutat de les Art i les Ciencies (City of Arts and Sciences):

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/08/architect-santiago-calatrava-valencia

I try to think I went with an open mind (although I had seen this article beforehand), but I tend to agree.  As the tingly feeling of having stepped into a futuristic metropolis subsides, you’re left with a sense of overwhelming excess, and the realisation that the place is virtually empty.

Despite each building being a virtuoso structure in its own right, overall it’s just too much for even a massive building geek like me: the buildings, all of the signature Calatrava style but variations on a theme, like the laboratory cast-offs from the tinkerings of a deranged structural genius, compete with rather than complement one another.  The overall composition is undermined by its own homogeneity – white tiles, glass and concrete provide the only textures and the branching, treelike structural form is so overused it loses all of its style.

I did like the water.  The Ciutat is situated in the dried up bed of the River Turia, so it’s a nice touch to surround everything in water.  The downside, of course, is that is augments the sense of distance and isolation which is already excessive.  It also doesn’t help that most of the buildings appear to be closed most of the time, or that they are clearly suffering, somewhat prematurely, from the ravages of their coastal environment.

All of this said, I really like Valencia.  I’m generally a fan of not-the-capital-city sort of places, especially the ones that aren’t particularly trying to prove anything or be the edgy alternative to the capital.  The place felt comfortable, even despite the 80% humidity and the tendency for paths, roads and bike tracks to just suddenly stop as though the builders got distracted or ran out of money or both.

I hired a bike and explored.  I spent over an hour wandering around the Mercat Central on Saturday morning, and an hour sketching the vaulting in the Lonja (15^th century commercial exchange) on Sunday afternoon.  I meandered the streets, and watched the other tourists.  I did not understand any Valenciano.

Church in the Old Town

Mercat Central

My sketch

What the Lonja vaulting really looks like

The Barrio

I’ve not written a lot for a while, and this is largely because after more than a year I’ve settled into a normal rhythm of daily life.  I need to nudge myself on occasion to remember that I’m essentially a long-stay tourist, and should therefore be getting out there and making the most of it. I’ve been toying with writing about my neighbourhood, and day-to-day Madrid in general, for some time now, so here it is.

   

Unlike most guiris, I live well outside the city centre: although I hear English spoken at every step when I wander around near the office, along Gran Via or through Retiro, the community I live in is totally different.  I don’t think people particularly notice we’re foreigners, a lot of the time, because that’s just not what they expect to see out here.  It not’s glamorous, just a normal flat in a normal comunidad,  but we do have the very good fortune to have a swimming pool available to use  - no room for that in the city centre – and it’s easy to feel normal.

This evening my brother and I went running through the Aluche park, which was teeming with life – old ladies gathered on benches, people cycling the perimeter, and children playing in the dried-up concrete base of a long pond.  Just a few weeks ago this park was the scene of the local fiestas, which I was disappointed not to have time to get to – the equivalent, from the sound of it, of the village fair.  This is all in sharp contrast to the last time I ran that particular route on a damp evening in the spring, when a couple of hardy dog-walkers were all I had for company (see photos).

The comparison of the weather in Spain and back home, and people’s reaction to it, are two of the things that come up most often.  Us Brits take a perverse sort of pride in not even noticing the degree of drizzle that brings out a sea of umbrellas here.  That’s not to say that the park, transposed to the UK, would have been as lively on the soggy evening as it was today – on the contrary, back home we wouldn’t go to the park on a summer’s evening either, as much as anything because of the risk of a downpour any minute or because the benches are all still sodden from this morning’s showers.  Although in exchange you have to suffer the dust catching in your throat, and breathe air that's body temperature before getting anywhere near a body, the upshot is that these well-used parks in Madrid are well taken care of, and pretty nice places to be.

We don’t do communal, anyway.  As I discovered first-hand in Graz and Mostar, long before coming here, if I hadn’t quite grasped from my architecture studies, the continental European norm is to live in flats. There’s no sense that this might not be a preferable lifestyle, and no hint of the social difficulties that we’d tend to associate with areas of big flat blocks.  The thing that constantly astounds me is that you see people in the park with dogs the size of horses: I haven’t the faintest idea how these beasts can fit into the average flat.  Anyway, stacking everyone’s homes on top of one another then leaves space for big, open, green spaces in between the buildings: similar density of housing but without the city feeling crowded.  It’s generally agreed that this is a pretty sustainable model, and broadly what Le Corbusier was getting at in the mid-20^th century.

The British, on the other hand, are peculiar in insisting on having our own little house with its own little scrap of land that we can put a fence round, however pathetically small it may be.  That way, when the sun does shine we can fire up our own little barbecue and potter around tending our own little plants in our own 4 sqm, without having to look at any strangers whatsoever.  I’m not objecting to it, but quite the opposite: I’m a fully signed-up member of that club and have my own little patch, replete with tomato plants and a fair supply of weeds too.  I do miss it and it’s difficult to adjust.

I’m working on it. 

Bussing about Castilla y Leon part 1: Avila

This is my first post for some time.  I don’t wish to make excuses, but I have been rather busy.  Completing the tender design for my last project, with an issue date the week before Easter, has occupied most of both my time and my thoughts for almost all of 2013 to date.  Having finally delivered it, it felt like I was waking up and returning to normal just as the world outside began to emerge from its winter slumber.  It was time to get out of the city.

If you’re reading this, you probably saw the Facebook commentary. As if it were necessary, let me tell you more.   Since I originally wrote this two months ago, you’ve probably forgotten anyway.

After the deadline, Easter loomed, and my Spanish colleagues prepared to return to their respective pueblos to spend time with their families. I realised that this four-day weekend would be one of my best opportunities to explore the country outside the capital.  The last year has gone by at a frightening pace, with more time spent in airports than at leisure in Spain, and I now found myself suddenly at the halfway point of my assignment. With every available holiday dedicated to the wedding I am left with dwindling opportunities to make the most of my experience here. 

With this in mind, I didn’t let my lack of available travelling companions deter me, and got to work on finding a destination.  What with the aforementioned busyness, however, I didn’t start to plan until the week beforehand.  Despite having been to Spain over Easter and seen some of the Semana Santa celebrations before, I severely underestimated the importance of that week and the associated dearth of accommodation or transport.  The dream of a sun-kissed break to the beach down south was short-lived, so I settled on a quieter area right on Madrid’s doorstep: Castilla y Leon.

On the Thursday morning I stuffed a few things in a rucksack, bought a bus ticket and booked a night in an Avila hotel, and then set off with no clear plan of what the weekend held.  The big camera, guide book and my sketchbook made up most of my luggage.

Avila, or Steak Town, as I shall henceforth be calling it, is a beautiful walled medieval city.  There’s the odd ramshackle bit – the bus station is a touch post-apocalyptic and there are few places where I’ve seen so many ruined shells of buildings within the city – and I wonder if these are signs of suffering from la crisis or the wider migration away from this area.  I understand that many villages are slowly dying as their people abandon them, and certainly as I travelled further from Madrid I saw more and more empty buildings left for the elements to reclaim.

Going into the cathedral was a mixed experience, as although they’ve screened off the cloister with ugly perspex sheeting and replaced real candles with rather less evocative battery powered fakes, the timing of my visit meant that the nave was filled with the processional floats of Semana Santa.  These colourful renderings of Biblical personages are interesting displays of craftmanship, but leave me feeling either totally godless or at best extremely Protestant, as do the processions themselves.  I respect the solemnity but remain disappointingly unmoved.

What I did really appreciate was the speckled red apse built into the city’s fortifications…<look at pictures and describe further>. In a small museum off to one side, amongst the ecclesiastical finery and religious paraphernalia I came across several huge illustrated cantora.  These are essentially monk’s hymn books, with medieval written music, which given my recent reading (In the Name of the Rose – lots of detailed descriptions of monastic life and illustration) and singing in a choir (reading sheet music for the first time in years) were of particular interest.  I spent much longer than I might otherwise have done poring over minutely detailed flowers in the borders of the pages and trying to decipher the musical notation before skimming past the other displayed finery to continue round the city.

 

The other big-hitter of Avila (aside from face-sized, flavourful steaks washed down with very nice red wine) is the city walls, half of the perimeter of which can be accessed.  Where better to sit sketching for an hour in blustery springtime conditions than the most exposed position for miles around?  I duly climbed to the highest point I could find, one of the wall’s turrets slightly above the bustle of the bank holiday tourist crowds, and settled myself down.  It’s a good way to slow my pace when alone, although when finished I felt dazed and tired: as I finally paused all the fatigue of the preceding weeks washed over me.  I headed back to the hotel for a little rest.

Darkness fell, and the streets filled up.  Avila is well known for its Semana Santa processions, and the floats from the cathedral were brought out through the city streets by their hooded attendants, watched by large crowds in a scene repeated, with some variations in style, in cities and towns across Spain throughout the week.

The obvious next step the following morning was the next city to the West: Salamanca.

Icelandic Inspiration: here's one I wrote earlier

My first blog post wasn't the first thing I wrote this year.  The idea of writing the blog in the first place really stems from how much I enjoyed writing a short piece about Iceland, specifically the concert hall on the waterfront in Rekjavik.  Here it is for your enjoyment.

I’d never really thought about going to Iceland.  I had joked about it, when the economy crashed in 2009 – it had always been so expensive, so now was surely the time to visit – but I hadn’t planned anything in earnest.

Then one day I was in a tube station in London, I forget which, but I think I was on my way home from a trip to Paris.  I’m always particularly susceptible to planning new adventures as the previous one finishes, so when I saw the poster advertising cheap Northern Lights packages to Iceland I immediately resolved to look into it and knew exactly who I was going to take.  Within hours of getting home I had been on the website and was on the phone to my Mum; once upon a time I’d promised to take her on a Norwegian Fjords cruise to see the Aurora Borealis, but the time and the money had never appeared, so here was my chance to make it up to her.

This time, I booked it, and we were off to Iceland.  I didn’t even know how much it meant to her... until the excitement started to build and my 61 year-old mother was like a child again in the back seat of the car, barely able to contain herself as we drove to the airport on the much anticipated day of departure.  That’s when I learned about Surtsey, the island that appeared from the sea, and more of the land of volcanic wonder that had so long held my Mum fascinated.

Before we had even left the airport building, my fiancé was despairing as the two of us paused to marvel at the glimpses of mountains through cleverly placed windows and to stroke the beautifully smooth stones and superbly finished concrete.  We had hired a car, so we set off away from the tourist crowd (such as it was) and into the bleakness of the lava fields, on the way to the blue lagoon.  This uneven expanse of black boulders, spewn so recently from the inner layers of the earth, stands silently testament to the awesome fury of nature in this place where the crust is a fraction of the thickness of our own stable land’s.  Its otherworldliness is also a fitting introduction and backdrop to the steamy spookiness of the Blue Lagoon and its ice-blue, impenetrably cloudy waters.

We watched the sky begin to darken, and lights around the lagoon twinkle into life, before we made our way onward to Iceland’s capital city, Reykjavik.  A town of less than 200,000 souls, it is hardly the bustling metropolis you’d expect of a capital, but it has an outpost charm, as we discovered when we explored it the following day.  You feel a long way from anywhere as you gaze out across the bay at the snowy peaks, backed by the brightly painted corrugated iron that predominates in the town’s buildings – apparently most of the early country’s building materials drifted in off the tide from more prosperous, more hospitable parts of the world.

 

 

Reykjavik’s waterfront has a new gem, however, that is all Icelandic and a million miles from driftwood construction.  Although the Harpa concert hall’s facade of tessellated glass hexagons purports to be a reference to the volcanic activity on the island (or so the website tells us), its situation next to the harbour and its fishing boats help it to evoke a much more fish-like image.  It positively glimmers in the grey wintry light, and stands in bold opposition to the natural backdrop of the bay without detracting from it – a feat not often successfully accomplished by modern architecture.  Once you’ve passed under the dizzying three-dimensional cladding to gain entry to the building, you enter a concourse space whose size is tempered by the projecting masses of the auditoria and the enclosing planes of the stairs and walkways that give access to them.  It doesn’t feel as large as it is, and the parallel walls of black concrete leading straight through the building to another perfectly framed view of the bay cause you not to care: instead you are drawn through for yet more quiet contemplation.  The route up through the building offers more of the same: spectacular views, cunningly accommodated seating areas on the skew stair that hugs the front wall, more walkways, more perfectly executed concrete.  The walls look like lava, but lavastone is too weak and porous to support such a building.  I imagine there is a volcanic additive used to achieve the colour, but in terms of a technical achievement these walls are truly remarkable (more detail available on request), with hardly a blemish on them.

 

The following day we set out into the wilderness which, in Iceland, is not in short supply even on the main tourist routes.  This is particularly true in winter, and we soon discovered why as the mist descended and we found ourselves enveloped in whiteness – land and sky blending into one with only the road ahead of us keeping us on track.  Eventually, following the guidance of a friendly local in the deserted coffee shop that serves as tourist centre for Þingvellir National Park, we left the car and made our way up into a fissure formed by the tearing apart of the Eurasian and North American plates.  There we came upon the Oxarafoss waterfall – we looked up at the river Oxara pouring over the edge of the North American plate and into the teetering plain of no-man’s land where we stood, a deserted borderland that is inexorably sinking away from the continental plates at either side of it. The water continued to steam and rumble as we pondered the existential crisis that this placed us in.

Further along we saw evidence of volcanic activity bubbling close under the surface in a field of geysers at Geysir.  The fascinating part was the range of effects we could observe, from the humble bubbling puddles of mud on the edge of the path to the roped off crowd-pleaser Strokkur that spouted 25m into the air with frightening regularity.  The steady wind blew the steam across the surface of the ground, lending the geyser field that same ethereal quality we observed back at the Blue Lagoon: perhaps it’s an intrinsic part of areas of geothermal activity, that because they’re so rare they appear mysterious and alien to us.

Finally, we pushed onward to Gullfoss.  This monstrous double-dip waterfall had created its own canyon in the ice... and there words fail me.  You had to be there.

We didn’t see the Northern Lights.  I almost don’t even care.  Iceland didn’t disappoint, and it’s hard to get stressed in a country so intent on getting you to relax and have a soak in their hot pools.

Still, I suppose I’d better start saving for that cruise...

On the Road with Jack, and the trouble with Istanbul

Today I feel normal, relaxed and for the first time in too long I am not tired.  It has been a peaceful Sunday so far: no alarm to wake me, freshly squeezed orange juice, coffee and a leisurely chat over breakfast, followed by an hour's pilates and a bit of Spanish study.  I've luxuriated in the novelty of having the time to do these things.

Perhaps fittingly, my literary companion for the dizzying whirl of international travel has been On the Road by Jack Kerouac. This is mostly about the heady excitement of drug-fuelled, nonsensical voyages to go and "dig" American cities and "get kicks".  For me it's not been easy to get into, or empathise, and the impact of prose style is I think lessened with its age - its own iconic status probably means there has been too much imitation since to make it stand out.  That said, I'm beginning to be won over, and there are flashes of descriptive brilliance.  There are some parallels between my struggle to like the book and my struggle with Istanbul, probably much more than between my style of travel and Jack's.


The hectic writing style undoubtedly contributed to my mood the day in Istanbul I spent walking through the darkening city after work, pondering what it was that I just couldn't like about the place.  Perversely, it was as I weaved through the commuting crowds and choked on the fumes of queueing cars that this changed; following this train of thought down to the Bosphorus shore I really began to fall for the city I'd been so keen not to return to.



It was the man with the bread in a bag on a stick that started it. He was walking amongst the cars, selling bread rolls to the motorists - a step above the 'drive-in' bread kiosks they have at every street corner. It amused me, so I took a photo.  What followed was a flurry of scarcely coherent note-taking and bad photography, that summed up everything I thought and felt about the place.







It went like this (with some editing into full sentences):

Man selling bread on a stick in a bag. Roses and water [also being sold to the motorists].  Sirens, bus queues and pavement bikers [one of whom in particular had mobile phone wedged between head and helmet].  Murky sunset and the heavy unidentified floral scent breaking through the traffic fumes.  Kebabs and tea and headscarves.  Massive signs for English schools.  Hills and more hills.  Ataturk watching you eat [his picture is everywhere, including our office canteen].  Broken pavements and wonky steps.  Unaccountably falling for a place once you've freed yourself of trying to like it.  Walking the wrong way out of the metro and trying to remember the words for yes and no.

Ferry bow waves splashing the pavements as an old man sells books on the floor, people fish and grown men try bike tricks.  Commuters stream towards the ferry terminal, onto buses and into cars.  Hard to string together a single coherent thought from the boiling mass, and work out what I'm trying to say about this place.

Travelling is too often this edited and sanitised version of the world.  I see that in Madrid when I walk the same stretch of pavement hundreds of times and see a hundred different faces framed in the same photo; I saw the same in Florence.  I've appeared in the background of who knows how many strangers' favourite holiday photos. 

That's not the Istanbul I've seen, which is not the same as the Istanbul I've heard people rave about. At root it's just a city like any other, the stage for people's lives, and though that has it's own magic it requires a different kind of appreciation, more tempered and considered.  Istanbul on a mundane level is hard to love - choked up with cars, you take your life in your hands every time you cross a road, and there are simply too many people.  However, it does just have this energy, this vibrancy, and as night falls the place just twinkles.

 

I came round to thinking that the sheen of tourism is ok, really.  People go on holiday to escape their day to day life.  Maybe the illusion that everywhere is better than home doesn't necessarily produce the ideal perspective for appreciating your everyday life, but I'm glad they enjoy their trips.  And I came round to Istanbul.

What Country Is This Anyway? Coming home.

It's a bizarre sensation, coming 'home' to somewhere that was where you thought you were going on your adventure to.  We got to the airport, and suddenly the check-in queue was full of Spaniards. I understood some of what was being said around me for the first time in a month.

Coming back the contrast was so marked that I felt more relaxed and comfortable here in Madrid than I ever did before going to Turkey.  Don't get me wrong, my Spanish hasn't magically advanced through disuse (quite the reverse), it's just I'm not so scared of using it now.

On the way home today I started to think about feeling lost, and endlessly displaced - wondering whether I fit even back home home (Sheffield, that is, at least for now.  It's not even where I'm originally from).  Geek that I am, I got stuck on the word displacement and started thinking very literally about the definition of the word in physics terms.  Turns out I do remember some of it.  Which is a relief given my profession.

Displacement is a vector, defined by both the distance travelled from a starting point and the direction. Velocity is then speed plus direction, the rate of change of displacement (the gradient on a graph of distance/time, or dx/dt) and acceleration the rate of change of velocity (the gradient on your velocity/time graph, or curvature of the distance/time one - dv/dt or d2x/dt2 respectively).  Bouncing between three countries, I'm like a conker on a string - always going at ridiculous speed but still somehow constantly accelerating (if you don't follow, ask, and I'll draw you a picture) - so it's no wonder I'm feeling dizzy.

Nothing is certain, constant and normal.  If you have no base to work from, what on earth do you say to anyone?  You talk about travel, yourself, or the extremely abstract.  Then everybody gets bored and wanders off.  Must work on that.

Speaking of conkers - Autumn is upon us.  The extreme summer heat has left Madrid and a comfortably temperate environment has supplanted it. As I crossed the park this evening it was starting to get dark and the clouds were bright pink against the fading blue, wispy bits stretching across the horizon like candy floss.  I don't have a picture for you though, sorry.

By the way...

In case anyone apart from me actually reads this blog, and is wondering about what happened with that chartership thing I mentioned in the first post, there is news.

I passed.  Celebrated on a rooftop in Istanbul, as you do.

That is all.

Shining in the darkness: Byzantine mosaics

As I begin to write, I’m listening to the call to prayer and the sky is darkening over my little corner of Istanbul to reveal a full moon hanging in the sky.  This sound never fails to evoke an incredible sense of otherness for me: it’s a stark reminder of how far I am from home, repeated five times daily just in case I forgot for a moment.  Beautiful, though, as since I got back to the apartment the reddish haze in the sky has gone and Levazim and Ortaköy are twinkling again.  The best thing about this flat is the view, and tonight for the first time I’m sitting with my laptop on the little glazed terrace that capitalises on it.

The key thing about this place for me has got to be the light, or more precisely the effect that minimal lighting can have.  In the same way as the vistas across the Bosphorus really become magical as the sun goes down, it’s the shadowy interiors of the remaining fragments of Byzantium that really capture the imagination.

I couldn’t write about Istanbul without talking about the Aya Sofya (Hagia Sofia or Sancta Sophia in Greek and Latin respectively), which has been dominating the skyline of Sultanahmet since the 6^th century.  It’s widely considered to be more impressive inside than out, and aside from the size this is very much down to the mosaics…

I first learned about Byzantine art during A-levels and can recall that a) it was one of the earliest forms of figurative art from the Christian church, which had survived through the centuries because b) it was all about the mosaics, and tiles don’t rot and flake like paintings in Roman catacombs.  I also recall that these mosaics were special because of their tiny tesserae (tiles, to the layman) which allowed incredible nuance of detail and shading, and abundant use of gold and lapis lazuli laid not-quite-flat to catch and reflect the light and so give the images their lustre.

… so naturally I was excited to see the Aya Sofya.  It was a big part of my agreeing to this little easterly sojourn.  On our first free day I virtually dragged my long-suffering Spanish travelling companion to the door and into the lengthy queue to get in.  Then we stepped inside and I felt, well, no more than moderately impressed. 

It grows on you though.  Once you move away from the worst of the tourist throng, it’s possible to take in the atmosphere, reflect on just how old it is and begin to see the traces of the original decorations that have variously been plastered or painted over during the building’s life as a mosque.  That’s when the impact comes: imagining the place with shimmering mosaics on every surface in its heyday, just as Justinian saw it.  And now I find myself considering stumping up the entrance fee again for a second visit….

Mosaic in the Upper Gallery

 

Section of plaster removed to reveal mosaic

The Constantinople of Constantine and his successors is hard to find in modern Istanbul, save for the one show-stopping church-turned-mosque-turned museum, so it’s necessary to leave Sultanahmet in search of it.  A reasonably well visited alternative is the Chora, the 11^th century church tucked away in the west of the city.  No period of reflection is required here to feel its impact: the domes of the narthex glow, with mosaics more stunning and complete than those of the Aya Sofya.  I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

 

 

 

The Chora is just within the Theodosian walls, which cut across the peninsula and enclosed the city – preventing its conquest for a millennium as the last vestiges of Imperial Rome withered and died quietly within the empire’s eastern outpost.  These walls are in a terrible state of repair, and being well outside the tourist centre are largely ignored.  The shell of a fortress forming part of the wall (Palace of the Sovereign or Tekfur Sarayı in Turkish) prompted further recollections from school as I contemplated the end of empire.  This time it was Year 7 English lessons, and learning the poem that most will find more familiar from the Watchmen film character and his taste in interior design.  Of all of Shelley’s lines, it’s only the pedestal inscription and the sentiment that stick in my head:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

Despair indeed, ye mighty, not at the greatness of Ozymandias but for your being destined to share in the same fate.  Somehow, for me, Rome is most poetic at its bitter end.

(I also remember thinking that Bysshe is really a very strange name)

Language acquisition at the beach

My Turkish vocabulary now extends to at least ten words.  I can now ask for up to five of the following things:

1. Beer
2. Water
3. Tea
4. Coffee
5. Watermelon

I'm reasonably satisfied with the progress of this, but if I'm honest it's not a critical life goal of mine to become conversant in Turkish.  The project of the moment remains to learn Spanish, properly.

Some weeks ago I found myself on a bus full of Spaniards heading for the coast.  This was something of a step up in what I was expecting of myself in Madrid and represented a vague attempt at making some of my own friends in Spain.  Spanish ones.  I think through work I already know more Spanish people than your average guiri. English folk in Madrid generally tend to be language teachers, and consequently meet each other much more than locals, which impedes their own language learning and makes it harder for them to get to know locals... and so on.  I think I can hope for better integration than that, even in the short time I'm around.

So today I'd like to talk about language, or my lack of it in recent months.  With the level of Spanish I had on arrival I would never have dreamed of going on that trip - I couldn't even have read the website to find it.

Everyone who has put themselves through this process will be familiar with 'the silent phase' when you sit through evenings, lunches and meetings with a gradually improving idea of what's going on but without ever saying a word.  You feel like an idiot.  The Spanish phrase for someone who doesn't speak a language is simple, poetic and appropriate for this situation: estaba una chica sin palabras (I was a girl without words).

It's pretty hard going - my brother is convinced of the need to suffer to learn and language properly and I tend to concur to an extent.  He's maybe a little bit extreme in his views on the matter but it is really very hard to see another way to get beyond the 'tourist' level where you can ask for things and manage basic interactions but can't really engage in proper conversation.  It's perfectly possible to live for years in a country without achieving that higher level: people do and it's not always a problem.  It's just not for me.

I feel like I am beginning to come out the other side now, when people are patient with me and I'm not distracted by actually being in Turkey, that is.  In fits and starts and on comfortable ground I now have words.  It is still exhausting (another feature of living in a country and attempting to learn the language - sheer blind fatigue) but getting better.

On the Monday after my weekend of speaking no English it was as though everything had just clicked into place.  It was definitely worth going purely for the language practice, as I felt myself relaxing in conversation over breakfast.

The trip, incidentally, was my Spanish beach trip for the year - I found the group on the internet and liked the sound of a party on a catamaran as the sun set, followed by beach and hiking the next day.  Here's a picture.

Engineer on tour: Go East

I wrote a blog post on a plane again.  This is happening a lot (the being on a plane, more than the writing on planes). Outside the window what I assumed at the time of writing to be the lower reaches of the Carpathians marched northward toward the Bulgarian border as I crossed towards the Bosphorus and the eastern terminus of the Orient Express… going to Istanbul.  It’s a mighty range of mountains and a bleak and forbidding landscape, even the valleys between baked dry with their rivers nothing more than tracks of dust.  I’ve lost count of my recent plane journeys but I still love a good window seat.  I’m considering the purchase of a travel atlas for easier landscape identification.

The journey merits inclusion in the blog because it’s not just another holiday.  The vagaries of construction project workload in the current environment and a global employer has seen me sent East in search of gainful employment.  Turkey is busy and buzzing so we’re joining in.  I know little about what to expect, but will endeavour to record some of it in as articulate a fashion as I can muster.

As previously though, with a long flight and a laptop I have a chance to fill you in on something interesting I’ve recently seen.  It’s been a long time coming but I’m finally in a position to share my thoughts on the Herzog and Meuron talking piece that is the CaixaForum building, just off the Golden Mile of Art in Madrid. 

The building is sponsored by, fittingly, the CaixaForum, the charitable arm of a large Spanish bank, and was commissioned as a venue for art, music and general stuff considered good for society’s soul.  Entrance is free, and a visit worthwhile just for a trip up the first staircase which takes you – like a spaceship’s entrance ramp – up from the centre of the floating building’s undercroft through sci-fi brushed aluminium into the belly of the beast.

The building began life as a fairly unremarkable masonry construction, a municipal substation if I remember correctly.  The Swiss architects, or probably more likely some of their employees from the company’s office in Madrid, kept just the upper levels of this façade to raise up the building mass and open up a semi-subterranean plaza (which one might call an undercroft, if so inclined) beneath, complete with water feature and the aforementioned entrance experience. 

Above, the older building is topped with the architects’ favourite material of the last decade: COR-TEN (or pre-rusted metal to mortal men), which blends tonally with the brickwork as well as adding height and a nice bit of texture.  I like it.  It’s uncompromisingly modern without being shiny, and inventively turns an old bit of structure to a new purpose rather than tearing it down to start again.  There’s some great detail about the architecture on the CaixaForum website.

Once inside, vertical circulation is up through one of the concrete cores that provide support and stability to the structure, and the smoothly undulating, high spec exposed concrete makes it feel like the inside of a sculpture.

I was there to take a look, eventually, at the Piranesi exhibition.  I had a vague idea of his work, and knew it featured buildings and cityscapes but really no knowledge of who, when or where he’d been.  I certainly didn’t realise how inspiring I’d find the images, how redolent they’d be of a sense of place or have any sense of the level of their finely etched detail.  

A mostly frustrated architect in the 18^th century, Piranesi apparently took refuge in the imagined places of his etchings, drawing heavily from studies of Classical constructions for landscapes of ruins, surreal vistas and fictional cartography. The exhibition showed a broad range of his work, grouped more or less chronologically, and standouts for me were one small print of tiny people racing along in between the outsized tombs of the Via Appia and a modern video adaptation of his Imaginary Prisons etchings made 3D.  The video is available online, set to a Bach Cello Suite, and although one might argue the ethics of wilful manipulation of another, long dead, it doesn’t detract from the originals but draws you back to take a second look at the images so vividly brought to life.  I am also conceiving a real appreciation for the humble cello, I think.

The sheer enormity of the imagined edifices calls to mind every time I've stood in awe of an ancient (and they are always ancient if they have this impact - I think it's the contrast of scales between the fine details and the building size), monstrously large building and felt so very small.The work was about creativity, but also just about skill.  It’s a quality of representation that really makes itself apparent in the work. 

Just in case you were paying attention in the first paragraph: yes I was wrong about the mountains, but also sort of right.  The internet tells me that the mountains in that particular part of northern Greece are called the Rhodopes, which go up to meet the Balkan mountain range that covers much of Bulgaria and a bit of Serbia.  The Balkan mountains in turn do almost meet the lowest part of the arc of mountain ranges that form the Carpathians, but they’re cut off by the Danube.  So… I was right about what direction I was looking but not much else.  Like I say, must get that atlas.  There seem to be mountains in all sorts of unexpected places, as I intend to discuss at a later date…

By way of explanation...

I've been asked to explain myself, and give some sort of justification for this whole blog-writing business, haphazard as it is.  So I've identified three reasons, two of which do me no personal credit whatsoever:

1) Laziness - why write long emails to lots of different people when you can just put a link up on Facebook, or not even notify anyone and just expect people to check back periodically to see what you've been up to. It's this modern ailment of not being bothered to talk to anyone directly, which I'm wholeheartedly embracing.  In my defence, the odds are that the internet in its facilitation of this cold, impersonal communication is really often replacing a sharing of information that never would have occurred, rather than better quality contact.

2) A near-pathological aversion to repetition - I hate repeating myself.  It annoys me.  I remember very clearly a stand-up fight with my mother many years ago over the vacuuming of my bedroom: the hoover hadn't been working very well so although I had done the chore the original goal had not really been fulfilled. Nevertheless I refused to do it again on the basis that I had done what I was asked once already and it was unreasonable to expect me to do it again.  Ok, maybe there was an element of the laziness I just referred to, but for the most part I just couldn't stand the idea of doing the same thing again.

The same applies to conversation, and a consequence of this is that I tend to speak as though people know things that I have never bothered to tell them but did describe with thrilling vivacity to someone else.  They then appear not to appreciate the development of that same theme. So instead of a) having to tell people all the same things about my time in Madrid or b) remember what interesting and different things I've described to each person it's easier just to write a load of stuff down and go from there.

A similar difficulty applies to forming any kind of routine or developing a proper hobby.  It begins to feel boring, repetitive and claustrophobic and I find a new thing to obsess about for a bit.  This is the reason I still can't play the guitar and will never succeed at any competitive sport.

3) Writing makes me think better.  This is a good one, I think, and should help me get more out of this whole foreign travel and work business. 

I did it in previous years, when I was travelling and it was a good way to pass the time, but I don't know if it was (a greater degree of) immaturity or the fact that it was entirely private that made me write this travel diary with even lower editorial standards and an even greater level of self-obsession, along with a lot of the assumptions of familiarity that I mentioned above. 

A public forum, albeit one that few strangers will find or ever bother to read, focusses my ramblings to be a) more succinct and b) less about facile chronological diary entries and more about abstract things that I find interesting.  Additionally, as I articulate my thoughts about things I find more then occurs to me. It also can act as a impetus to continue doing and seeing interesting things, so that I have something to write about.

In that spirit, it's 3.30pm on a Friday so I'm off out to sketch the city, maybe from a terrace, with a caña in hand.  Next blog post is likely to be about Piranesi, engineering and drawing and how they all fit together.  Or potentially Herzog and de Meuron's Caixa Forum building.  Or mountains or the beach.  

Less of an icon - terrace life in Madrid

One of the things I've been enjoying on the few occasions I've managed to sit down and write this blog is the way I start remembering things.  Specifically in articulating what I think about buildings and the city I find myself remembering some of that dearly purchased knowledge that came from four years of architectural study.

A big thing, love it or hate it, in architecture is the concept of the 'iconic' building.  That big, shiny white elephant on the corner that people will travel miles to visit and everyone stops to photograph but that has real meaning to no-one at all because they don't live or work there.  It's not a part of (almost) anyone's daily existence. 

Cities fall over themselves to embrace the Guggenheim effect, while architects chase that big competition win.  Architecture students try to conjure hypothetical landmarks on the street corners of provincial towns, unfettered by either cash flow or gravity but well versed in what makes an 'Icon'.  Engineers are complicit, too, when we award prizes to buildings that we see little merit in beyond the fact that they are bigger and more expensive than the next. 

The elegant little bits of design that sit silent but efficient in the corners of buildings (their very invisibility testament, often, to their ingenuity) are attributed no more praise than the shanty communities that develop unplanned yet seem to function on a basis of community engagement and shared ownership, albeit in the informal market.  These need to be explained and promoted by their creators, as well as watched for and appreciated by building users.  The architectural press, to their credit, has a nice line in appreciation of fine detail (the Detail section of the AJ, particularly, springs to mind as an example) while engineering journals can often veer wildly between incredibly broad-brush and uninformative or offputtingly dry and inaccessible.

As an aside, my brother and I both recently read a great book called Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand, which deals at length with the effective informal administrative arrangements of shanty town communities and the potential of developing world in general.  Different parts of the book, which explores a wide range of topics all running along the lines of 'How do we save the planet?', seem to have relevance to conversations on a regular basis, so we keep referring back to it.  I still harbour some doubts about some of Brand's comments about building without regulation or design in some of these (extremely seismic) areas of the world.  Professional building designers may in the eyes of many be entirely superfluous but there is a critical safety component to what we do.

What was originally going to be a little pre-amble into a description of a nice, low-key square in Madrid has turned into more of a rant than I intended, for which I apologise, and I assure you I have more than my fair share of white elephant photographs. I like those buildings, a lot of the time I'm making my living from those buildings, and I do see the value to our culture of having more criteria than 'Can I eat it, make money from it or live in it?'.  Construction is one of the few areas left that, even with the widespread loss of traditional craftmanship, has a substantial niche for the bespoke.

The problem is that the building of ambitious construction projects in Spain with dodgy financing and even more questionable business plans has been identified as one of the major contributors to the current woes of the country.  One of my colleagues was telling me today about a huge €1.1bn airport in Ciudad Real that was operational for less than three years before going into receivership.  It's one of many examples that I hear about every day, when all the while I'm never far from the marching, shouting indignados on the street outside.  

On a lighter note, and what I was initially planning to write about, the point being that it's not all about the centre of the city, or the big buildings, but really it's all about shoes...

...some time ago now I found myself in the Plaza Dos de Mayo (2nd May Square: named for the same Madrid uprising in 1808 that gives us that day as a holiday here), which is a little way north of the centre of the city.  It seemed to be the heart of a great deal of family and community life - I don't know if it's the weather or just a cultural difference, but children seem to be far more involved in the city here than back in the UK.  Maybe it's something to do with our reservedness and need to have our own gardens, which we then keep our children in rather than letting them share city squares.

Anyway, it was around the time of the San Isidro (patron saint of Madrid) festival, and as I sat drinking coffee in a cafe in the shade the children were running around in traditional outfits, chulapas, that made them look disconcertingly like very small old people.  A number of them were mustachioed.  It seemed like they were having fun.

I was sitting in the square having come up to that part of town in search of a shoe shop I had found written about on the internet - they sell traditional Spanish alpargatas (you know, those rope wedges that occasionally find themselves in fashion) and have done for generations.  I needed to get some, but like a true tourist had fallen foul of the eccentric opening hours operated here.  Of course one should expect a shop to open at quarter to five 'for the afternoon'.  It's telling of the attitude toward time of a nation when they don't have separate words for afternoon and evening.

I bought some.  I had been distracted by the curious phenomenon of Bubble Tea (more on that another day, I'm sure) by the time the shop eventually opened, but a few minutes late I headed back and I found it full.  The proprietor seemed to have a short fuse, and was already at the end of it as a result of two apparently fairly thick English tourist girls so it wasn't quite the idyllic experience I'd been imagining.  Good shoes though.

Sorry, I didn't forget about you. Barajas Airport (the Richard Rogers terminal)

I've been away for two of the six weeks I've not written.  For the rest, well, life in Madrid began to feel like normal life and true to standard form I just didn't quite find the time.  So I've not been to that Piranesi exhibition at the cool Herzog and de Meuron building on the Paseo del Prado that I've been dying to tell you about, and I've not found the time to go exploring the other cities of Spain to tell you about them. I've not even been back to the Palacio de Comunicaciones to try to go up the tower.

I have been back to Casa de Campo for no less than five runs and two picnics.  I also managed to go to Cercedilla (more on that later).  I've just not told you about any of it.

What finally made me write, peculiarly, was this:

As I said, I've been away, and before I left I'd seen the elderflowers in Cercedilla in full flower (like I said, more on that later).  On my way home through the park today I realised that the grass had dried out in the intense heat and that the lavender had flowered.  A sudden overwhelming sense of seasonal change and the passing of time made me feel that the time had come to return to you.  So here I am.

Going away and flying long haul for once gave me the chance to get a good look at Richard Rogers' prizewinning (11th RIBA Stirling Prize) Terminal 4 building at Barajas.  So naturally, perhaps not wisely, in the three hours of my wait I started wandering around the building taking a couple of photos and making notes.  I have had Rogers' book Cities for a Small Country sitting mostly unread on a bookshelf for the best part of a decade, and never visited any of his buildings until late last year, yet now I seem to have inadvertently started collecting them.  The book is only mostly unread because I probably skim-read a couple of chapters to find essay quotes at uni.  Perhaps the time has come to actuallly read it properly.

The first of the Rogers buildings I went to visit as a result of reading Peter Rice's 'An Engineer Imagines' and happening to be in Paris.  Rice devotes a chapter of his book to the Centre Georges Pompidou, and although he had a lively appreciation of the architecture I took from it an engineer's bias: my visit was therefore spent predominantly admiring the ingenuity of the cast steel nodes and lamenting the effect of 40 years on the paint finishes.  Piano and Rogers' exterior servicing concept and flexible internal space (which, from half-remembered architecture lectures, I seem to recall is not generally used particularly flexibly for some reason to do with the deep plan - I don't know) didn't really register particularly strongly.  The views and the strange 'soundscape' artistic installation in the escalator tubes did.  Here is a photo if you can't remember what building I'm on about, along with an image from a totally different building: the tree columns off to one side of the new King's Cross concourse roof in London owe something to Rice's gerberettes, I would say.

Anyway, I digress.  Barajas is a very much newer building than the Pompidou, so the 'high-tech' of Rogers' architecture doesn't really have the same resonance or impact as it might once have done, although it's certainly still there in the shiny ductwork, immaculately detailed cabling and several storey high scrolling digital signs that appear to have no function other than to tell you that you're in Barajas and it has shops.  The atmosphere comes off sort of like Blade Runner, only really clean.

It does have lots of lovely exposed structure, brightly painted to form part of the gate colour coding system to aid way-finding (incidentally, unless it's pretty deeply subconscious I'm not convinced by the system - despite being pre-warned of the system, having read something about it when the building first opened, it still took me until after I'd got to the gate before I'd noticed the graduated rainbow tones of the steelwork that also matched the colour of the signs I'd been following). 

The wavy roof in the main departure hall (i.e. not the bit in the photo) is supported and stabilised by inclined columns that spring off either side of a central concrete elevated walkway and separate to each support two of the undulating roof beams.  These roof beams continue out past the barely-there curtain walled facade with its tension cable mullions and skinny transoms, with another line of support and a modest cantilever outside.  I very much like the structure; it's a large open space so like the great train stations of engineering's Victorian heyday it should and did invite good, regular, expressed structure, with none of those silly room things that architects like so very much that really just get in the way.  Bit light on pubs though, it must be said.

The third Rogers building (or Rogers Stirk Harbour, whatever they're called) that I've collected in under 12 months probably doesn't count.  I walked past the under-construction Tower 3 in Lower Manhattan last week.  It's not that big yet, and I can't honestly say I noticed it.  The nice Irish pub round the corner, on the other hand...

Exploration and assorted scribbles part 2: Spanish curry and a foray into the park

Last week I went out after work on a school night for the first time since I got here.  An English colleague in transit in the opposite direction to me was in town, so after my weekly Spanish lesson (in this session we consolidated the past perfect tense and worked on food vocabulary) I headed out for an evening speaking entirely in English and ultimately a curry.  Integration?  What's that then??

The curry isn't the same though.  Even in what is apparently one of the better Indian restaurants in the city, the food was suspiciously orange in hue, the poppadoms were more like crackers and 'spicy' was just, well, not.  I think I may have to manage my expectations of such things... and continue eating tapas instead.

On the plus side, heading back to the metro I saw the bright lights of the Metropolis building by night at the end of Gran Via (it's a insurance company office building, from 1910 - that's all I know so look it up on Wikipedia like I just did).

Speaking of food (it will keep coming up), I feel it's about time I talk about (second) breakfast.  My brother informed me on arrival that my colleagues would all leave the office at around 11am, to head down to a local bar to drink coffee and eat baritos con tomate, which is essentially bread smeared with tomatoes and olive oil.  I found this unlikely - after all, the working culture to which I am accustomed dictates that you leave the office only if going out on business or to go to lunch.  I was wrong.  It's just not always baritos - the normal mid-morning snack is actually pincho de tortilla, normally accompanied by a substantial piece of bread.  The small of appetite (and non-Spanish) might call such a thing 'lunch'.


So, to the weekend.  I finally ventured into the huge park that has lingered so tantalisingly on the edge of my daily commute, and ran a little loop in the corner of it.  3.5km and I have not even scratched the surface.  It's also an undulating, densely wooded place with lots of secluded corners and little by way of vistas, so I couldn't even see further across it to appreciate its size. 

Great for getting some quiet time away from it all along with your exercise, not so good to wander in by night.  Pretty though, and it's wildness makes a great contrast with the managed prettiness of the Retiro park in the centre.

I look forward to my next run. It's flatter than home too.

Exploration and assorted scribbles part 1: Salamanca

Despite having three times as much time this week as last, my exploration has been disjointed, aimless and random, so this is broadly the structure I intend to adopt while telling you about it.  The intention has been to tread the streets with a vague destination in mind, and in so doing to build up my mental map of the city.  When travelling underground, as I have been when time has been limited, you discover distinct locales but never the spatial relationships between them - this is what I've sought to rectify.

Early in the week, possibly on Tuesday, I left the office at lunchtime and proceeded to explore the streets around my office.  The district of Salamanca is a wealthy place full of designer outlets and sharp suits, largely built in the 19th century, with a large degree of homogeneity in the building stock.  A typical street looks like this - rows of cars, lines of small trees, street level restaurants and shops and flats or offices above.  Save for the occasional enclosed balcony it could also be any district of the same period in Europe.

What really distinguishes one from another, I've begun to notice, is the varying intricacies of the ironwork on the building.  I love the detail, and the variation - it's such an expression of craft, and yet another one of those skills that will only exist now, if at all, in niche artesanal workshops. I know that modern building has other things to recommend it; not least modern materials, fitness for modern purpose and decent wages for those constructing the things which make similar details now both superfluous and unaffordable. It still just makes me sad to contemplate.

This also brings us back to Cibeles.  I can't believe I didn't notice and therefore didn't mention the entrance canopy when I wrote about the Palacio de Comunicaciones last week.  That is one hell of a light fitting.

Also have a look at the support for these lights in the side entrance colonnade.  Again I didn't initially notice this - but now it's a favourite feature.

More in a bit.