English Countryside--Kiplin Hall!

Friday
Friday consisted of us traveling to Kiplin hall, about four hours north of London. The drive was gorgeous. We lucked out and had great weather, the sunniest day so far in England. It did bother us though that we were trapped in the car, but it at least made for picturesque views. We had a beautiful sunset once we reached Kiplin which set well over the lake on our property. The grounds to the estate are unbelievable. Its almost like its out of a novel. We didn’t explore much because we knew we had an empty pantry so we set out to buy groceries.

The grocery store is about twenty minutes away but it was worth the drive. I bought a week worth of food for 25 pounds, which is about 40 dollars. The only pain was that they charge for bags and I didn’t know that until I finished paying. Most of us didn’t know so we had to individually load all of our groceries into our van. Thankfully we have a big trunk.

We went back to our house and made dinner. We got settled in the place after we got a tour from the groundskeeper. The place is an old carriage house that is recently renovated. Its an L shaped building with a courtyard facing the lake. On the ground level, we have a library (our tv room), a kitchen, a dining room, our studio (which is a big room with four tables), and a guest bedroom. Upstairs there are three bedrooms, two bedrooms for the four girls and one large bedroom, which is more like a loft, for the four guys. DuPuy has his own entrance to his apartment on the ground level, but right now his heat is broken so he sleeping in the guest bedroom.

I am particularly happy with the living conditions. The rooms are spacious. We have all new furniture all of which is from IKEA. The loft is the coolest room in the house so I’m happy to be sleeping there. It is also the warmest. Our first night we had to learn the hard way about our heating system. Even though we had the warmest room, the entire house dropped down to about 7 Celsius and was freezing. We found out that the heat was circuited to drop down so low. Obviously we changed that immediately.

We are going to do a video of our house and the grounds once our internet is working and we will put it on youtube.


Saturday

We spent the day in Richmond scouting out sites for our studio project. We explored the very cool, medieval city of Richmond. We also checked out Easby Abbey, an old ruin from the sixteenth century. Very cool. It was a very relaxing day.


Sunday

We went to Durham. Left about 10:30 am. Took about an hour to get there. The city is beautiful. It reminded me of a British Siena minus the huge plaza. We thought about looking around for sites but we decided to stick with Richmond as the location of our main site.

We broke into two groups and went to coffee shops to use the internet. We were online for about an hour before we met up with DuPuy. It is kind of annoying that we need to depend on coffee shops to use the internet. I am looking forward to when the internet is fixed at Kiplin. I made a blog for the group so hopefully we will use that soon. Our name is British Blitzkrieg. Hopefully no brits will find that offensive.

After surfing the web, we explored the historic part of the city. The atmosphere is very quaint. There old buildings that date back as early as the eleventh century. It is a typical medieval city with extremely narrow streets, with buildings about three stories high, built in a regional style that radiate out from a central square. There are two major buildings within the historic city, the castle and the cathedral.

The castle was built in 1070 and is now used by Durham University. About 150 students live there. It’s basically their version of Stamp with residence halls minus the fact that it is a castle. We went on about an hour tour given to us by a student attending the university. She did a very good job and DuPuy made sure to tell her multiple times about how much he liked it. It made me think of Carolina who gave tour guides in Florence. It seems like a great job to have. You get to talk for an hour and be an expert about something interesting. Then you get paid. Wherever I live next, I might look into giving tours for a historic building in the area.

The castle looked very stereotypical, like what a kindergartener would draw as a castle. The crenellations are probably the biggest reason. We toured the building and became very jealous of the students who live there. It’s almost unbelievable that students get to study in such a magnificent place.

We also visited the stunning Durham Cathedral, which happens to be Dupuy’s favorite cathedral (which is something to say considering he’s been to hundreds). It is built on a cliff so that the westward face, the main entrance, is inaccessible. It makes for a dramatic view. This forces the entrance to be on the sides. The things that are most noticeable once you enter are the huge columns and the dramatic light let in through the clerestory. The columns made the building feel heavy. Every other column is either inscribed or painted which makes for an interesting perspective because it distorts the rhythm of the columns, which is typically consistent. The light was incredible. The orientation allows for light to enter through the clerestory and it reflects well off of the vaults. Both sides have large rose windows. There is noticeably more fenestration (a characteristic of English Cathedrals) than the cathedrals we visited in France.

We stayed for evensong, which is a shortened mass free to the public that runs about thirty minutes long. It combines two choirs together, the men’s and boy’s choir and they sing hymns. It is nice to hear both voices together. We also went to evensong at Westminster Abbey and were able to sit much closer to the choir. This time we sat kind of far away from the choir in the regular pews. I prefer to sit closer because it was much more engaging. Nonetheless, it is a great chance to spend time in the cathedral for free listening to beautiful music.

We were only five deep when we left the cathedral to come home. Sara, Emma and Jesse left early to make dinner for us. They made thai chicken stew, or at least that is my interpretation of the name of the dish. Needless to say, it was delicious. I had two servings. We had a good conversation with DuPuy. We are learning a lot about his insight and his personal life, which adds another layer to this trip that makes it so worthwhile. The boys cleaned up after we ate a tasty apple crisp. We are going to try to have group meals every Sunday. I imagine that the girls will remain the cooks and the boys will continue to clean up. Otherwise dinner will be chili, instant mashed potatoes, frankfurts and canned corn.

Post dinner plans consisted of people splitting up and getting on with their personal endeavors. Some laundry was done. People cleaned their rooms. I read our tech homework, which was very uninteresting (thermal conditions of various building materials). There was a good amount conservation tonight about our daily schedule. We will have tech every morning 10-11. He will teach from Bovill’s slides. He has said repeatedly that he wants it to be interactive so I hope that this means that we will learn this material much better than we do in a lecture setting. We will have studio following tech at 1 and that will go until 5. Ideally we will have it four days a week and split the week up with a field trip for our history class. Weekends will consist of us traveling to nearby sites like we did this weekend (Richmond and Durham). The schedule sounds ideal to me. We maintain this until the end of the month.

I am now preparing for bed, at 11 at night. In fact, I have been ready for bed since ten but I am dragging this out by writing this journal. I like getting tired early; it’s a change of pace from previous schedules. There might even be a chance that we will get eight hours of sleep a night. Can you believe it? I almost can’t. It sounds too good to be true.
Tomorrow we will go to Richmond to pick our site. I have a site in mind. I want to do an infill project that will tear down an existing restaurant and build a mixed-use building with retail on the bottom and a bed & breakfast above. It terminates the view one of the streets off the main square. The street splits and the site is right at the fork. It will cover tectonics, urban issues and adaptive reuse.

Our assignment was given to us rather impromptu. We scouted out potential sites for the group but it now turns out that the sites we found are candidates for our personal sites. We make all the decisions from deciding the site and determining the program. I want to do something simple programmatically so I am learning towards mixed use. I feel like I have done quite a few celebratory buildings and it will be good to do something more discreet. I found a few sites that need work on them but only really found one that fits the urban description that I am looking for. I want a site is located within the city medieval fabric that will require an understanding of the vernacular style and the existing urban conditions. Most of the sites that need help are located on the main road, island buildings that are better suited for celebrated buildings. Emma is considering one of these sites for her project. She wants to do some type of tourism information center, because the existing one is not too substantial.
I’m glad that DuPuy is giving us independence in choosing our sites. We each will have very different projects, which will be refreshing. It seems to be more applicable to post-graduation because we have to learn how to develop initiative and the ability to balance pragmatism and idealism within the creativity of design. It will give us a good sense of what we are made of, which is good and bad for obvious reasons. I see more good than bad and what I do see as bad is probably just scary if distilled down. I am curious to see what we can accomplish in a month. I don’t know how to compare consecutive design with the format we design at in Maryland. I imagine that we will have good results. We are removing so many unhealthy variables that it almost has to be better.

OK I have to go to bed. I will plenty of time to write tomorrow. I am the first to go at 1pm tomorrow and the final crit is at 4:30. I will most likely go to ‘the station’ and use the internet and post this! I can’t wait until we have internet.