Tuesday - Stuttgart

Stuttgart is famous for the Porsche. We started off our day drooling over the Porsche Museum. I didn’t personally care for the aesthetic of the building, but I did find it impressive. Basically the whole museum was lifted off the ground and supported by three “legs”. The cantilevering proved to be a structural feat. I think we all enjoyed getting to look at porsches all morning. They took you through the history of Porsche starting with the first models and ending with the latest and most impressive. I really enjoyed looking at the old ones. It was here, mom and dad, that I picked out your newest toys! Ha!

If seeing all the BMW’s and Porsche’s this trip hasn’t been enough car shopping, we went on over to the Mercedes Benz Museum next. This was definitely my favorite building of the day, and maybe in my top favorites for the trip. It was designed by UN Studio. They focused a lot on circulation. They set up the circulation in a double helix ramping system. Without seeing any diagrams, I was kind of confused about how it all worked, but it was definitely a unique museum experience. I hate going in museums that you have to back track through things to get to something else. They were able to prevent this from happening. They too started with the old(horse and buggy) and ended w/ the new. We didn’t hear as much about the cars on this tour as we did about the architecture. So, there are lots of things about the building I could comment on and that I liked, but I’ll keep it short. As you wound down throughout the helix, they allowed you to preview the next room you would enter. You kept winding down the ramp around the cars on show and then you were able to mingle amongst the cars once you hit the floor. This building has a unique smoke removal system that won them a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. Basically the entire museum circles around a central atrium and has doors that open up to the space in the event of a fire. There is a vent at the top center of the atrium that along with other mechanisms sucks all of the smoke out of the exhibition spaces into the center and creates a “tornado” in order to get the smoke out of the building. Pretty ingenious if you ask me.

The last thing we saw was a double house by Le Corbusier – the Father of Modernism. I’ve seen one of his houses while in France (Villa Savoye for those of you that are architecturally savvy), so I was able to compare this house to that. It is so apparent in his designs and how one would live in these spaces his ideal of a house being a “machine for living”. From the way you open the doors, to the way you sleep, everything makes you feel as if you are operating a machine in order to do daily things. Its not about waking up in your bedroom and moving from one programmed room to the next to do what you need to do in a day. Its about changing the one room to perform each different function. One of the major comparisons I noticed, was that this house was much more compact than Villa Savoye. I don’t know if this has to do with the area in which it is built (this house being in a denser area) or what. Another aspect I thought was interesting were the colors he used. A brown color was on the main wall with a deep red door, and a recessed part of the wall was painted a sky-ish blue. After taking art history and knowing Corbu was an artist himself, this color pallete makes a lot of sense. When painting, warm colors are supposed to be in the foreground while cool colors are to be in the background and fade away. He allows the walls to become not just pretty colors, but a livable piece of art.

CULTURE

Just a couple random things:

During the excursion this week, I’ve realized that not only does our apartment in Berlin do this, but so does every other hotel in Germany. I don’t remember it being like this in Paris/France, so I’m wondering if its just a German thing. Anyway, German linens are different. Instead of sleeping with a fitted sheet, a normal sheet, and then a comforter, they sleep on top of a normal sheet that is tucked in to function as a fitted sheet and then just cover up with a down feather duvet. So, its really like sleeping w/ no sheets. Their pillows aren’t as firm. They are a little bigger but the foam is much looser. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing … just different. And I’m definitely a fan of down feathers!

Also, Europeans, I think by necessity, are much more efficient with their use of space. Its always a surprise how the bathroom is going to be laid out. The weirdest one was in Stuttgart. They had a square shower with a tub that you had to step up and over into. The problem was that the toilet was on one free side of the square and the sink on the other (the other two being in the wall). So their solution was to have two small doors open from the corner. Sometimes the efficiency of space works out better than others. One thing I’ve noticed on the drive is that all these little villages that we pass are still very dense. In America we would have probably taken up 4 times as much land for the same amount of buildings. We just use our space and land differently. I could go into issues of suburban sprawl, but I’ll spare you that.