Safe to say that by now I am no longer jet lagged and fully adjusted to the time zone. Also, I now know the basic words and phrases that are crucial to know when navigating around Germany, such as hello, thank you, please, you are welcome, water, bathroom, and much more. I also have gotten more comfortable with and adjusted to the German culture as well as Berlin public transportation. With all the cool adventures we have been on the first two weeks, my feet were all worn out and I was ready to sit down. Luckily, this was what the third week was all about, sitting and crunching down on our project. Since this abroad journey also included school credits, some of the time had to be devoted to school and not just walking around and exploring. Well, this is what the third week here was strictly devoted to.
Since we are landscape architects, our schoolwork consisted of a studio project. We were given a specific site in Berlin and were asked to redesign it with a specific task in mind; storm water management. Rainfall in Berlin is tremendously high compared to rainfall in New Jersey, so storm water management practices are crucial to implement when designing in Berlin. We were also given the challenge to make it a space for the people as well.
The project took place at a radio broadcasting station called RBB in Berlin. The design of the building and the interior is very new and modern. However, the outside space is slacking. All there is now is a circle of grass with a few sad benches and trees. The space is not ideal or attractive to the eye at all. No one is out there ever utilizing the space and unfortunately, I don’t blame them, I wouldn’t be either. This space has so much opportunity to be able to become a grand space, and thus is the reason why we were there for. The first day of the project we went to the site and collected a bunch of necessary data and met with the students from the Technical University of Berlin, which was our partner school for this project. We divided into groups and from there began our project. Here is pictures of what the site looked like.
Monday through Friday was strictly devoted to getting studio time and working on our projects. Even though we sat on a desk all day instead of walking all around Berlin, this week was by far the most exhausting. My brain was fried by the end of it. On Monday we basically discussed in our group what our design was going to look like and Tuesday we worked on curating it to the site itself. On Wednesday we got critiqued on our work so for Thursday and Friday we could fix our errors and submit our final design. I was pretty impressed with my design in the end and was very happy with how it came out. Even though I was mentally drained, I still had enough energy to be able to celebrate when this week was all over. I celebrated this long exhausting week the same as any other German would, with beer. Overall, this week taught me a lot, especially when it comes with designing using the metric system. That is something I never had to do before but definitely should learn. Here are pictures of my final design.
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