The Adriatic and the Lavender Palace.

The view from our balcony

Thursday we got down to business. My group met in the morning and talked about our site analysis so far, where we are and where we want to get to by the end of the day. There is a major conference happening at the hospital and we were invited to come to as many of the talks as we wanted. Only a few said they would be in English so we went to those in the morning.
Unfortunately I am really running low on clean clothes, the only unsoiled pieces I could wear to this conference of very respectable psychiatrists were my work Carhartts and my last clean tank top. Luckily a nice scarf can dress up almost any outfit enough to sit in the back of an auditorium. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get much out of the talks, they were all in Croatian, some with English powerpoints going on in the background, and once they got into cognitive connections I got pretty lost.

After the talks my group walked through the site again, trying to pick up on anything we'd missed the last time. It's amazing how much one can miss the first time through. After we had a day to process and come back we saw twice as much as the first time, made more notes and corrections and figured out the direction we want to go in for the site analysis

Kisses from the neighbors

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That afternoon we decided to take advantage of the beautiful afternoon and took a break for swimming. We walked in the opposite direction from Rab down to the other bay nearby. It's a big sandy beach, with boats tied to docks on one side. We walked around to the docks so we could jump in the water. 

we went swimming off that dock in the distance.

The water is amazing, all the locals stopped swimming in early September and thought we were crazy for getting in this late in the year, but it was still at least 75 degrees in most places. It's crystal clear and we could see little schools of fish swimming around us. Luckily no sharks. The water is also very salty and I could float without having to try at all, just lay back in the water and drift under the sunshine.

I spent about a half hour in the water but then the breeze picked up and the sun started to get low over the hills so we got out, dried off and went to a cafe in Kampor. There I discovered the magnificence that is cappachino. At the cafe there were a few salty old Austrian vacationer/sailors, already deep into a few glasses of beer that kept us laughing until we got too cold and walked back to the apartments. 

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The next few days were much the same. Site analysis is hard work but there is only so much useful information you can glean from observation alone. We don't have blueprints or utility maps of the hospital. We created maps for sun/shade, wind, weather, soil quality, views into and out of the site, elevation change, emotive mapping and behavioral mapping of what people do in different parts of the site etc. 
But really, that doesn't usually take that long so until Saturday we were able to work and play quite a lot. Going to the beach, walking into Kampor and Rab, and hiking a bit. This part of the project was just as much about meeting our classmates as meeting the site. 

Sunday though the conference ended, which means that we have a space in the hospital to use for our studio. A place called the Lavender Palace.

This hospital is well known not only for its progressive and humane conditions, but also for how much lavender they grow here in fields on the south side of the campus. Primarily it is used for occupational therapy for the patients but everyone here is very proud of it. In the middle of the lavender fields is a building usually used for guests called the Lavender Palace. Painted a lovely light purple, the palace has a ground floor kitchen/bathrooms/ living room and an upstairs bedroom loft with about 9 beds for guests. I have a sneaking suspicion that if we hadn't been able to get our apartments we would have been residents of the Lavender Palace for the duration of our stay. 

We moved on from site analysis to conceptual designs. Where we figure out the big ideas that are the most important for informing the rest of the design. The concept is the spine or the bones of the project upon which everything else rests. It's a pretty important part and we all take it seriously. We worked through the afternoon till dinner, then most of us worked after dinner into the night. 

Now it's early the next morning and back to the Lavender Palace we go!