Pushing the Design, Croatia Ball, and the Big Review.

Life is getting to normal here. We have hit the ground running with a regular albeit fast paced schedule. Most of us get up between 6:00 - 7:00, eat, shower, skype with loved ones and gather up all of our materials for the day. Then we head down to the gate of the Lavender Palace to meet Carl at 8:00 to start the work day.

The Palace is in a separate part of the hospital from the main campus, it's to the south and blocked off by a gate that needs to be kept locked at all times even when people are there.

View to the Lavender Palace from the lavender fields.

We design, get critiques, design some more, visit the site, make more changes, decide the new thing sucks, change it, love it, find out it won't work either, change it again, find a stronger concept, get a critique, have the concept change - all before lunch. Lunch time is questionable but it happens some time in the early afternoon. Then we design, edit change, critique, problem solve, and problem cause our way to dinner. Most days so far we've been able to finish working before 9:00pm or so.

laying out flour to understand the scale of our structures

We presented our concept designs on Tuesday to our fellow students, advisers, some of the staff and to our surprise Vesna! Suddenly our big ideas seemed small and unworthy in front of our client and it added an extra layer of nervousness, but we got through it. All the comments we received were useful for our final plans and we have been incorporating them since.

After the review the advisers went around critiquing our projects and we were excused to go outside while they made notes. Someone brought down one of the orange stress balls given to us at orientation and started throwing it around to play catch. More people wanted to join, someone else found a branch on the ground and voila! Croatia Ball!

A much more fun version of baseball, two teams of dubious loyalty and unsure numbers get on the field that is partially gravel and the rest is lavender.. Anyone can get up to bat and try to make it to the bases marked by things found in studio like a coffee cup or a sketchbook. And an extra challenge added because the stray cats wandering on and off the field. When the batter hits the ball they run in the general direction of first base; stopping wherever they feel like it, sometimes skipping third all together and running across the diamond home.
This game is very fun. I suggest you try it out next time you're stressed or feel like being particularly cool.

Firmly in the grasp of the big push, on Wednesday my team worked into the night until we could barely function enough to draw out boardwalks, stages and gardens anymore. At 11:30pm we packed up and left the Lavender Palace for home. But you see, walking through a psychiatric hospital in the dead of night with a thunder and lightning storm rolling in from the east isn't as soothing as you would expect.
On edge, my group stayed close together and marched as quietly as possible the length of the grounds up to the main gate.
Of course nothing happened except for getting a bit wet when the heavens opened and a warm rain fell down on  us.

Thursday was the same story, we got up early worked out the kinks in our final design, got one last critique and started producing. 
Producing is the part of the process where you're not designing anymore, all of the important decisions are made with very little room for change, here you produce a large plan, sections, section elevations, vignettes and explanatory diagrams. Everything with titles, north arrows etc. Producing always seems like it should go quickly but is some of the most intensive work in the process, somehow pen just can't go to paper as fast as it should. Unless you're Winterbottom who can create a gorgeous plan in about 8.6 seconds.

Our cat at the Lavender Palace, she has 4 adorable babies that she sometimes brings around.

Thursday night we were at the Palace till 2:30am producing producing producing. 

Friday morning started off wet and hasn't let up since. My group slogged down to the Palace and rendered till the very last minute. Drinking copious amounts of caffeine as fast as possible and trying not to let our hands shake too much while drawing out fine ink lines and thick marker washes. Carl called us at 11:30 to ask where we were, then again at 11:33 and again at 11:36. At 11:38 we rolled up our drawings and covered them as best we could to protect them from the rain, ready to present at noon.

The work space just before the presentation

The review went well. At the last minute I had to sprint back down to the Lavender Palace to look for a base map that had disappeared and sprint back up to the presentation space. When it comes to public speaking I have a nervousness cycle that's exhausting. I feel fine up until I walk into the space where I have to talk, then get extremely nervous to the point of feeling faint. Then see my cue, stumble up, am scared about starting to talk then once words come out I'm usually fine. It's a ridiculous and unnecessary emotional roller coaster. 

Now it's all stressed memory haze but I think it went ok.

Now we rest and recoup, but get going again soon. We head to Zadar in the morning!

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!