11.16.2011

utrecht, amsterdam & rotterdam.

Bonjour!  It's a brisk 2 degrees Celsius here in Paris this morning.  I'm in studio, enjoying a cafe creme, ready to build a site model.  I'm going home in exactly 28 days, but right now, I wanted to share a bit about my trip this past weekend.

I was really excited because I got to go to Holland this weekend!  The real Holland, not the city in Michigan :)  I visited a lot of great Dutch Architecture and my friend Sandra.  Sandra and I worked together on Support Staff at Geneva in the Summer of 2010.  It was such a fun weekend and I'm sooo glad I got to go.

My first stop was Utrecht.  I took a tour of this house: Rietveld's Schroder House.  It's one that we've always talked about in school and I was so excited to see it.  And I wasn't disappointed.  The house is beautiful and pretty ingenious.  The only thing that would have made it better was if I could have sat on the furniture.  A real Red and Blue chair right before my eyes!  Oh and I couldn't take photos indside either :(


I stayed with Sandra and her family in Wilnis, a 30 minute drive from the center of Amsterdam.  On Saturday night Sandra asked me where I wanted to go the next day.  She said we could go anywhere.  So of course, I chose Rotterdam!

I got to see this building, the Kunsthal.  Designed my Rem Koolhaas in 1992, it's awesome.  I learned so much and had a great time exploring with Sandra!


Near by is the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) which we checked out next.  It was a really cool place with a ton of great exhibits on Dutch architecture.  So cool!


It was crazy foggy all day Sunday, which was a bummer because Rotterdam has the largest ports in the world!  But despite the cold and the fog, we enjoyed a nice lunch inside and saw this beautiful bridge.


Monday, I explored Amsterdam.  I went on a free walking tour and learned a lot about the city and got to see a ton too.  It was great.  Especially because I didn't have a ton of time to explore on my own, or a really good map.  And due to my lack of navigational skills, that held me back a bit.



The city was beautiful and definitely somewhere I'd like to visit again.  It was a little overwhelming at first, but the it's such a unique city and I really loved it.


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