Architecture & Urban Planning Pilgrimage

I'm planning my first architecture & urban planning pilgrimage for the spring and summer of 2010.

First stop, my hometown: San Diego, CA.

Next on the itinerary is the place where I fell in Love...with urban planning: New York

Other cities on the list: London, Paris, Granada, Hong Kong, Munich...more to come (even small cities will be explored)!

For Calatrava Architecture is...

Lots of fun facts in this New Yorker, Sep. 2008...I feel like a kid in a candy store, wanting to taste (read & share) everything...

Santiago Calatrava, one of the great Starchitects of our time on architecture: "You can penetrate architecture, you can enter into it...This room is part of ourselves in this moment. I think it is important to build for people, and to deliver this message of hope: through good construction and a certain sense of progression, a better understanding of each other can be achieved. All those things, in modesty, are what I have tried to convey."

Calatrava on building in marginal, industrial districts: "When you work in those places, you have to do very strong gestures. If you make a shy building, no one will go there."

Shoe History Facts

Still going through the New Yorker's and I came across an article on women's obsession with shoes by Patricia Marx. Never heard of such a thing...LOL...so I thought I would see what it had to say, the facts fascinated me the most.

1. "Freud believed that for many men, shoes represent female genitalia."

2. "High heels weren't always a girl thing. In the 1500s, the riding shoes of French noblemen [had] raised heels so that their feet stayed put in the stirrups."

3. "Short King Louis XiV wore shoes with 6-inch red-painted heels (often embellished with scenes of military victories) and decreed that only members of his court could wear similar ones."

Patricia Marx, "Sole Sisters," The New Yorker, September 2008

Must go: BMW Welt in Munich

Must add the BMW Welt in Munich designed by Wolf D. Prix to my Architecture and Urban Planning Pilgrimage itinerary. It's a cyclone- shape that looks a lot like a wave...I can't wait!

Diane von Furstenbrg & American Express Circa 2008

I'm going through my old New Yorker's that I know it hard to admit, I feel a bit guilty...it's bad, but that's a whole other story...point is that I loved the idea of the American Express card "follow your own style" advertising campaign.

In one of the September 2008 issues I saw an ad that was highlighting fashion icon, Diane von Furstenberg, apparently she likes hiking and she didn't always feel comfortable with her curly hair (now she does...yay), but my favorite fun facts that she points out in the American Express fill-in-the-blank questionnaire are, and I quote: "Fashionably late is being on time" and "Sexy is liking who you are" (both Diane von Furstenberg).