January 30-31, 2009

went on an overnight field trip to Urbino with my Architecture in Context class. We had to catch a bus at the Santa Maria Novella train station (literally five minutes from where I live) at 6:45 in the morning. That wasn't a whole lot of fun, but the trip to Urbino took about three hours so we were able to nap some. Urbino is this little fortress town up in the mountains of Italy. We had to drive over snowy mountains to get there. The city is completely walled in, and only 4,000 non-students live within the city walls. The University of Urbino has a large influence in the city. They have dorms right outside the walls and several different schools of study within the walls. Friday night, we stayed in the dorms. When we got to Urbino, we had some free time to wander and find some food. Then we met to see a museum. I have no idea what the museum was called, but the architecture of the place was as much part of the exhibit as the paintings and couple of sculptures it housed. When we finished looking at the artwork, we went down in the basement. The basement was pretty much untouched (except for one creepy room with these projections on the walls and weird music playing) so it was like exploring ancient ruins or something. The rooms all connected really strangely as if twelve different architects hollowed out different parts of the mountain and then realized they all needed to be connected. Most of the rooms had what looked like the remains of some sort of rainwater collection system. One rooms overlooked the bottom of a well so we could see all the coins people had thrown down there. Although where we entered, the basement was underground, when we walked to the other end, we were looking out windows several stories in the air; I guess cuz it was built on a mountain. It was really neat.
After the museum we were on our own for lunch, and then we went to the dorms. After being assigned rooms, we got a tour of all the dorms. None of the dorms were what we would consider traditional. At first, they seemed similar to the buildings at UMass Dartmouth because they were all made of concrete in sort of abstract rectilinear forms, but once we got to go inside and explore them, I realized they're way cooler than UMass. The dorms we stayed in were singles that all opened to outside. Since everything in Urbino is on a hill, there were walkways connecting the rooms, but you always had to go in the opposite direction to get where you wanted, which was kind of annoying. For instance to go up, you had to go down first, or to go right you had to go left. The other dorms weren't as confusing. A common theme in all of the dorm buildings as well as in each individual room was the idea of rooms opening up to rooms above and below. One of the rooms we got to see had a living room that was about two or two and half stories tall. You walked in halfway up and could go down to the living room and some of the bedrooms or up to a balcony and the rest of the bedrooms. All the dorms had access to some sort of green space. There were roof terraces all over the place. It was an adventure trying to figure out how to get into each space because they were so three-dimensional, and sometimes you could see one from another but had to go to the other side of the building to get onto it. There were a few lecture halls mixed in with the dorms as well as a cafeteria, but it was closed for maintenance.
After we had seen all the dorms and played on just about every roof terrace we could find, Franco (our teacher) took us back into Urbino to eat dinner at one of the University's cafeterias. It only cost 4 euro to get a large roll, a first course, a second course, a side dish, and two pieces of fruit. For the first course, I chose the pasta with pesto sauce. I got an omelet as the second course. I think it was supposed to come with meat, but I didn't get that. I had thought that the meat alone was the second dish and the omelet was the side dish, so I wound up without a side dish, but I still had plenty of food. While at the dorms, one of the students had told us where the night life is, so after dinner we headed to the pub he had told us about. We had a few drinks with Franco and played some foosball. Two Italian kids came along and completely whipped the butts of the Americans playing. After Franco and most of our class left the pub, some of us went to out with the two Italians, Paolo and Simone. They took us to another pub that had a big room in the back for dancing. We didn't stay there for long, because Paolo wanted to take us a big club that all the Urbino kids go to. We had to walk so far to get there. We went outside the city walls to an area that actually looked pretty modern. Just when we were starting to get sketched out and wonder if it hadn't been such a good idea to trust Paolo (even though there were 8 of us, 6 of whom were boys, and only one of him), we reached a little strip mall. It was really small and unremarkable. We couldn't see how a club could be located there, but as we walked around the back, kids started appearing out of nowhere. It was like something out of a movie. Clusters of college-aged kids just popped out of the darkness. The club wound up being in the back underneath the strip mall and it was actually really cool with lots of European techno music. Paolo got us in for free. It was fairly crowded while we were there, but when we left (which was probably just after 2), people started pouring in. I was amazed that the busiest time is when I would expect most places to be closing, especially in a small place like Urbino.
Saturday we got free breakfast at the dorms and then went into the city to visit some of the buildings restored or designed by Giancarlo de Carlo, who played a large part in making Urbnio look the way it does today. We saw a public library and a former convent and the schools of the University of Urbino. The first one we saw was really cool. I think it was the school of education, but it had this big auditorium in the middle that could be expanded by joining it with the lecture halls above. There were I think three lecture halls above with wooden panels along one side that could be opened so that the lecture halls looked down on the auditorium. There were also louvres in the ceiling that could be opened so that light could pour in from the skylight above. After seeing all the schools, we got to wander on our own again before heading back to Florence.