Sunday: November 2nd

Parc de la Villette: Bernard Tschumi
A desolate factory building: Renzo Piano
Communist Party Headquarters: Oscar Niemeyer
Rue de Meaux Housing: Renzo Piano

This was our last day of Fall break. Our flight was at 9:55 pm out of Paris, so we had from 8 am to 4 pm to see what we had left to see.

Parc de la Villette was my favorite part of this day. It was the first thing we saw in the morning and it was worth it. Tschumi, an architect, designed the landscape and the follies that are placed in it. The landscape pushes and pulls the ground. The 30 or so follies are red structures that he places randomly around the park. These structures plop down anywhere, right in front of other buildings. I thought to not care about the existing buildings on the site was interesting. There were images of fake cows. The best part about the park was that it was used to its max. Every field had people playing soccer on it.

Skipping to Piano’s housing. It was locked, so Matt and I could not get in. When we were peeking through the gate a guy that spoke English who lived there asked us if we wanted to go in. Then he gave us a tour and described what it was like to live there. It was literally a forest in the center, surrounded by housing.

At 4 pm, we waited for a half hour for the third person to show up. We took the metro for an hour to the bus to take us to the airport. The bus ride was an hour and a half. Our flight was delayed 40 minutes. Long story short, we landed in Pisa at 12:30 am with no transportation back to Florence. We were told there would be a bus, but that took two hours to arrive. I found a park bench, then the bus came and I stood for an hour and a half because it was packed with other students returning to Florence. I arrived at the villa at 4 am last night, 12 hours for an 1.5 hour Ryanair flight.