Day 30: Prague's School of Design

Monday, June 11, 2012 

Rehearsals start today back at home! I must find a way to listen to the music online, so I'll know what to sing when I get back. 

After this morning's fibers class, we took a trip to the design academy in Prague. 

Full name: Vysoká Škola Uměleckoprůmyslová v Praze. 

Pronunciation: VEE-so-kaa SHKO-la OOM-ye-lets-ko-pru-mi-slo-vaa v' PRA-zeh. 

In English: the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design, Prague. 

This is sort of the equivalent of the School of Design at NC State - they have industrial design, architecture, illustration, animation, fashion, and all sorts of other things. Even the bus shelter outside was interestingly designed. 

When we stepped through the front door, we were greeted (confronted?) by an enormous statue with wings and no head. 

I'm not sure who she was, but she was magnificent, though she'd obviously seen better days. 

The building seemed to be centered around a tall, open stairwell... 

One of our teachers had brought along a friend who was an architect; she pointed out the influences from several other cultures in the architecture of the building. It was fascinating, though I've forgotten most of the more technical terms by now. 

The building also has several courtyards. The largest one was so narrow, and the windowsills so deep, that it was impossible to see the floor of the courtyard from the upper windows. 

It was easy to imagine that the yellow-walled pit simply continued down to the center of the earth. 

Another smaller courtyard was covered with netting at the top... 

...On which someone had dropped a glass bottle. It was just hanging there, suspended in midair several stories above the ground. 

In some cases, the things that students had left on the courtyard windows were more interesting than the views outside. 

Around the courtyards and stairwell were long, open hallways full of sunlight, boxes, and old furniture. The rooms of the academy were connected to these by sets of tall double doors. Today, the academy was having an open house, so the building had been shifted to exhibition mode and opened to the public. The rooms held displays of various kinds of work. 

The first room we went into was an exhibition of glassware and industrial design. My favorite thing was this set of folding paper tableware: 

There were many other rooms with industrial design exhibits. Some of the highlights: 

A stool with a cushion woven out of what felt like rubber bands. 

A set of leather... coffeepot-cozies? ...complete with holders for one or two cups each. 

There had to be glass somewhere. This is Prague, after all. 

These glass vases were huge - bigger than my head - and as irregular as giant soap bubbles. 

There was a whole room full of pottery. Each set of bowls or mugs or tea apparatus had a spotlight on it; the rest of the room was dark. 

One room had several bathroom sets made of various found objects (many of them antiques) fastened to poles. 

No two were the same. 

The view from the windows on this side of the building was also rather spectacular. 

Another room was full of sets of clothing accessories, pinned to white ovals hanging from the ceiling. 

Sleevebows: definitely the best way I've seen to display cufflinks. 

Many of the ovals had matching sets of earrings and... things to drape around the neck (Boas? Ruffs? Stoles? I'm not sure what the correct term is).  

As always, I found myself fascinated by places where visitors obviously weren't supposed to go. 

I didn't go in any of these rooms, but I peeked through plenty of open doorways. 

Several rooms were full of graphic design - posters and book covers and so on. I don't usually like to take photographs of two-dimensional work (though much of it was quite beautiful), but I had to get a picture of this set of evaporating architecture.  

 

Yet another room was full of jewelry. It was all fascinating, all for sale, and all far beyond my price range.  

I would definitely have gotten one of these birds or chameleons if they'd been a little cheaper. As it was, I had to be content with a photograph. 

This entire set of bracelets, earrings, and necklaces was made out of tiny interlocked springs. 

A screen in the jewelry room was showing a series of bizarre stop-motion animations, which would not have translated well to photographs. I assume they would have made more sense if they'd had sound. Or perhaps not. 

In addition to the winged lady, the Academy was full of all sorts of younger sculptures, such as this peanut-shell cat... 

These encased objects... 

These shoes... 

...And this cube full of water. 

This sculpture contained, among other subtly disorienting objects, a few live fish. When I realized they were moving, I took a much closer look at the aquarium; with all the cracks, it looked like the glass was ready to break at any second. I was relieved to find that there was a second layer on the inside, intact and waterproof. 

Other sculptures were simply sitting out in the hallways of the building, with no labels or particular attention paid to their display. I got the impression that they were fixtures of the academy, rather than objects in this particular exhibition. 

A set of gears in many different materials, stuck in the dark corner of a hallway. 

I don't know what this pink creature was, but it (she?) seemed to be laughing, or perhaps singing. I'm not sure. 

This appeared to be a portable tree in a shopping cart. 

We started out as a medium-sized group of students, looking around together, but we gradually split up as different rooms caught our interest. Along with one of the fibers instructors, I was one of the last to leave the academy. There was just too much to look at. 

We walked part of the way back to the Institute together, stopping (as always) to admire interesting architecture on the way. 

In the middle of it, of course, were the gravel-filled gaps of the ever-present cobbled street repairs. 

We split up at the library, after stopping to take another look at the sculpture in the lobby. It's a tall column of stacked books with a hole in one side. 

Look down through the hole... 

...And you find a bottomless well of books. 

This is actually accomplished with a mirror, which is placed on the floor inside the column and kept spotlessly clean. It's incredibly convincing, though. 

And of course, the knowledge and stories inside the books really are things you could dive into forever... 

Day 23: Further Adventures in Baking

Monday, June 4, 2012 

After planning it for weeks, today I finally got everything together that I needed to bake brownies. 

I did have to improvise some of the ingredients based on what is possible to find in Czech grocery stores. I used kakao powder instead of baker's chocolate, got butter in the single package it comes in here (fortunately, it's about the same size as two sticks in the US), and left out the vanilla extract entirely, since as far as I can tell, it does not exist in Prague. 

Fortunately, there was no one else using the Institute's Miniature Kitchen # 3 at the same time, or it might have been hard to find room for everything. 

I was trying to remember how to convert from degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius, so I'd have some idea what temperature to use in a European oven, when the IT expert at the Institute walked in and said he just bakes everything at 170. That seemed worth a try. 

It was a long and nervous half-hour wait before the brownies came out. I thought I'd burned them at first, but it turned out to just be the darker color of the chocolate. 

After another long wait for them to cool, I finally cut out a corner and tasted it... 

Perfection. 

It would have taken me weeks to eat a whole pan of brownies by myself. (Well, one week. Most of a week. Certainly a few days.) Instead, I left a note inviting other people to take one each. 

Four hours later, they were gone. I think that's a good sign. 

Day 15/16/17: His Only Desire

Monday, May 28, 2012 

Today, I ate breakfast before going to the studio to start work on my lace project. I'd finished the sketch yesterday but hadn't had time to start weaving. The project was due Tuesday morning. 

I took a half-hour break to use the restroom and get a sandwich for dinner at the closest affordable place I could find. 

I skipped lunch. 

I had to stop for perhaps another half-hour to ride the Metro back to the Penzion. 

That was all. Other than that, I worked on my lace project all day and all night. I worked in the studio until the Institute closed. I worked in the hotel room until my roommates came back and needed to sleep. I worked on a chair in the hallway outside, clicking away as the late-night wanderers among the students gradually trickled back into their own rooms, expressing surprise and occasionally concern to find me still working at such a late hour. 

I like to listen to music while I work, to occupy the part of my (left) brain that's in charge of distractions. I've found that, after a certain point, it becomes easier to keep focused on a project if I simply listen to the same song over and over again. The song for this project was one by the incomparable Kirsty MacColl (repeated 61 times, according to my laptop). It worked quite well. 

I finished just before dawn (not as late as you might think, since we're quite far north here and the days are a few hours longer than they are back home) and climbed quietly into bed for several hours of deep sleep. I felt like I'd earned it at that point. 

There is a certain fierce joy that comes only from this kind of stubborn, sustained effort. If I tried to do it routinely - or even twice in the same week - I suspect it would kill me; but every once in a while, it becomes necessary to throw all the time and energy I have into a project, casting everything else aside for one unceasing burst of creative work. I love it when it happens. There is nothing quite like it. 

And the result was this: 

So I'm satisfied. 

Day 9: Heaven in a Pancake

Monday, May 21, 2012 

Our first night in the Penzion. There are several loud snores in the room (there are five of us, so statistically, that was almost guaranteed), so I will try to get to sleep as early as possible from now on. It shouldn't be a problem. 

We continued with lacemaking in the Fibers class; having mastered the chain stitch, we now move on to the linen stitch, which requires five hanging pairs of bobbins and one pair of "walking threads" that weave back and forth like a shuttle between them. This is even more fun than before! 

After lunch, I drew comics on my laptop for a while, then went out to take more photographs for tomorrow. We are now focusing on things that remind us of lace, presumably as a precursor to creating the patterns we will eventually be using.

I stopped behind this building, the church-with-houses-wrapped-around-it. I really should learn its name sometime.

There I found a little food stand where a woman was making crepes. They were only 55 crowns (about $3), which was about how much money I had on me at that point. I got a chocolate and butter one and ate it on the steps of the church's back door (see below) while listening to what I'm fairly sure was a choir rehearsing inside. 

Basically, a crepe is a flat pancake filled with heaven and folded into sixths.

It was gone far too soon. I will be going back to this place. 

After that, I wandered around until I got lost, then got out my small map and found that I had circled all the way around the Institute to arrive in Betlémské Náměsti (or Bethlehem Square). This is a nice place with benches, so I went to a little Vietnamese food stand nearby for dinner.

Dinner was spring rolls (they had two kinds; I got the mushroom) and gelato (the tiramisu flavor, which was quite good). Added together, these cost almost exactly as much as the crepe earlier today.

Even spring rolls here are different than they are in the US; thicker, meatier, and full of more savory crunchy bits. Perhaps this is the Czech version of Asian food, as opposed to the American version of Asian food we get in the US. 

Two of the things I've found myself missing the most here are public seating and water fountains. As far as I can tell, Prague has neither. If you want water, you get it from a tap (or, if your tastes run that way, get beer instead); if you want to sit, you go to a park, or you find a convenient ledge or stairway. It's surprising to be so surprised at this. I hadn't realized before how accustomed I am to finding benches and water fountains - free sitting and drinking - in even slightly urbanized areas at home. I've been taking them for granted without realizing. 

The public bathrooms on the sidewalks are another issue entirely. (According to other students, you have to pay to use them, and sometimes you have to pay again so that the people who make their living by occupying them will stand up and get out of your way). Between the various hotels and the Institute, I have not had to use these small and aromatic buildings yet; if possible, I think this is one aspect of Prague's culture that I will be content to miss. 

At another student's suggestion, I walked from the Penzion to the Institute and back today, instead of taking the Metro. This turned out to be more difficult than I expected. Prague is built around the river Vltava; the Old Town, where the Institute is, is right in the middle of a bend in the river. This means that the Old Town is downhill from everything else, which made the walk from the Penzion to the Institute in the morning an easy fifteen-minute stroll. It also means that everything else is uphill from the Old Town, which made the walk from the Institute to the Penzion a half-hour endurance test. It was rather pleasant, though - almost like mountain climbing with different scenery.