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 29: Late to Church

Sunday, June 10, 2012 

I got up early this morning (not quite early enough, as it turned out) to go to a mass at the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn (or Tyn Church for short). After seeing the outside and hearing their choir rehearsing, not to mention finding out that Tycho Brahe is buried there (with or without his pet moose), I was determined to go to at least one mass there while in Prague. 

The inside is just as beautiful, if you can believe that, though it's somewhat less understated than the outside. I don't think I've ever seen so much gilt in a single building. 

I remembered the opening time wrong, so I ended up getting there after the gates were shut, but they still let visitors stand in the narthex and watch the mass from there. I did get there in time for the last reading; it was in Czech, of course, so I could only understand a word here and there. The same was true for the following prayers, though I'm familiar enough with the Catholic mass that I could usually identify the prayer by its length, cadence, and position in the mass. 

Unlike the Catholic churches I've been to in the US, they seemed to actually sing all the verses of the hymns. I didn't recognize either of the ones I heard, but they were beautiful. I hummed along with the bass parts anyway. 

After a somewhat less exciting trip to the laundromat, I took the Metro back to the Institute, where I wrote and drew comics all day. It was a good afternoon. 

Day 26: Stitches and Stories

Thursday, June 7, 2012 

Having finished my first tapestry - a sampler of sorts - I started a second one today, a somewhat more ambitious design of stripes and concentric circles. I'm starting to figure this out. 

Our trip after class today was to a textile academy in Prague. Like most buildings in the city, it was tall and narrow, with a staircase looking out onto the roofs of the neighboring buildings. We started in the lace archive. This was a room full of wide, flat drawers full of lace patterns, embroidery, beading, and other fine work with thread. There was even a series of lace designs based on drawings by children, many of which were quite beautiful; the hedgehogs and the giraffe with little lace rosettes for spots were some of my favorites. (Photographs, unfortunately, were not allowed.) 

Some of the most exquisite work in the collection - and, I suspect, in the world - was by the legendary lacemaker Emilie Paličkova. Some of her work is so fine that it hardly looks like fibers anymore. It looks like it was etched on the air, painted by a brush with a single bristle, spun of cobwebs beaded with dew. 

At the academy, we also got to see weaving, printing, a couple of different drawing classes, sculpture, fashion design… They seem to do just about everything with any relation to textiles there. 

The rest of the afternoon was fairly uneventful. I'm trying to use up my remaining food before I buy more, so my lunch was bread, bread, tangerine and bread. After that, I wove some more. For dinner, I got a sausage at one of the booths in Wenceslas Square, with a Toblerone from a nearby potraviny for dessert. I had never tried these segmented, triangular chocolate bars before (do we have them in the US?), but after reading about them in Australian romance novels, I thought I'd give them a try. Quite good. 

The same student who found out about the blind tour and the Choco Cafe (she really does have a gift for finding things) had invited me and another friend along on a ghost tour this evening. We left at dusk and met in one of the busier under-building passages. 

The guide was a young man ("young" meaning perhaps a little older than us) dressed in a long black coat and top hat, with dark circles under his eyes (makeup?) and a vague, haunted expression. 

I'm not sure how much of his demeanor was an act, but it was perfect for the ghost tour. I could never quite place his accent - British? Czech? American? Italian? - and I forgot to ask him where he was from. Every sentence seemed to have an extra little half-syllable hooked onto the end, a bit like Jimmy Derante. ("From here you can see the palaceh… It's not haunted, I just stopped here because I like the vieweh.") 

The first half of the tour took place above ground. Coincidentally, it also took place entirely within my assigned section of the city, which meant that I was at least slightly familiar with all the places we visited. The guide had a substantial collection of the most grim and grisly gruesome legends from Prague - torture, witch burnings, executions, live entombments, a darker version of the clockmaker story... 

He told us a couple dozen of them in the course of the tour. This was only shortly after dark, so the city was still busy, and the touches of melodrama were - intentionally, I think - more funny than creepy. It was a fun way to hear some of the city's darker history and legends. 

The second and best part of the tour, worth the price of admission all by itself, was the tour of the old dungeons and torture chambers beneath the town hall. This is some of the most terrifyingly solid stonework I've seen here - not surprising, considering its function. There are places where you can still see the words scratched by prisoners on the walls. There are no lights down there - or, if there are, they were turned off - so we walked around by the light of lanterns and any flashlights we'd brought with us. (Conveniently, I carry a small one in my backpack all the time.) 

According to the guide, many of the underground rooms used to be the ground floor. Medieval Prague's waste disposal system was, in a word, nonexistent, so garbage and other things gradually built up around the buildings and actually raised the ground level of the city. Like many medieval cities, Prague is largely built on Prague. 

Day 25, Part 2: A Feast for the Tongue

Wednesday, June 6, 2012 (continued) 

After three and a half weeks in Prague, I decided today that I was going to actually eat in a restaurant for once. I hadn't until now. After wandering around the area near Betlemske Náměsti for a while, I finally found a restaurant that had everything I was looking for: Czech food, prices below 200 crowns, and the sound of people quietly enjoying themselves inside. (Several restaurants had passed requirements one and two but failed number three. I don't like eating in noisy places.) 

It was called the Restaurace Pražský most u Valšů. (Address: Betlemska 5.) The interior was decorated in an odd sort of modern Gothic style - chairs in odd geometric shapes made of rough wood and cast iron, dim wall lamps with skeletal figures in drippy metal on top, and so on. (Sadly, all my camera batteries were dead by then.) In contrast to the decoration, they seemed to be playing the Best of Michael Jackson all through dinner. I like Michael Jackson's music, so that was fine, although I would have preferred Czech music. 

(I have yet to hear much Czech music in Prague, with the exception of street musicians. Judging by what the hotels and clubs play, Czech pop music seems to be American pop music a few years behind.) 

There were more tables in the basement, wedged between the giant vats and barrels of brewing equipment, but I ended up at a small table in sight of the front door. I looked over the menu for a while and got dumplings and a pork whatchamacallit stuffed with cheese and mushrooms. 

It was quite possibly the best pork, of any kind, that I have ever eaten. 

After dinner, of course, it was time to find dessert. (This is one thing I've found out while I've been here: I can skip meals without much trouble, but not desserts.) I was already fairly sure where I was going.

The Choco Cafe is a small building on one of the little side streets off of Betlemske Náměsti. A fellow student - who seems to have a gift for finding the most interesting things in Prague - recommended it a few days ago. 

I'm glad she did. 

As this was my first visit, I looked over the menu of various flavor combinations, but chose the simplest (and cheapest) plain chocolate. It came in a teacup - larger than I'd expected - and it was complete bliss. It was like the world's best chocolate bar, melted so that you could drink it.

I ate it in the smallest spoonfuls I could to make it last. 

I also ordered the caramel sherbet, to balance out the chocolate. I wondered about the price of the sherbet at first. It cost more than the chocolate, and the chocolate was… well... the chocolate. It was hard to see how anything could be worth more. 

Until, that is, the sherbet actually arrived.

It was a glistening sculpture of dessert topped with whipped cream and airy slices of cookie. 

Together, chocolate and sherbet created the perfect counterpoint. The light, cold sweetness of the sherbet balanced the rich chocolate and kept it from becoming overwhelming. Then I started combining them in the same spoonful… 

I think I spent most of an hour sitting there with my eyes closed, taking spoon after tiny spoon full of chocolate and sherbet. The French ladies at the next table probably thought I was in some sort of trance. 

I'm not sure they would have been wrong. 

(Note: my camera batteries were still dead, in case you were wondering. These photos were taken on a later visit to the Cafe, as I had to go back again to properly document the experience. The trouble I go to for the sake of completeness...)