An Art Nouveau Kinda Week

And that's not an Art Nouveau building...it's the Royal Palace of Brussels, but we will get there.

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Students were assigned into two groups for two different countries for the week long architecture workshop. I was hoping to get into the Copenhagen workshop, but ultimately ended up in the Brussels one. This workshop serves as a milestone for the studying abroad experience and jump-starts the exciting last semester. The goal of the workshop is mainly to learn more about the Art Nouveau movement through on-site sketching and visiting. Our professor planned out the building visits according to the historical timeline: Gothic / Baroque, Neoclassical, Art Nouveau, and modern architecture, which I think it's a very precise and interesting way to learn about a city.

Art Nouveau, a world-wide art style movement in 19th century, influenced almost every single art form, from sculpture, jewelry, painting, furniture, to architecture. Belgium was an early center of such movement. Victor Horta, a very well-known architect in Brussels, designed one of the first art nouveau projects in the world. We visited many of his houses including his museum through out the week, and I found it very interesting to relate his style and influence to Antoni Gaudi's buildings, who was also an Art Nouveau architect (a very unique one that is). Below are some of the Art Nouveau buildings we visited, all of them were initially designed as residential housing, now some of them are abandoned and some are museums and hotels. 

Besides architecture, we also got to experience the food and beer scene in Brussels. They are very proud of their seafood, fine brewed beer and chocolate. A local introduced us the Trappist beer, which has to be brewed in monasteries by monks. I got to try several Trappist beer, including the Westvleteren 12, according to Wikipedia: Westvleteren 12 being considered by some to be the best beer in the world. The beers are not brewed to normal commercial demands but are sold in small quantities weekly from the doors of the monastery itself to individual buyers after reservation only. (First picture from the left is the Westvleteren 12, it's known for a simple bottle with a golden cap that people can keep as a souvenir)
  

On-site sketching is a big part of the trip! Many of my classmates didn't feel comfortable with sketching at the beginning, but by the end of the week I can see they started to develop their own styles and techniques, which is very exciting! Hope to see everyone's development at the end of this semester.