tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62987727854336577732011-07-31T02:14:55.074+02:00This blog records three projects completed by Waqas Jawaid during the summer of 2009: an internship at kilo architectures in Paris, senior thesis research in the Paris suburbs, and travels to various cities for an independent architecture drawing project.Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.comBlogger411100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-70973161054784298352009-09-28T12:28:00.003+02:002009-09-28T16:35:25.162+02:00

"It is the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting."My journey to some of the greatest architectural wonders of the world was similar to the one undertaken by Paulo Coelho's protagonist in The Alchemist. Sitting in summery Princeton I look back on this summer and I know that I discovered as much about myself as I have learned about architecture."He still had a long way

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-23659072860636119462009-09-04T08:34:00.000+02:002009-09-28T16:33:46.406+02:00

24"x36" ~ watercolor on paperFrom a seat in the ruins of an amphitheater, I sat and watched the breathtaking sunset light up the Athenian Acropolis. Drawing this took me back to the A'Level Art days, complete with the standard 300-rupee Winsor and Newton paper, watercolor box, wooden board and masking tape.This was also a way to make an architecture drawing project more interesting because people

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Carthusian Monasteries ~ 40"x54" ~ acrylics & ink on paperMy search for the right Fermata del Autobus was successful.The bus I took left a Florence full of tourists wearing shorts and sneakers, carrying maps, and eating ice cream on sunny pavements. In thirty minutes I arrived at the Certosa del Galluzzo (also called the Certosa di Val d'Ema), a peaceful place made more serene by the fact that no

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Hagia Sophia ~ 18"x24" ~ watercolor on paper

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-47827563611639807272009-08-30T11:18:00.008+02:002009-09-28T16:39:12.753+02:00

18"x24" ~ watercolor on paper"Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light" (Le Corbusier).Almost as a response to the last post with the Parthenon ceiling, here is a drawing of Henri Labrouste's ceiling for the Bibliotheque Nationale (Richelieu) in Paris which was built in the mid-nineteenth century.This library was just minutes from where I interned

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Pantheon ~ charcoal on paper ~ 25"x45""Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep."I was struck in Rome especially by the sheer magnitude and beauty of art that religion has inspired and funded. If religion is a human need then so is art. Le Corbusier's quote above reflects that as well.In this drawing I wanted to capture how

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8.5"x11" ~ pencil on paperThere are certain monuments that are overwhelmingly awe-inspiring because they are not only formally beautiful in the semi-ruined state in which they exist but also embody a strong sense of symbolic and historic meaning. The Colosseum is one of them.

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2009: In a small street in Berlin, I had arrived at the AEG Turbine Factory exactly on time, but a hundred years too late.I have written about the timeless beauty and architectural influence of Peter Behrens's architecture of 1909. Now that Modernism with all its idealism has been put on the shelf alongside other architectural "styles," I wanted to revisit the columns of the building in this

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8.5"x11" ~ watercolor on paper

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-55366590553522044832009-08-24T13:40:00.004+02:002009-08-26T11:32:41.330+02:00

8.5"x11" ~ pastels on paper

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-82737599319718287542009-08-23T09:34:00.047+02:002009-08-29T09:29:58.220+02:00

And then I took the Eurostar to Rome, a city founded by Romulus and Remus in 753 BC, territory of rulers such as Julius Caesar and Mussolini and Gods such as Bacchus and Jesus Christ, the setting for epic drama of love and betrayal, a founding city of the Western civilization and a Mecca of modern-day Christianity.

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Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, a small town near Rome, was more impressive than I had suspected.I dragged myself out of bed before 10am, the time at which the hundreds of residents of my industrial-size hostel were supposed to leave their rooms each day, took the Metro Linea B to the last station, Ribbibia, turned right and went through the pedestrian tunnel, turned right again and tried to enter the

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I call these memory sketches.Caught without a functioning camera at a moment of elation and wonder, faced with a sight so perfect in composition, energy, serenity or movement, I had urge to immortalize what I experienced. So I did these very, very quickly so as not to lose the “impression” of what the moment felt like. These were sketches not meant to be seen by others but I think they are

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İstanbul! Capital of both the Roman and the Ottoman empires, a bridge between Europe and Asia, home to the Hagia Sophia whose sheer elemental force invokes silence, and adorned with exquisite mosques whose call rings through the city five times a day, a city in which extreme opposites coexist, a surreal world, sensuous and sensual, the city of temptation, there is no other word for it.If Athens

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"It was as a grown-up man that I first stood on the hill of the Athenian Acropolis, surrounded by ruined temples, gazing out over the blue sea."Mingled with my happiness was a sense of astonishment that came to me as: so it really is true, what we were taught at school! How shallow, how feeble must have been the belief I had acquired then in the actual truth of what I was being told for me to

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Florence, a city whose size is comparable to the Princeton campus, home to the Medici family, center stage for players such as Michelangelo and Machiavelli, and Galileo and Savonarola, and the birthplace of the Renaissance itself; that is where I headed after Paris.If Paris is an architectural museum, Florence is a tomb. If the streets of Paris are congested, those of Florence seem suffocating.

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-69109913318766757592009-08-07T15:22:00.019+02:002009-08-07T17:33:28.305+02:00

The sun shone warmly on Paris. The very air was saturated with a sense of poignancy. All the sounds of guitarists on bridges and of jazz concerts and of the metro rush combined to form one bitter-sweet harmony which said adieu.Though I already have plans to return in the winter, every moment was full of lasts. It reminded me of the Killers' Exitlude. I would have embedded it here, but youtube.com

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“‘I don’t know whether I shall write. It sometimes seems to me that writing prevents one from living, and that one can express oneself better by acts than words.’“‘Works of art are acts that endure,’ ventured Olivier timidly; but Bernard was not listening.“‘That’s what I admire most of all in Rimbaud—to have preferred life.’”Days have flown by in a flash. I would have liked to write about Nice

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-24602504223376997082009-07-27T11:35:00.007+02:002009-07-27T14:11:13.868+02:00

At the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles, I had a Howard Roark moment.Photo by PictFactory (Creative Commons License)I was at the top of the world. I stood on a thin metal parapet, the landing of a narrow staircase supported on the roof of the building. I clutched the delicate iron framework and could feel the ripple of the heavy concrete mass underneath, and the earth from which it rose. The vast

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-3338439413430777192009-07-22T08:31:00.008+02:002009-08-17T09:37:43.070+02:00

Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-31909569973759244682009-07-17T00:43:00.006+02:002009-07-17T17:35:59.849+02:00

On Tuesday, 14 July 2009, Seung-Jin, Emily, Gary and I celebrated, along with all of Paris, the 220th anniversary of the supremely influential French Revolution.Photo by Seung-jin Ham

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-60585678186510090562009-07-17T00:40:00.005+02:002009-07-17T17:29:09.465+02:00

I awoke from the kind of deep sleep in which you dream of many things, losing all sense of time and place. It was dawn and I was in a small room at an inn in Portbou, Spain.It was Monday now and the next train into France would leave at 9:30am.[to be continued... maybe]

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Barcelona: a city said to have been founded by Hercules 400 years before the building of Rome; Antoni Gaudí’s city; a city brimming with elaborate, vibrant, boisterous Catalonian spirit; and a city in which I knew no one and had no place to stay when I arrived at the train station at 11pm on Saturday night.Getting ThereBarcelona had never been part of my itinerary for this summer. When I found

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-72606617019745931072009-07-16T22:52:00.015+02:002009-07-17T00:12:28.372+02:00

Friday, 1pm: the next train to a small village called Ronchamp was leaving in an hour from the Paris Gare du Nord. I had thirty minutes to pack for that trip, and possibly others.Visiting Le Corbusier’s chapel of Notre Dame du Haut would suffice as justification for a day of unexcused absence from work. I had run into a group of Princeton students on my way back from a shisha place the night

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-73947748464443029412009-07-10T04:18:00.029+02:002009-07-13T20:45:18.273+02:00

In a blog which has to do with Le Corbusier, and which is called works-in-progress, it is fitting to post some sketches from my carnet.I want to get this out of the way before I write something about Ronchamp and Barcelona. Yes, Barcelona!We start with everyday objects. Missing here are the trash can studies. I want to do a whole series on them later on, with some thoughts about the significance

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-13248607276477984922009-07-08T21:53:00.016+02:002009-07-17T00:21:07.683+02:00

Two kinds of people go to Poissy, a small suburban town in the 5th ring of the Paris region: those who live there and those who go to see Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye.By our bewildered looks as we stumbled off the RER A, it was obvious we were part of the latter category. And not just any tourist will make the trip to Poissy to see this modernist house; it is hardly to be found in regular

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Real innovative progress took place in the small industrial towns of Germany, spreading from there to the larger cities, and then to the rest of the world. Stuttgart is one such town.I headed to Stuttgart right after Dessau. Situated on a big hill, Stuttgart is home to the Weissenhof Housing Estate, a model neighborhood where several modernist architects were invited to design workers’ homes in

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Visiting the Dessau Bauhaus building was like going on a pilgrimage.The Bauhaus is omnipresent even in today’s world. When it was forced to shut down by the Nazis and many of the architects emigrated from Germany, the movement found a new home in America and the influence of the philosophy reached New York and Harvard and the rest of the world.The building itself is remarkable in its functional

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The AEG Turbine Factory, designed by Peter Behrens in 1910, is a major crossroads in the history of architecture.The roots of Modernism can be traced to Peter Behrens and the German Werkbund. From 1907 to 1912, Peter Behrens' students and assistants included Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Adolf Meyer, Jean Kramer and Walter Gropius. All of these people were highly influential in charting the

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-8172795299831584142009-07-01T01:39:00.020+02:002009-07-05T12:24:41.561+02:00

Berlin: the setting of immense upheaval and reform in the last century, home to giants such as Peter Behrens and Mies van der Rohe, the last stronghold of the movement that was the Bauhaus, a city bold in its embrace and expression of modernity, the very streets of which exude an understated but distinct elegance in their simplicity. Berlin might not be as “Beaux Arts” pretty as Paris, but there

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-24264563708221875142009-06-25T09:43:00.010+02:002009-07-01T03:08:29.340+02:00

Cities are like oil paintings.They are built over time by the addition of countless layers. There may or may not be a grid, but there is movement and there are centers of focus. Older layers lay the foundation for new developments, yet at times they are scraped off in bold and calculated artistic gestures. The artist sets parameters but also lets the painting take its own course. Sometimes there

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In the 1850s, Baron Haussmann gave Paris the Kärcher treatment, carving wide boulevards through the fabric of the city, and creating diagonals that link key points of interest.The facades along these boulevards were made available to developers who, according to strict guidelines, gave Paris its modern-day identity. I have always been amazed that people actually live in apartments behind these

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There is an obsession in France about the problem of housing the "working class," or poor people. This is strange to someone coming from America, where there is very little recognition of the existence of the homeless. What exists in America though is a heightened awareness of racial equality, so no one group is ever deliberately isolated. Whereas Americans discriminate against the poor people as

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To explain Fête de la Musique to a Princeton student, I would simply have to ask them to imagine Princeton lawnparties taking place on a national scale.At lawnparties different music bands perform at the eating clubs; at the Fête de la Musique, every public square, cafe, museum and bridge in Paris (and in all of France) is animated by bands playing different kinds of music.So on Sunday all of

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-76179972403446549892009-06-15T00:41:00.030+02:002009-07-01T03:11:22.014+02:00

On Saturday, I visited Clichy-sous-Bois, the infamous Paris suburb where the 2005 France riots started.In November 2005 two Muslim teenagers got electrocuted in a power substation in Clichy-sous-Bois while trying to flee from pursuing police. Ten days of violence ensued, in which thousands of cars were burnt in the Paris metropolis, and all over France.The police steer clear of Clichy-sous-Bois,

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In the last three days, I started work at kilo, visited Le Corbusier’s Pavilion Swisse, went on a picnic with people at work, bought gorceries and the pass Navigo, and met up with some old friends. Yet while I am very much in Paris now, my heart is still in New York.Le Corbusier's Pavilion Swisse at the Cite UniversitaireThursday was my first day at work. The people at kilo architectures are very

Waqas Jawaidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08460302677183668267noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6298772785433657773.post-49371725927007694532009-06-03T15:59:00.011+02:002009-07-01T03:12:53.734+02:00

I am back at the Cité Universitaire campus after less than a year. Last time, I was here for 17 days. And yet everything is so familiar that moving in feels almost like returning to Princeton after a break.British Airways and London Heathrow was a combination of nice and not-so-nice—nice because some of the flight attendants were very kind and friendly, and a little awkward because BA and the

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I am packing every single thing in A165 Forbes. Although most of my life over the last year is already neatly packed into labelled boxes, its difficult to store the artwork. I can get rid of many things but it is difficult to throw away art - there is something sacred about it. On Tuesday I leave for Paris. I will leave this room exactly as I found it many months ago, with no trace of my

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Starting June 4th 2009, I will be working as an intern architect at kilo architectures which is located on Rue Réaumur in Paris. I am looking forward to the opportunity of working for founding partner Linna Choi.I am a little intimidated. The working hours are 9am-7pm with a one-hour break. The last time I "worked" outside Princeton was at the Actors Theater Workshop in New York City. That was an

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For my senior thesis at Princeton, I will study how the modern housing projects in the Paris suburbs are linked to the marginalization of the metropolitan area's immigrant population. This summer I will visit the suburbs of Paris to conduct preliminary research.In September 2005, massive riots broke out all over France. Ten days of severe unrest were sparked by an incident in which two African

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The two-dimensional surface has always served as a testing ground for architectural concepts such as composition, volume, and the interplay of light and shadow. The same surface also serves a second important function: that of recording, interpreting and disseminating the object and spatial qualities of architecture.While Le Corbusier’s work is the epitome of the role of sketch as creative

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