Day in Roubaix

After the trips to London and the Louvre, the last week has been primarily about rest and preparation for the coming classes. For the next three months we will be taking four classes essentially, a studio with the French students, a travel seminar with Professor Gleye, a seminar taught by a French professor, and a French language immersion class provided by the school. The French class is divided into two groups based on relative knowledge of the language (relative to what, i don't know). I am in the group one would consider to be more advanced (my friend Ari, who has tremendously greater grasp of the language, is in this group as well). I suppose since the vast majority of the students here have absolutely no experience with French, anyone with any language experience may qualify for the slightly more advanced class (I took two years of German in highschool). Anyway, we got our own room in the school to conduct our NDSU class business and found the cafeteria facilities. Next week we have an urban design charette with the students from Lille and some students from England; that should be interesting. I also started planning out my remaining trips, as I have less time to travel than I previously expected. I hope to travel to Barcelona, Vienna, and Normandy before the end of this trip. I also plan to spend spring break (which is in late April for us) in Ireland. This also excludes the various class trips we will be taking.

Today we took a tour of a city in the Lille metro area, Roubaix. It became even more clear that we are on the boarder of Belgium, as almost all of the buildings were built with brick rather than stone. We saw a lot of great industrial era architecture. The two primary buildings we visited were adaptive reuse museums that used to be a community bath house and a textile drying facility. Granted, not all old buildings can be turned into museums, or we'll eventually end up with nothing but museums. I shudder to think of the day when we create the first museum of a museum. I digress. My favorite was the La Piscine Museum, which used to be the community bath house and swimming pool, back in the late 1920's. It was decommissioned in the 1980's but was, as I said, turned into a museum. I suppose its not a very successful as a museum, as the building itself was infinitely more interesting than the art in it, which by my standards (I've been to the Louvre) was still pretty good art.

Tomorrow I will be traveling to Brussels. I will hopefully get to see the home and studio of Victor Horta, a man who's art nouveau prowess is second only to Antoni Gaudi. I would also like to see the Brussels Museum of Musical Instruments, another fantastic art nouveau building.

Pictures of Roubaix to follow soon.