Assignment # 4 - Identity Couch

For assignment number four, we were given the task of taking a picture of somebody we saw while we were in London. It had to be someone interesting and with a strong personality. Once we took a picture of this person we found, we were asked to design a couch inspired by this person's identity. I found this couple in the train station that scared me to death, so I decided to use them. This is what I came up with....





This is the lovely couple, with their most dominate feature and characteristics about them that form their identity.



This is the couch I started out with. I loved the shape and the two tall peaks on either side reminded me of two individuals, representing the couple. I also liked the sharp edges and lack of pattern on the cushions. After playing around in Photoshop, I came up with this....



The colors turned out kinda funky. They are actually supposed to be pink, black and red. Now they are blue, light blue, and a turquoise lookin color. Anyways, this is the couch I thought matched the identity of my couple.




This couple made me kind of nervous, so I picked a couch that would make me feel the same way. I made it harsh with the sharp edges and mimicked the man's clothes with the mesh on the cushions. I also incorporated the HIM logo on the three peaks of the couch to represent the girl's shirt. I made the couch black and white because the couple had a serious lack of color and pattern, but they did have several rock band patches that I placed randomly on the cushions. The identity I would give this couple is Harsh, rebellious, and Uncomfortable. Hope you like it!

Kew Gardens

After we went to the Architectural Exhibit we all made our way over to Kew Gardens. The official name is the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. They have specimens of plants from all over the world. They have plants from Cacti to Bonsai Trees. In fact there was even a little Bonsai Tree House. It was way cool.



This is a picture from the top level of the Palm Conservatory. It was gorgeous, but probably the most humid structure I have ever been in. They are constantly misting the palms to reenact the rainforest.




This was one of my favorite places at Kew. It was a green house full of water lillies. Look how huge they are! These are each big enough sit comfortably in!



This is a picture of a cool fountain with lilly pads in front ot the Princess of Wales Royal Conservatory. Corrine had this marvelous idea that we should swim in it, which would immediately get us thrown out, but we were tempted.

Architecture Exhibit

Today we went to the Architectural School in London and got to see all their cool projects and assignments. These students are so creative it is unreal. I can't believe how they can come up with these projects.



This is a picture of me and Whitney inside of a project with white cords and a hallway. It is so cool. The cords were twisted in this design and the walls lit up.



This is just one of the examples of the creative way they presented their architectural documents. I loved how they displayed everything.



This is one of the amazing projects by a student. Can you see the small dark dot on one of the orange levels? That is a representation of a person and this is a model of a futuristic building! Awesome huh?

Isle of Wight

Today was an "On Your Own Day". So we got to decided where we spent our time....so guess where we chose? You guessed it, the BEACH!



This is a poster along the beach walkway. Thought it was worth blogging....



The beach was so nice. There was plenty of sand and people. This is a picture of random people and the sail boats in the distance. British beaches are a lot different than any other beaches I have ever been to. There were several naked children and numerous yelling mothers. I heard the phrase, "go wash off in the sea" a thousand times!



This is just another random picture of the view we had of the beach. That cool chair in the right corner of this picture is what they had all over to lay on. Instead, we brought the sheets off our beds to lay on, rather than our towels.

The London Eye

After we went to Hampton Court today, we decided we would wait until sunset and go on the London Eye, which is a giant Ferris Wheel with little "pods" that you ride in.



Here is a picture of the Eye. It is so huge and over 30 people can fit inside each pod.



Here is a picture from our pod of another pod and the scenery below. This is over the Thames River and you could see all the bridges, boats, and the city lights!




This is Me, Brighton, and Whitney on the Eye. It felt so nice, air conditioned and everything. There is even a cute little bench to sit on and observe. The ride took 30 minutes total.



This is Big Ben from our pod. I always imagined it to be just a big clock tower, but it is a part of a huge and GORGEOUS building.



Long story, short version: We were on the Tube coming home and this guy kept putting his butt up to the glass right next to me. So I kissed it, and Whit captured the magical moment.

Hampton Court

Welcome to Hampton Court! This is one of the various "pleasure palaces" of Henry VIII. Apparently it is his 4th favorite, after Windsor.







This lovely lady was there to greet us as we entered the second courtyard of the palace. They actually had several workers dressed in period clothing, I bet they were dying of heat!



This is a picture of one of the entry ways to the main part of the palace. The fan vaulting is gorgeous!



This is a picture from inside the palace of the King's Bathroom. Pretty nice toilet huh? I like the velvet personally.



This is the ceiling of the entry way of the King's apartments. The painting is breath taking. I was not supposed to take a picture, but I kinda shot a picture as quickly as I could while the guard was not looking. Come on! I could not pass it by!

London at Night

Last week, before our little Amsterdam experience, Brighton, Whit, and I decided we would go out later and take some pictures of the old Architecture of London at night. It was so beautiful!



This is Tower Bridge again, but even more beautiful at night when it is lit up.



This is the Tower of London, which we still haven't visited it yet. This is called the "Queen's Fortress". It is where you can go and see the crown jewels and stuff.



This is a picture of Big Ben at night, and probably my favorite picture I have taken the whole trip. I took it on night vision so that when the cars were wizzing by, even a double decker bus, it left cool streaks of light! Pretty cool eh?

Assignment # 3 - Water Bottle

On the way home from Windsor Castle we chose to complete our assignment of designing a more convenient water bottle. We were on the bumpy train ride the whole time, hence why my bottle looks hairy.

This is a collapsible water bottle. It has rubber on the bottle so it doesn't slide around when it is wet, and it has a rubber handle that can be used as a hook when it is collapsed.

Assignment # 2 - Pattern for Brinton

So our second assignment was to design a pattern that could be made into an area rug. Mind you, my pattern is pretty shabby. I completed it about two in the morning. They had to be inspired by the Museums we visited, so I chose the iron work into he V&A.

Design Center

Today we as a group went to the Design Center. I absolutely loved it! It was one of my favorite experiences dealing with interior design so far. There were tons of show rooms of designers and companies that we got to go walk through. These are just a few things I saw that I liked.

There were 3 domes with 4 floors of show rooms. There is no way we would have visited it all in two hours, but we still ejnoyed all of it!

Another cool thing is how the show rooms would give out samples to us students. We went home with our back packs full of magazines and handouts.

On the Street Where We Lived....For One Terrible Night

So most of you have probably seen my professor's, Darrin is his name, blog. He has an entry called, "On the Street Where We Live". It has pictures of the flat we are staying at in London. It also has cute picture of flower boxes and windows on our street. So his entry inspired me to make an entry about our experience in Amsterdam. The street we stayed on was so dirty and trashy that it was almost commical. So here is details of the place we stayed for one night in the hostel.


This is a window down the street about 20 feet away from the door of our hostel. Gorgeous huh?



This is the door right next to our hostel. Isn't it charming?




Well, hope you enjoyed the street where we lived....for one night!

Amsterdam

Warning: This blog entry is very long. It explains our (Whitney, Brighton, and myself) journey in Amsterdam.

Friday, July 21.
We woke up early this morning in order to catch our Tube ride to Liverpool St. and caught a train to Harwich. It took us 2 hours to get to Hook Van Holland by train, it was a long ride. Once we got to the Hook Van Holland, we got on the cruise ship called the "Stena Line". It had a movie theatre, a gift shop, restaurants, a play area. After we got something quick, but very expensive, to eat, Brighton and Whit took a nap in the booths while I listened to music the whole rest of the way to Holland. It was about a four hour cruise overall. When we finally got there, we were super anxious to see the city of Amsterdam, but we still had to get on another train ride there. When we arrived in Amsterdam, we were hurried to our hostel to drop off our luggage. As we walked to our hostel called the "White Tulip", we couldn't believe where we were. We were in the center of what is known as the "Red Light District" of Amsterdam. If you don't know what that is, look on Wikipedia and read the definition. There were nasty shops everywhere, drug shops, sex shops, everything you could possibly imagine. Naturally, we were getting pretty nervous to see what our hostel was like. We finally got there and immediately started to panic. This is what we saw....


This is our first view of our hostel room. There were three other women staying in room with us as well. Not to mention our bathroom was shared with the six men on the same floor as us. We were nervous, but decided to lock our luggage away and go see some sights.


This is the Royal Palace, about a block away from our hotel. There is a giant courtyard in front where there was a magician and tons of pigeons. The city is really dirty. We decided to take our mind off of the filth by going into a few gift shops, but we were about to be caught off guard.



Little did we know how dirty the gifts shops would be. There was tons of pornographic material in them, drugs, everything. This is one of the best shops we found and stayed in there for some time to try on wooden shoes. We were starving, so we got something to eat in a little cafe down the street. The food was fantastic. It got dark really quickly, so we hurried back to our hostel to get ready for bed. We took the small stairs up to our room and noticed a room of boys across the hall smoking marijuana. (P.S. weed is legal in Holland.) The smell was so strong, we hurried into our rooms. As we were checking out our sheets on our beds we noticed holes everywhere in them, which meant only one thing: bed bugs. We decided we would boycott the sheets and sleep on top of the blankets. This was a good plan, considering our hostel had no air conditioning. We fried to death. It was at least 95 degrees in our hostel in the middle of the night. Not only was it unbearably hot, but we were located right above a karoke pub. There was loud music playing till 5 in the morning, and a bunch of drunks singing along. We were so hot, we had to open the three small windows of our room. This, naturally, made the noise even louder. We tried to fall asleep, but we kept getting interpreted. A woman just walked into our room and started making one of the beds. This was about one in the morning. We were so confused, she didn't even knock, just barged right in our room. More women came throughout the night, making us feel more and more uncomfortable. At about 2 in the morning, a man barged in our room telling us to get out our tickets to prove we had paid for the night. We were so scared and confused, luckily we all had our tickets handy. About 3 in the morning, we just kept looking at each other in total bewilderment. We didn't know what to do. It was too hot to sleep and so we tried to come up with a solution. We decided there was no way we could sleep in the hostel another night. So me and Whitney took of on a search for any hotel that was available. This was the worst by far. There were drunk people everywhere. Some were smoking weed, so were trying to get us to go in the sex shops. There was even a man dressed in a leather thong and chains standing right next to our hostel door. We quickly ran hotel to hotel, all of them were full. We decided we needed to stick out the night and find another place in the morning.

After having 45 minutes of sleep at the most, we got out of our beds and hit the streets looking for an internet cafe to look up hotels in Amsterdam, not even considering the price it would be. We looked for about 3 hours and finally found a place to stay in the outskirts of town. We were so excited to be out of the Red Light District, we didn't care how far we had to go. The problem was, we didn't know how to get there. So we rented bikes and set off with all our luggage to our hotel that we had no idea where it was. We knew it was south, but had no idea which way south was. In fact, nobody in the city we asked knew which was south was either. We took a random guess and set off with a small map, three bikes, and our stuff. After a while, we got really frustrated. To top off the whole situation, it started to rain while we were on our bikes. We got so upset, we decided to go into the Marriott Hotel and ask for directions. The nice man drew us directions on a map, and it turned out we weren't terribly far away.


Here we are, trying to find our way to the Meridien Hotel. It was raining about this time, and we were about in tears. After about 20 minutes, we saw this glorious sign....


It was possibly the most wonderful site we had seen the whole
time. It took us about 2 hours total to get to our hotel on bikes. We finally checked in to our new place, which had air conditioning and private showers! We took a quick nap and decided we should go somewhere, since we are in Amsterdam.

We ended up here, at the Anne Frank House Museum. It was so cool. We spent about 2 hours there and got on our bikes again and went back to the hotel. We showered, actually I showered twice because I felt so gross from the hostel, and then went and got ice cream to help us cool down. That night I think I slept the best I have slept since I have been here in Europe. The beds were heavenly.

The next morning was set aside as our picture day. We took tons of pictures by coo l museums like the Van Gogh Museum, and this cool I amsterdam sign in a park. We also stopped at a bakery at got breakfast. Then we returned to our hotel and check out and walked with our stuff to the tram. We rode the tram to Central Station, and realized we were running late, really late in fact. We had 10 minutes to get our tickets and get on the train back to Hook Van Holland. We were completely lost, we waited in the wrong line twice, till we finally got frustrated and just found the platform and got on the train, without even getting our tickets. It turns out the Brighton had our tickets all along in her purse. We made the train by about 30 seconds. By the time we hopped on, it was started up. Lets just say that our prayers were heard.