My Favorite Buildings (I've visited):

These are all buildings that I visited durning my Study Abroad Semester in chronological order:

I loved Norman Foster's reconstruction of the Reichstag in Berlin.  Walking up the ramp provides an excellent panoramic of the city.  Visiting it at different time of the semester enabled me to see the different positions of the sunshade.  And I loved being able to look in the mirrors and see the reflection of the Parliament meeting below.

This is the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin.  It is a typical late 19th century museum building.  I'm partial to it because the central atrium has the largest mounted dinosaur in the world.

This is the CaixaForum in Madrid.  Herzog and de Meuron were commissioned to convert a "historic" power plant into a forum for the arts.  They raised the brick facade, removed the granite base so it would look like it was floating and added additional stories above which are wrapped in a corten steel skin.  Herzog and de Meuron commissioned French Botanist, Patrick Blanc to design a green wall for the adjacent building.  I love the juxtaposition of the materials and the plaza they create.  It doesn't hurt that there was an upside down elephant statue on display while we visited.

This is a stand at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.  The Grand Bazaar is a massive indoor market that opened in the 15th century.  It is a maze of vendors, I visited it everyday when I was in Istanbul, but that's mostly because I like buying stuff.

This is a Medusa column base in the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul.  The cistern was built in the 6th century.  The weight of the ground above the cistern is supported by columns and a vaulted ceiling.  The columns were brought from buildings all over the empire.  I like it because the amount of aesthetic detail that went into a water storage system is incredible... though only par for the course at the time.

Peter Zumthor's Kunsthause in Bregenz, Austria is another one of my favorites.  I like the double ceiling system that allows for the different lighting conditions on the interior.  I also like how everything is based on a unit and is detailed accordingly.  The width of a glass pane corresponds to a ceiling tile, interior concrete walls are one half of the width of a ceiling tile, so on and so forth.

The image on the right is a house by Gion A. Caminada in Vrin.  He bases his design on typical building typologies in Vrin (left) and is trying to bring people to this small village in the Alps through his architecture.

I loved Palladio's Villa Rotunda in Italy.  It's a classic, so you can't not like it.  I loved it because we visited it on a gorgeous day, and we sat outside with other architecture study abroad trips from America and you could just talk about architecture.  It epitomized an architecture study abroad trip.

My other favorite building is the Thermal Baths in Vals, Switzerland, but it was previously discussed in this blog.