Grenades Are Green

The first seed grenades were made from condoms filled with local wildflower seeds, water and fertilizer. Envisioned by Liz Christy in 1973 when she started the "Green Guerrillas," the grenades were thrown over fences into the empty lots of New York in an effort to rehabilitate underutilized portions of the urban landscape. Christy was angry and resentful of the waste left by urban sprawl and critical of the ways in which we were squandering our spatial resources. What it sparked was a whole movement of eco-lawlessness, engendering everything from moss graffiti to clean marketing, and giving voice to the militant faction of green peace.

But today, sustainability has lost its fangs. With Brad Pitt's face now poster boying the movement, it is hard to remember that the green movement was once a grass roots movement, small in scale and loyal in dedication. In 1997 when the US renounced the Kyoto Protocol, being green was still something the nation at large was increasingly skeptical of and living sustainably meant making individual silent sacrifices and asking other to do the same. In an attempt to grow in its global endeavor, green officially went public somewhere around 2007 when Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his 2006 documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." After that, it was a snowball with everyone from Toyota to OPAC getting in on the action. By 2010, green was a bumper sticker you put on your car.  

Even seed bombing, once the staple of the eco-urban malcontent, is getting a commercialized neutering as both Visualingual's Etsy and Anthropologie have put out commercialized lines of all in one seed and fertilizer balls. They are packaged in a number of different seed variants and sizes to fit any microclimate and budget. Others, such as Daniel Phillips and Kim Karlsrud of Common Studio, think that seed bombing should be as mainstream as gum. In their project Greenaid, Common Studio is taking the old typology of the gumball machine and transforming it into seed bomb dispensers scattered throughout Los Angeles. A small booklet attached to each dispensors informs the bomb buyers where the best local urban targets are for their twenty five cent purchases. Common Studio says that "Greenaid is equally an interactive public awareness campaign, a lucrative fundraising tool, and a beacon for small scale grass roots action that engages directly yet casually with local residents." All of this action makes me ask: what does it mean for green when even the Los Angeles Times is willing to run a story on how to make a home grown seed bomb? I think the answer is simple: we have lost our balls.

Revolutions sustain themselves only if they remain revolutionary. What has happened instead is that those once opposed to the sustainable movement, big oil and genetic farmers, have become its biggest seeming supporters, investing huge quantities into bio-tech research as well as sustainable practices. As a society, we have accepted this self imposed sacrifice as an appropriate censor. It would be fine if it we as simple a matter as letting the world's biggest polluters off with a warning, but  by giving them control of the fiscal reigns of the movement, really what we are doing is letting these corporate entities set the terms for the sustainable movement. In essence, we've accepted a honey-but cheerios version of sustainability. If the only balls that green has are seed bombs, then I do not want any part of it.

The Conceptual Gap

“ Through our teaching and public programming, we help students gain a deep knowledge of architecture’s techniques, traditions, methods of inquiry, and modes of production, so that they emerge with the intellectual breadth and acuity to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world that demands agility and innovation. Through both programming and outreach activities, we aim to engage a wider public audience in a dialogue about the role of architecture in society.”

                                                                      -Syracuse Architecture Mission Statement

I was going back in time. It was a twist on reality that was so highly distorted from the present space in Los Angeles that it was unrecognizable to my eyes. What is this desk? This slanted top that lets my computer slide off, has no space for my Ipod, and doesn’t allow me to put my feet up whist drawing? Florence was one thing. These design sensibilities and this typology of ‘doing things’ was completely distorted and unusual to me. Syracuse was the real time gap.

Last semester I studied in Florence with Syracuse University. The combination of Syracuse, with early modernist goals and mostly tenured professors, and Florence, the capital of the Renaissance, was such a drastic change from the ‘innovative’ University of Southern California and the sprawling lack of control that is Los Angeles.  There was something about Florence that you could understand and place in your memory as a system of order with the likelihood of learning from. The Renaissance movement had this rightness about design and art that has never really been replicated, although many have tried. The population that coexists in this medieval city recognize that although great, the cities value and influence lies in its history.

Syracuse on the other hand, seems to be a modern artifact that still breathes and produces designers. Their students are expanding outside upstate New York and their design sensibilities are being brought to the modern world.  It could have been the ancient city that just inspired the Florence program’s retrospective attitude, or it could have been the university’s attempt at making a statement to the world. It could also be very possible that Syracuse is drastically different from what I experienced in Florence.  The Syracuse students who were studying abroad in the Florence program, probably also felt like they too were taking a trip back to a realm of hand drafting and arcades.

Because the curriculum at Syracuse is heavily based on understanding the cultural atmosphere of many varying places, their students seem to have developed an innate ability to absorb the urbanistic and architectural references of a place. Unlike USC, many of their studios travel all over the country to experience different cultures and the impact it has on the local architecture. This sensitivity to the context could be why, in Florence, many students reverted back to using older materials and quintessential 'Italian' urban principles. After not having the same range of travel as Syracuse, the USC education seems limited in its spectrum of contextual influences.

When I pinned up my final project, I felt amazingly out of place and even irresponsible in my design intentions.  My massive 50 foot, cantilevering I-beams seemed to be bordering on excessive and impractical.  Even the circulation seemed over sized compared to my overly-logical colleagues.  But this is what USC teaches us, have a strong design intention, make it spatially relevant. The major moves that I made in my project were absolutely necessary to convey my idea.  But is this right? Do our professors undermine us by telling us that in the real world our clients care about our expensive torquing forms? Is the art of architecture going to be necessary in the built work in 2090? Or are the construction planners of the world going to carve up the remaining land into giant FEMA trailers? The students in my studio in Florence had such nice little spaces with perfect little labels and magnificent handicap ramps that worked perfectly into the egress. They had lovely little landscaped lots where children could stand, a simple mesh screen to shield the sun, and a roof terrace overlooking the park. Their projects were completely practical but there was no concept behind it. Is USC going out of style by actually teaching conceptual design intention these days?

This is not the first time that this question has been discussed in the realm of architectural education. The question actually draws upon the discussion of whether architecture should be more practical or completely conceptual and experimental. Our architecture school is just resurfacing from a more practical education and is trying to push the boundaries. With a cutting-edge Dean and new classes to teach advanced computer programs and theory, our school seems to be moving into the future. Syracuse however, seems to be content with its practical design approach. Could it be that we are actually moving in the opposite direction of the future?

I will admit though that the act of going to another university to learn about something as fragile as design has made me torque my ideas on the necessity of the complete composition. I think that it very important to experience multiple schools of thought within the architecture education. By leaving the USC bubble, I realized that regardless of the prestige of a school, each one is on a gradient scale from tradition to progression. It was only by studying with an (almost) foreign university, that I acquired the knowledge of regional and cultural differences that impact the theoretical teaching of architecture.

So where does USC stand in the huge gradient from insane Zaha shapes, to the cerebral based non-building, to the square-footage maximizers? Maybe our school of thought is fighting the revolution and the Syracuse/Florence tradition is what the architectural education is really headed for.  Maybe we will be the school that will be unable to evolve to the recession-proof, environmentally-balanced, carbon neutral, 8-foot ceilings, built surroundings. Maybe we’re so far in our Los Angeles bubble that we can not see our mistakes. Maybe Syracuse has it right. Maybe material saving, no-double-height space-because-it-is-a-waste-of-space thinking is the new trend. After all, it is hard for even architects to justify the need for a brand new community center/city council/media museum when the world is drowning into the sea and there are hurricanes the size of Texas sinking all of the Virgin Islands. Or when materials that could be helping Haitian orphans are rerouted to the newest Gerhy opera house, something should be done.

So choose. Do you want to be the maximal minimalist for the globe’s population, give them their 25’ by 30’ flat and their little composting toilet or do you want to give in to the experimental badass approach and make something that even when the aliens find our broken, beaten planet they will be in awe.

Hopefully we will never have to completely choose

Copy + Paste

Architecture, in terms of both theory and function, is a medium difficult to transpose to the public domain. Between the eye of the architect and the eye of the laymen lies a startling disconnect that can cause frustration amongst many young designers – the buildings that seem to enthrall and captivate the everyday man the most, are those which can have little to no architectural significance. Shallow, pretty, and meaningless, these are the buildings that will not outlive their own era; these are the spaces that will be swept away with the spirit of the age, only to be replaced with tomorrow’s zeitgeist. Yet, while their forms may be tired, their organization muddled and overcomplicated, and their function basic, there is a reason so many of these copy+paste buildings exist today, and why they are so easily welcomed in the arms of an overzealous public. 

Take for example track housing, an epidemic that has particularly infected the Southern California area. One of the largest contributors to suburban sprawl, track housing is the epitome of copy+paste architecture.  The incessant waves of cookie-cutter facades and identical landscapes destroy any sense of uniqueness, identity, and place that have come to define the many cities that aged in eras prior to modernism and postmodernism. This destruction began in the age of the Industrial Revolution, which saw the rural population flow into the developing cities.  As people piled into these overpopulated spaces to embrace the progression of the mechanical age, they began to lose the sense of identity that was so evident in the villages from which they fled. The big city was a place of anonymity, a concept evident in Edward Munch’s  “The Scream.” The figure, standing alone on a sparsely populated bridge, represents the alienation and isolation that was brought upon by the Industrial Revolution. Almost a hundred years later, when suburban sprawl has led people back into these metaphorical villages from which they once so hurriedly fled, the seemingly apparent sense of community that should be fostered by such developments was instead replaced by a familiar sense of estrangement, loneliness, and a loss of self.  

Considering this, it would seem that such copy+paste architecture would be unwelcomed by the general populace. Who on earth would want to come home to the same dreading feelings that have plagued so many generations prior? And yet, these track housing projects dominate almost all new real estate that is currently being constructed in the SoCal area. So what about these buildings makes them so irresistible to the public? To put it simply, their biggest fault is also their biggest asset.  Each individual house itself carries no particular distinctiveness, no underlying sense of life and soul. They are not buildings that affect those inside. Rather, they are buildings that are affected by those who occupy them. These buildings are reduced to their most basic typologies –four walls, a pointed roof, well-manicured garden out front – and become the ideal image of HOME. Even though, from a design perspective, these houses may be aesthetically and architecturally lacking, their basic and instantly recognizable forms can draw from people memories of times gone by. People begin to look at these homes as manifestations of their pasts, and caught in the almost unavoidable cycle of familiarity, find it the ideal place to build their futures. 

The idea of copy+paste is not foreign to the architectural sphere either. Some of the most famous architects heralded the idea of multiplicity in design. Le Corbusier himself, one of the most prominent architects of the 20th century and the forefather on modernist design, crafted the majority of his projects as samples that, in an ideal world, would be duplicated and rebuilt thousands of times over. In fact, one of Corb’s most radical ideas was to wipe out Paris in its entirety and replace it with a series of strictly-gridded high rise towers. And more recently, Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette in France explored the concept of copy+paste arch, with a series of programless red structures dubbed “follies.” These spaces carried no historical precedent, and like the track houses, act as a blank canvas for the experiences that occur within. Unlike track housing though, the work of Corbusier and Tschumi, although technically falling into the category of copy+paste architecture, explore new typologies that at the time, have never been seen before. The forms may have been nearly identical to one another, but they were a radical departure from that architecture that was prominent in their eras. In this sense, the copy+paste buildings they created were able to illicit a sense of identity and brand that is lost in the familiar forms of modern track housing.

Knockers Not Boobs

I once met a man who refused to touch doorknobs with his bare hands. He always carried around a tissue box, and he generously used these tissues to turn any doorknob that he encountered. One tissue for each doorknob, and he carried the evidence in a plastic bag. His case may be extreme, but it is not uncommon for people to feel opposed to making contact with a doorknob. We are heavily reminded that doorknobs are agents of germ collection during flu season. Naturally, it is hard to like objects that gather potentially health hazardous microorganisms. 

In architecture, doorknobs are one of the only elements within spaces that we consciously touch on a regular basis. They allow us to open or close doors, something less trivial than it may seem. Opening or closing a door equates to opening or closing a space. An open space allows for the filtering of light and air, access to other parts within a space, and social interaction with others. A closed space allows for privacy, quiet, and darkness at times. The difference between open and closed is far from small, yet the operation that allows for this spatial change is usually smaller than the size of the human palm. 

What is disturbing about our hesitation to touch doorknobs is that we are ultimately making architecture a limited experience for ourselves. Architecture has always been strongly associated with the eye, but the sense of touch has filled the gaps. Our hands let us transition between spaces and make the change between open and closed. The doorknob is the utmost symbol of movement through space.

Maybe our hesitation to touch doorknobs is a commentary on the design of doorknobs. Contemporary doorknobs have been accused of being uninspiring and sterile looking, contrary to the germs that might live on their surfaces. The design of doorknobs has backtracked in a relatively negative way. The doorknobs of the 18th and early 19th centuries were ornately embellished, and their designs were cherished. As a result, the recent market for antique doorknobs and antique inspired doorknobs has expanded. Nostalgia for doorknobs of the past has replaced a possible excitement for contemporary doorknobs.

Bruce Gerrie is a doorknob enthusiast, and he curated an exhibit for antique doorknobs called “Jewelry for Buildings: The Art of Antique Doorknobs” in 2002. He is particularly fascinated by door knobs of “early skyscrapers, built during the late 1800s and early 1900s, when architects detailed every aspect of their buildings. They created knobs specifically for each building.” Gerrie elaborates, “They were designed by the architect to enhance the building's architectural style (Moorish, French, etc.), and they featured an image, such as a city's seal, or a building's initials. The emblematic doorknobs were often the owner's signature.” 

Our generation of architects has stopped designing doorknobs, settling instead for prefabricated doorknobs that are usually far from charming. The disdain for ornament in contemporary architecture has wrongly translated to a disdain for doorknobs. Refusal to embellish buildings has become a lack of attention to detailing, and our will to touch has suffered. We all know that scale is an important aspect of architecture. We have skyscrapers, castles, warehouses, log cabins, staircases, windows, and doorknobs. The sheer number of doorknobs should be enough reason for people to care about what they look like. 

Dear architects, please pick up the practice of doorknob design again.

Rebuilding and Redefining Haiti

When was the last time you heard news about the situation in Haiti? While media coverage of the topic has resurfaced recently in regard to a cholera outbreak and the threat of a hurricane, the issue has essentially vanished from the thoughts of most Americans. Here are some numbers to put the disaster in perspective.

Nearly TEN months ago, a 7.0 quake with an epicenter 25 kilometers from a city of 3.5 million struck the Western hemisphere’s most impoverished nation, leaving 230,000 dead, 300,000 more injured, over 1,000,0000 homeless and nearly 300,000 collapsed buildings. Efforts to rebuild have been moving at a snail’s pace since the earthquake struck, and a million Haitians continue to live in camps where the threat of disease and crime is constant. Haiti desperately needs a construction boom, not only to resettle a million of its citizens, but also to jumpstart its economy, which has essentially ground to a halt since the disaster.

The lack of construction since January can be attributed to a number of causes. Firstly, Haiti’s pre-earthquake infrastructure was far from developed. Port Au Prince, the nation’s bustling capital and most populous city, was only just starting to address the issues of poverty and lack of proper infrastructure that had plagued the city for decades, when the earthquake struck. Rebuilding Port Au Prince now entails not only new construction, but also cleaning up the mess created by years of haphazard development. Most of Port Au Prince’s population lived in self-built shantytowns that sprawl across the city’s hillsides. Haiti must avoid returning to the disorganized, shoddy construction methods that failed its populace during the earthquake. Secondly, foreign investment in the nation is virtually nonexistent; most international dealings with the country are on the level of basic aid. Haiti has the potential to be an economic success story, but with the current state of the global economy no one is confident enough in the island nation to invest in its reconstruction.

For all the havoc the earthquake has wreaked on Haiti, it has also provided a perfect opportunity for the nation to start anew. 300,000 structures must be rebuilt in some form or another, so why not make the construction of these Haiti’s defining moment. All of the obstacles aside, Haiti has a lot going for it. Take for one its location in the balmy Caribbean Sea; Port au Prince was once among the region’s most popular tourist destinations; can it capitalize on its prime location and landscape to reclaim this position? In addition, the country has a staggering underemployment problem, and can put its underused labor force back to work. Port Au Prince’s shantytown dwellers have unknowingly, through the resourceful construction and maintenance of their own homes, developed a mentality of recycling materials and an understanding of the Haitian landscape that will prove key to the rebuilding of their nation. Finally, Haiti’s colorful and creative culture offers the potential for the development of an innovative architectural movement that is unique to Haitian issues. With the images of debris and dead bodies strewn in its streets fresh on our mind, it is difficult to see this happening in Port Au Prince, but could the right policies and investments transform the island nation into an architectural masterpiece in paradise?

Loosing the World Cup

Who won the World Cup? The eleven men playing together on the football pitch? The one country searching for national pride and international recognition in its first such victory? The entire planet of socially separated peoples all seemingly united in one enthusiasm by the shared spirit of open competition? All of these answers are in their own way correct, and the diversity of perspective latent in their individual formations illustrates just how difficult it is to define the word "winner." However, when it comes to a similar but quite different question, who lost the World Cup, the answer is much clearer: the homeless of South Africa.

Why this is the case may not be immediately obvious. To glean the answer one has to keep in mind that the World Cup is not just a sporting event, it is an economic stimulus package. It means an average 2.7 billion USD increase in a country's GDP through tourism and sponsorship alone, which can translate into years of sustained progress for a developing nation. In his final presentation to the FIFA committee, Africa's bid chairman, Irvin Khoza, said that the economic benefits of the 2010 World Cup would "enable [our country] to help in bringing development, future and hope to all the football loving people of South Africa." In one sense, this promise held true: there are ten new or upgraded stadiums around the country, new roads leading into Host Cities, airports of an international standard, a Gautrain in Johannesburg and a modernized train station in Cape Town, city greening and a plethora of new city artwork. For the gentrified elite that inhabit the city centers, Khoza's promise four years ago came true

However, the majority of South Africa's citizens are not wealthy land owners; they are urban squatters who benefit only indirectly from these urban accomplishments. Due to the siphoning of funds towards the World Cup, the 400,000 people on South Africa's wait list for government sponsored housing were put into a state of economic limbo. What is more, in order to unfetter host cities from the stigmas of their urban poor, slum dwellers where evicted from the zones around football stadiums that they had inhabited for generations and forcibly redistributed to facilities miles away from the city. For every hundred thousand dollars spent of the nearly 52 billion USD in World Cup improvements, one person was displaced since democracy took in 1994. That is over 500,000 people in total. The "towns" to which they were moved can hardly be called an improvement in quality of living.

Forced relocation and this form of aesthetic censorship in the wake of world media events, of course, is nothing new. Perhaps the most noteworthy in this trend is the 1988 Olympics, where the government of Seoul forcibly moved 15% of its residents. Additionally, in the run up to the 2008 Summer Games, it is estimated that Beijing displaced nearly 1 million of its inhabitants. This trend does not seem to be one anywhere near to stopping. The 2010Commonwealth Games are slatted to begin in just a couple of days in New Delhi, where an estimated 300,000 people have been moved in order to make the city slum free for opening ceremonies. Additionally, thirty-five informal communities are slatted for eviction in Brazil as they begin to get ready for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. While the Olympic Committee has agreed to add forced displacement to the areas of consideration (the United State's bid to host the 2016 Olympics in Chicago being the first ever to promise zero population displacement) for Olympic bids. FIFA on the other hand refuses to regulate or even acknowledge this growing phenomenon.

In South Africa, the government says that people were moved because they were in need of "immediate emergency housing relief" and denies that the relocations were an attempt to surgically modify the aesthetic image of South Africa for the World Cup. However, the residents of these camps see it slightly differently. "It's a dumping place," said Jane Roberts, a resident of unit M49 in Blikkiesdorp, "They took people from the streets because they don't want them in the city for the World Cup. Now we are living in a concentration camp."

What this brings up is a question of the human right to space. In England, for example, the right to space is so protected that a squatter who occupies an unused piece of property for 10 years gains ownership over it. It is seen as a system that is mutually beneficial because it ensures squatters a right to live as well as a reason for habitation and also prompts land owners to make sure their parcels are utilized. Placed in the context of South Africa, it has been suggested that this value system may have some tenable solvency. With five new stadiums and five existing stadiums in South Africa each capable of seating 45,000 people (the National Stadium seats 95,000), there is a real question over whether South Africa's three main sports (cricket, football and rugby) can fully utilize these massive facilities. In the 2009-2010 season,  South Africa's Premiere Football League played 212 games, and only four drew more than 40,000 fans. As Maura O'Connor, a South African journalist, put it, the stadiums are "white elephants" that "need a mathematician to figure out how they are going to...pay for [themselves]." So, why not allow squatters to repopulate the underutilized stadiums themselves? Think of it as a massive housing experiment. You simultaneously develop under developed urban resources as well as defining affordable housing zones, which, due to the visual introvertedness of these stadiums, answers surrounding concerns of NIMBY.

Politicians in South Africa love to speak of the "legacy" of the 2010 World Cup. Will its legacy be a series of derelict buildings? Or could this be a unique opportunity to address a national problem with singular urban vision that turns the losers of a collapsed economic system into winners.

Studying Broads

The first time I studied abroad, I made it three and a half miles with four sandwiches and a change of clothes, which is to say that I was thirteen  running away from home. I bring this event up because I think that we all tend to forget how valuable those first unaccompanied steps outside of our homes were, how much they put this fragile little world into perspective. I was like Siddhartha come out of his palace to see the world with all its blemishes and spots. The event left me with a profound wisdom that I would like to pass on: one does not have to travel well or very far in order to experience substantial change. Perhaps, this is true now more than every before. Digital media is shortening the distance between image and experience even more than my thirteen year old self could have imagined, and the result is not necessarily a good thing.

Before a student even gets to their host country, they are so bombarded by digital imagery and text that is hard to tell how much this tampers the process of true cultural inundation. From Facebook to Café Abroad students ask about where to get X at the abroad site, whether or not you can wear Y, how others evaluate classes at the local university, the sort of host family experiences to expect and so on. Their experiences become highly regulated, not only as academic oversight and safety precautions increase, but also as cultural encounters become over-documented and readily available out of context in both virtual and other sites not attached to the locality where students will study

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Even that catalogues produced by institutions of higher education to promote genuine abroad experiences aid in this cheapening of experience. Catalogues respond to the needs of stakeholders – universities, parents, students – by promoting messages that: 1) comply with good business policy, articulating what goods (experiences) will be delivered for what price; and 2) communicate necessary tenets, for example as the Harvard Catalogue says, that "the best way to develop...global competence is to have firsthand experience living abroad" that studying abroad will help you "develop a deeper understanding of their own society" and that ultimately "planning to spend time abroad is one of the most exciting things you will do." These catalogues also reveal what one can expect to see, which means that anomalies, ephemeral experiences and exceptions to the cultural rule, some of the most important parts of any journey abroad, must invariably be kept out.

If, however, all of this changed when a student finally got abroad, my concerns would not be so great. However, what is intriguing to me is that this digital bubble that technology and image has made around us seems to shatter little, or at the very least not enough, upon actually cultural engagement. Karen Rodríguez, PhD and director of the CIEE Study Center in Guanajuato, Mexico says that "too many students come abroad only to spend their time tightly wired into Skype, the Internet and Facebook, seemingly more concerned about capturing images for those at home than actually experiencing the wonders at their fingertips." Students spend an average of 1440 minutes on a cell phone daily while abroad, an estimated 1250 minutes daily looking at the world through the lens of a digital camera, and almost 2800 minutes listening to an ipod. This digital desensitization is causing Rodríguez how much time students actually spend abroad.

All of this digital inoculation has me questing what exactly it means to study abroad in the digital age. If it means getting outside of your comport bubble, then should not we all leave our cell phones and laptops at home? If it means getting a new perspective, then should not we attempt to get a perspective on our own lives before we burden another society with our bias? And if it means, as  it traditionally has, that studying abroad is meant to help you experience a new culture,  then I have to ask how much of this is even possible in an era so dominated by globalization and global identities, where English is spoken as the number one language on the WORLD wide web and 47 million McDonalds customers every day?

If studying abroad is going to continue, it has to reinvent itself within its digital confines. Experts in the field are pointing to what they call digital story telling, short, first person narratives, often video narratives created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds.  Karen Rodríguez notes that "while digital storytelling does not embody or ensure critical intercultural thinking, I argue that it has a tremendous potential for re-creating both students and host community members as authors and representers of their experiences, thus creating a 'counter-catalogic' study abroad experience that goes far beyond the staid images used to market these experiences." The idea is not new or novel; many students keep blogs while studing abroad. But tweeking this method to incorporate a further developement of experience could potentially be a leap forward, a judo on the digital invasion. Check out the blog for the USC Study Abroad Program in Barcellona to get a look at what this might mean here.