Architect Abroad

An architect who is off to seek adventure…and buildings.

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  • Vive la France!

    It is time to say goodbye to Western Europe as the car rental date was looming nearer and nearer. So as apart of the sprint back to Paris we stopped into Lichtenstein, a small principality principally known for 2 kind of stamps: postage and passports. Now I am not a collector of the former and the latter is rather unsatisfying when you have to pay for them. Although with the new UK Electronic Travel Authorization cash grab of 20 quid each I paid for last month, it feels like I have a history now of paying for stamps.

    Vaduz, Lichtenstein was a charming and rich capital city, an excellent place to spend an hour or two at a cafe people watching on the square. I fell in architectural love with their yellow brick parliament building, complete with Dorothy’s yellow brick road. I am a sucker for what you can do with one material and populating it in unique ways everywhere; it is so hard to pull off and this building does it beautifully.

    Lichtenstein house of parliament and yellow brick square
    Brick Ramp
    Brick Fenestration Screening

    On our way back to Paris we checked out the capital of the Alsace region: Strasbourg. This city was born the love child of an extremely rocky and volatile relationship between Germany and France. France, now has custody of her, for the foreseeable future, but her German father has left many imprints upon her. Signage across the city is bilingual, much of the architecture is distinctly German (with the most obvious exception of the central Notre Dame Cathedral), and I still trying to shake off the weeks I spent touring German speaking countries, kept of speaking an odd hybrid of German/French (Deutschcais?) and was completely understood. Dinner consisted of foie-gras (yes, I know how it’s made and felt bad about it), creme- champignon poulet, and spatzel, followed by kugelhopf and crème brûlée. Odd, maybe but delicious-definitely. This place is stunning and I would argue a must visit, especially if you are around in the Christmas season as I hear they have an epic market.

    Now it was time to get to Paris and do a couple of the things that were either booked out or we didn’t have time to do. Laura and I had some girl time checking out art at the Louvre. She had a desire to see the Mona Lisa but wasn’t prepared for the mosh pit atmosphere that surrounded that painting. My favourite piece at the Louvre remains as the Winged Nike of Samonthrace. That lady has been ‘Just Doing It’ for everyone since 100BC.

    Laura is generally more of a fan of paintings, and I personally feel like sculpture is just one of those things I tend to back into when I am trying to get a better angle on a painting (Winged Nike aside), but we did get out to visit the Rodin Museum and ponder some of the world’s problem’s at ‘The Thinker’ before looking at the gates of hell from Dante’s Inferno.

    For our last day in France, and Western Europe for that matter, we went to learn about (and make) perfume. Despite having a good nose for what is suspect in life, I doubt I will ever have the sensitivity (or temperment) for subtle nuances of beauty, try as I might, but I suppose we have to leave something for the poets, while the rest of us wrestle in the quagmires of life. Our final stop in Paris was at Sacre Coeur church, where we just missed the Pope’s visit by a few days, but managed to catch up with my old school collegue Gayatri, who is a sleep therapist now and has lived in Paris these past 20 years. We gazed on the church’s beauty while consuming frog legs, bravely ordered by Laura.

    Western Europe, our road trip has been phenomenal, I miss you already. It took so much discpline to not stay longer, but our wallets told us: ‘yeah you can move on anytime now’. Speaking of wallets, once we are out of europe, I will post some interesting stuff about traveling and expenses, in case anyone else is thinking about doing an extended trip. So stay tuned, money and travelling is always an interesting bout of fisticuffs. Our next stop is mainland Greece, but until then, a bien tot.

  • Germany – Let the Good times Roll!

    Despite the last post being somewhat somber, Germany had some amazing times filled with friends (or freunds), festivals, and fast cars, and fabulous architecture! Touring through Germany I realized that my German language skills were not all forgotten from learning it 18 years ago. As we were driving 160km/hr on the autobahn meine Deutsch was spitting out fire. Well, enough to order at restaurants and generally make myself understood anyway, if I didn’t think to hard about it. Sadlly, it came back easier than my French did in Paris, after trying to learn that non-immersively for 20 odd years, thanks a lot DuoLingo…my 600 day French streak let me down big time, but we will get to that in another post.

    We visited the city of Leipzig where a friend of mine from my uni days, Michaela now lives. Leipzig is a bit unlike any other German city I have visited before; they have their own undeniable flair as the city is known for artists, an epic amount of grafitti, and the birthplace of the composers Bach, Wagner, and Mendelssohn. Known affectionately as ‘Hype-zig’ it is an up and comer with a bit of a rock and roll vibe to it. Here is a beautiful canal pic of the city, taken after an enormously delicious dinner of Kase Spatzle.

    We toured a couple of different Zaha Hadid buildings in Germany, my first Hadid experiences, the Pheno Science Museum in Wolfburg, and the BMW factory tour in Leipzig. Hadid was a ‘starchitect’, one of the few namebrand female ones actually, who died in 2016. The science museum was pretty amazing, not only to play at as they had roughly 300 fun experiements to do, Laura’s favourite was laying on the bed of nails (which Mike couldn’t hack), but the architecture was amazing as well. The building’s structure is created from maybe 8-10 inverted concrete cone shapes supporting a steel lattice work that was supporting the roof, providing tons of free open space without the pesky business of columns.

    The car factory tours and the eventual visit to the Porsche Museum were more of a ‘Mike’ thing, however, I enjoy watching some factory processes and it reminded me of this industrial project I was just finishing up at work before I left…except you know..the world class example of that with the infinite $$$ that BMW brings when they crank out a car every minute out of that factory (the car takes 10hrs to build).

    We finished off Germany by heading to Munich for the opening day of Okoberfest and visiting Mike’s good friend Axel. Laura and I have never been to Oktoberfest before and I honestly didn’t realize it is just like Kdays, except everyone is completely wasted, dressed up in traditional dirndels and lederhosen, with tons of amazing rides and no lines for them, 2-3x the size, and much more delicious snacks. So basically our hometown fair…but way better. The police are there just to make sure everyone is safe and having a good time as there are always accidents and medical events that happen. The Germans know how to let loose, and loose they are over 2 weeks of frantic partying, Laura wanted to go back or spend tons of time on the Devil’s Wheel (seen in the video below) but we need to get our car back to Paris.

    We are getting to the end of Western Europe with only Lichtenstein and France to go, before we head to Greece…stay tuned…

  • The Ghosts of Berlin

    As some of you may know, I did a semester of university in Germany in 2007, and this was the first time back to Berlin since then.. At that time I was going there, with my good friend Alyssa, as a weekend break from our studies at the Koln International School of Design. We both were accepted for a semester abroad there from U of A and we graduated together. The last time I saw Alyssa was in Vancouver in 2023, she was quite an accomplished designer who had travelled and worked around the world at that point, and unfortunately she was sick with breast cancer. Sadly she passed away recently, at the age of 38, so when I stepped on the streets of Berlin I was haunted a bit by memories of her laughter as we boarded tandem bikes in old Soviet style hats and squealed across the city. Bringing your own haunts into a city so full of recent memories is a sobering experience; memorial sites dot the city from victims of the holocaust to victims of attempted wall escapees demarcated as a visible scar that runs through this city.

    Berlin Wall fragment
    Memorial for Murdered Jews - Peter Eisenmann

    This city will always have a special place in my heart, as this was the city where I chose to become an architect. I fell in love with a building, something that had never happened before, and it was the Jewish museum by Daniel Libeskind that made me want to create form that would evoke emotion in others. This is some of the interiors that impacted me almost 20 years ago to follow the path that I am on now, I am so grateful to have the opportunity to see them again. The use of scale, section, light, and shadow is a powerful experience, especially given the context of the museum, made me realize that space can evoke emotion, reflection, sadness, joy, and form experiences. That the spaces we build as architects can have the power to influence.

    Libeskind's Tower of the Holocaust
    The Jewish Museum, Berlin.

    We ended our tour of Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie and touring the Wall Museum learning about all the extraordinary feats people used to escape from the Soviet run Eastern Berlin into the Western world. So much ingenuity from hot air balloons, developing motorized underwater apparatuses, even one guy cultivating a relationship with a woman that looked like his wife who was stuck over in Eastern Germany. Then one day they both visit on a holiday and we does a switcheroo and leaves the poor girl over there and sneaks his wife back with her stolen papers..wow that is mean. I want to close this entry with an old photo of Alyssa and me hanging out at Check Point Charlie, it was a beautiful day then as it was this time around. Goodbye old friend.

  • Lifestyles of the Swiss and Famous

    Lifestyles of the Swiss and Famous

    Switzerland has been one of the best stops so far, likely because we were housesitting again in the Swiss Alps. It’s a place I never could afford to spend a week in, but we enjoyed every last minute of it as each day in the Swiss countryside was more charming than the day before. Picture alpine meadows, charming wood houses, complete with a soundtrack of cowbells mooing and jingling in the breeze.

    Our place was located an hour from Zurich, 1 hr from Lucerne, 1 hr from Lichtenstein, and 2 hrs from the Pritker Prize winning (the architectural Nobel prize) thermal baths in Vals. We managed to visit all of these places, as well as eat tons of Swiss chocolate and fondue, with the standouts being Lucerne and Vals.

    When you are traveling you tend to try to compare what you are seeing to your home country and I suppose Switzerland is a little like our neighbour province of British Columbia’s Interior. However, the vernacular architecture here really serves to enhance the landscape, or is in harmony with it, and some of interior BC really is quite industrial and at odds with its surrounding. I mean it doesn’t hurt that there are literal castles here to enhance the views. This is from Lucerne, which is, in my opinion, much more charming than Geneva or Zurich.

    As we had a rainy day following, and it was my birthday, we headed over to Vals to see the famous thermal baths. Peter Zumthor masterfully balances a sensory experience of dualities through a severely restricted architectural palette of stone, concrete, water, and natural light. Cracks of light penetrate into the voluminous darkness created by these granite monoliths. Heavy concrete slabs appear to float as they are penetrated by these beams of light that dissipate into the waters below. The visitor explores the darkness and journeys into the light to explore new spaces and experience which were not apparent to the eye before. The spaces are filled with silence, sound baths, views, restriction of views, intense heat, frigid cold plunges, feelings of pressure & weightlessness, and is overall a completely meditative experience. Or you know would be, if you didn’t have a 14yrs old with you emitting the occasional shriek. The baths are highly restricted on entry, which honestly enhances the experience as you aren’t fighting for space. You can float and let your mind wander, or even fall asleep (as my husband did), without fear of bumping someone else. Unfortunately there are no photos allowed in the main area, but here are a couple from the quasi-allowed/not quite allowed area.

    We finished off Switzerland with a quick trip through Lichtenstein and Austrian to reach our next destination of Munich and I fell in love with the Lichtenstein parliament building as it is one material of yellow brick just populated everywhere.

    If I could pick one countryside to live forever, it would be the Swiss countryside, but I would probably run out of cash 1 month into that new lifestyle. An epic week, but the world beckons. Today we are headed to Oktoberfest in Munich. We will make sure to eat a bretzel, tschuss.

  • Let’s Go Dutch!

    Our adventures took us over to Holland, as many of you know Mike’s Father was Dutch and had 7 brothers and sisters, a few of whom remained in Holland and had families of their own. So Mike, Laura, and I got to spend some time with the Dutch cousins. Mike and Laura are also Dutch citizens, but alas I am not. I thought I would check if Holland needed another architect, but Rem Koolhaus mentioned that they already had it covered. Speaking of architecture, Rotterdam is home to some of the most interesting modern architectural experiments in Europe. The city was bombed extensively in WWII and out of those ashes arose some really great projects, such as the cube houses and the market hall.

    In fact Rotterdam was my favourite of the Dutch cities that we toured to, which included Amsterdam, Utrecht, and the Hague. There is just something fun and quirky about the city that feels accessible and familiar and maybe slightly North American as the majority of buildings here are from the 60’s to now. For the quirky factor, Rotterdam has surfing in one of it’s canal’s downtown, what an amazing idea.

    After leaving Rotterdam, we hopped over to Amsterdam, which I haven’t been to since I was in my late 20’s. Going back as a parent was a totally different situation as I was looking for ideas on places to go that didn’t include partying. So we hopped into a canal boat in Amsterdam,

    fell in love all over again at the Van Gogh Museum

    The food in Holland deserves lots of comments as we were really busy downing Dutch Droppe candy which is a mix of salt and black licorice, as a PSA don’t try this unless you have been raised on it, which Laura was. In fact the candy game in Holland is so extraordinary that there is something for everyone here, the young and old will definitely be partaking.

    Naturally we had to try some homemade Stroop Waffels, and then there is those chocolate sprinkles on toast that our family made sure that Laura had, and let’s not forget the ubiquitous amounts of Nutella that is pretty much all over Western Europe. Lastly was the Pickled Herring (this one deserves a PSA too), but frankly we eat and like most things and the world is full of new flavours.

    All in all it was hard to say goodbye to Holland, but as Laura is a citizen, maybe she’ll decide she wants to come back here to attend university. It might end up being less expensive that uni in our city actually.

    Our last activity in Holland was to check out the old Windmills at Kinderdyke. This is a UNESCO Heritage site and these mills date back to 1700’s. As many of you may know, the Netherlands is a country where 1/3 of it is under sea level and is the most densely populated area in Europe. Over 18 million people live in an area smaller than Newfoundland. So, have they thrived over the years, well they used the windmills to manage water within the lands, pumped out water to create more land, used dykes to control sea water from infiltrating the low lands, and have created the most impressive engineering of water management systems, arguably since the Romans.

    These mills are just a backup system now as more modern water management systems have come to bear, but there are still millers that work and live at these historic mills. From the distance they appear to move so gently, but when you are up close with them, those blades would tear you apart if you were to get near them. There is so much more that I could say about Holland, but the best parts of it was spending time with family.

  • Belgium: Waffles & Power

    We spent an amazing week exploring Belgium and the Netherlands. The best parts was due to spending time visiting some great friends and family, but of course the lowlands held a lot of charm as well. The last time I visited Belgium I spent my time in Brussels and the fairytale location of Bruges. This time we did a blitz through Knokke-Heist and while we were looking at the fabulous houses there, think “Cribs – Belgian Edition” we said goodbye to summer watching the last night of an international fireworks competition on the beach with some old (and new) German friends.

    We stopped the next day to spend the day in the magical town of Ghent, which is now my favourite Belgian city. Canals weave through the city sloshing under stone bridges, past castles & towers, into the medieval market square whose cobblestone streets are now covered in cafe umbrellas with vendors selling cheap beef stew and fries, mussels, and of course beer. However as our walking tour paused for a brief rain storm, you could imagine what it was like…before it fell under the corrupting influence of waffles. This was a square of vegetables and vengeance, where daily commerce commenced and punishment was completed all under the steady rulership of the Count of Ghent, who ruled with a few provisos. Commerce before all, and a horrific death to counterfeiters. You see, Ghent were a wealthy merchant economy with textiles and wools in the 1300’s, maybe the second largest city in Europe, before it was invaded by the French.

    We also briefly visited Antwerp on our way to Holland, but honestly, aside from the chocolates, it did not have the same charm or magic as Ghent did. Ghent felt a little like walking into Narnia, partially because of it’s huge pedestrian only central core, (something I kinda wished my city did) while Antwerp felt like it yeah it had an old town…yeah it has a central train station, but nothing really convinced me that it was worth hanging around in. Where were it’s secret hiding spots, unfortunately, they remained hidden to me. Goodbye Belgium – Next stop is Holland.

  • La Vie en Rose

    If there is anything that can’t be solved by a bottle of wine, a baguette, and some camembert, then that thing is not in Paris. We spent a few days in Paris doing exactly that, mowing down baguettes on the banks of the Seine, however we managed to get some some actual touring in too as well as see some dear old friends of ours, that we met on World Tour #1 back in 2009, while they were vacationing in Paris.

    This is my ‘after wine and baguette’ face, it is a lovely mix of drunken carbs and looking suspicious. All od the meals we are in Paris were exceptional from grocery store picnics, to an allegedly rat infested restaurant with our friends, (I mean their 6 yr old said he saw a rat, but whatever it was delicious), to our unique dining experience at Dans le Noir which is a ‘blind’ restaurant. Meaning you eat completely in the dark, you have blind waiters, and you have no idea what you are actually eating, unless you can use your tongue to identify it. Laura loved licking the plate with no one actually witnessing it, and obviously I don’t have any photo evidence of this either.

    Anyway onto Notre Dame…

    The cathedral is quite beautiful albeit still in stages of construction since that fire in 2019 from that deranged man who tried to burn the church down. The inside looks like it was especially scrubbed clean from smoke damage, but also from the wear and tear from 800 years of candle wax, splashes of baptismal waters, the tears from weddings and funerals, and the bitter disappointment of prayers when left unfulfilled. As Jesus has washed our sins, so has Notre Dame been left cleansed through a baptismal by fire, only to be made resplendent again and bathed in the love of Parisians. This refreshment may also have something to do with the upcoming visit of Pope Leo XIV this September. 

    After we hopped over to Shakespeare and Company Book store, a bookstore that books should be written about, if they haven’t been already. It is what I imagine the Cemetery of Forgotten Books looks like (in the Shadow of the Wind anthology), crossed with the Hogwarts Library. It was the old haunts of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, T.S.Eliot, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and many many others. It is the kind of shop that makes you want to write, drink brandy, smoke cigars, become argumentative, and then take up pugilism in your spare time. You know if it wasn’t so thick with tourists such as yourself, but if you squint, you can see that future of being a writer…which is really just you romanticizing the past. But if you can’t fantasize about yourself chasing some pursuit in Paris, I don’t think you can say that you have properly visited this city.  I actually snuck this photo, as there are no cameras allowed in the shop (likely due to everyone wanting to use the site to be influencers).

    Paris also included a mandatory stop at the Eiffel Tower, this is the first time Mike and I have ever been up it actually. Ironically the viewes from Level 2 were actually much better than at the top. But we easily spent an hour or two looking out at all of Paris. Some of the smaller sights we hit up were the Society National Bank, which had an exceptionally impressive interior, superior to Gallery Lafayette, which we also visited.

    We spent our final day in splendour at the Versailles Palace. Louis the XIV (the sun king) was a prolific builder of this estate as apparently the old palace (the Louvre) was getting to be a pretty stuffy palace full of ‘heavens save us’ PARISIANS…some of whom were ugh…POOR. Like what a total and complete bummer, way to harsh the royal mellow. So off to the country for opulence, splendor, and a party scene that has never been rivalled before or after. Frankly if there is anything more impressive than the palace, it is the gardens with its 80 hectares of manicured perfection; it takes an army of 45 gardeners to maintain the place. Laura described the garden as being inside of a painting and she was exactly right.

    A bientot a Paris, we will see you again in a few weeks, for now we are grabbing a car and doing a road trip across Western Europe.

  • Bye Bye London

    Mike, Laura, and I absolutely loved our time hanging out in London. With the London Go City pass we managed to do over 30 attractions ranging from the London Eye, The Crown Jewels, Afternoon Tea, the soaring heights of the Shard, the karaoke fever craze that was the ‘Fun Bus Tour’ (Legend), all for the price of about $40/person/day. The pass included several Meals, Wicked Theatre tickets, Walking & Tours, Museums & Galleries, Adventure Parks, Royal Apartments, Booze Tastings, and pretty much everything you could imagine for a raucous 10 days in London. All the attractions were great, the most unexpected joy was the washrooms of the Shard Building having floor to ceilings windows so you can have a very exposed pee at 60 stories up with an excellent view of the city.

    We also loved going to the play Cyrano (not included in the pass) but it was so moving that I was bawling, much to my teenager’s shock. Another unexpected awesome bit of London was taking a canal tour from ‘Little Venice’ to home of punk rock – Camden Town. The canals were made across England for industrial shipping uses across the island and are now places were Londoner’s recreate, tourists gather, and some call home on houseboats. You see a very different perspective of the city via boat and you can see the layers of history that London has lived through as the canals are among the oldest parts of the city. In a very strange and watery version of ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’, the canals connect heavily industrial areas such as coal electricity plants to the most expensive real estate in the city (including secret gardens of a certain Sultan of Oman). You can see marks of the industrial revolution with the bridges crossing it being riveted steel works, you can see the remnants of ‘horse power’ where the horses would pull at ropes to tug the boats along the canal, those rope marks are etched deep into the steel corners of bridges they wore at over the years.

    The only trouble with doing a London city pass is not the ‘value’ part, its not even that the attractions are not entertaining, it is the ‘not living like a local part of things’. It is the feeling that being a tourist starts to feel like full time employment as you try to cram all the things while racing around the city. The hard lesson of London is to try to slow down more and enjoy, that lesson was accentuated by the fact I picked up a creeping and painful case of the ‘Disney Rash’ that I can’t quite shake. Travel always brings odd ailments that apparently only time, walking less than 20,000 steps a day, and diaper rash cream can solve.

    Part of me was tempted to never leave London, but living here would be a totally different experience from touring it…I am not sure that my liver could actually take living here with a pub culture this strong. Besides, the world beckons, and the adventure has only just begun.

  • London Living

    This is the first time in the trip that we feel like we are actually “living” abroad rather than touring. The distinction being created when you are a) staying in the same place for more than a week, b) when you know the local shops and where the best grocery deals are, c) when you have sent parcels to and from, and finally d) when you know which day is garbage day and you put out the ‘rubbish’. This is our first stop where we have had a minute to stop and rest the weary feet (travel callouses are still building with 20,000 steps a day) and it is also giving us a minute to figure out what we are doing to educate our child come September.

    So here is the conundrum: our kid is going into grade 9 and there are two options for her education. One is that we opt for asynchronous learning (video learning) from our home province in Canada. It’s free, but she has to take all 5 core subjects which is quite a bit of daily devotion to the books, which are physical textbooks and kinda heavy. Option 2 is that we teach her ourselves and pray she learns something. Back to school is going to be interesting this year as we try some immersive learning.

    Laura at Frameless London
  • World Trip Planning- Expenses & Savings.

    World Trip Planning- Expenses & Savings.

    Hey everyone, so the question we are being asked again and again is how are you affording a trip around the world and there are a number of components to that answer. One of them was a couple of years ago I found out about a company in my town that reserves 20% of your salary and every 5 years it is expected that you take a year off. Now my company doesn’t do that but I thought well maybe I can just do that myself, so I did that for a couple of years.

    Secondly, we managed to pay off our mortgage after 20 years in the same home and rented it out to provide some additional income. My husband works for himself and is still making income abroad, and finally we had a house fire a couple of years ago (I’ll explain).

    Someone once told me to never waste a good crisis, so we took a really long time settling our claim and transformed every burnt/smoke damaged napkin into cash, much to our underwriter’s chagrin. I don’t suggest that you turn into a pyromaniac or anything but we were able to add to the nest egg by not replacing a lot of the extras in our life. On the positive side, it was a great way to declutter 20 years of accumulated stuff.

    Finally, to keep costs down the only stars we will be sleeping under will be outdoors and not in resorts. In fact here in London, we are house sitting through Trusted House Sitters, and our lovely 4 bed row house comes in at no cost, with the added bonus of a kitty cat we are watching over. The house belongs to a British couple in their 80s and the man is possibly one of the most interesting persons I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. I have never been acquainted with someone who has a Wikipedia entry, but our host is a prolific writer, play writer, television and film a Parsi immigrant, producer/editor/director, a former Black Panther, thought leader, occasional university professor, journalist, and in a strange twist of fate, a friend of the infamous Serial Killer Charles Sobhraj (although I am sure he would only claim him as an acquaintance). You may remember Sobhraj from the Netflix show “the Serpent”, as a psychopath who has killed somewhere in the range of 50 people in the 60-80s for pretty minor reasons. For instance he might sell a backpacker some diamonds and then kill them later to get the diamonds back, that kind of thing. My host wrote a book to expose the man from the myth of the Serpent a few years back called Hawk and Hyena which I am reading right now. He is a natural storyteller in a way that I wish I was.

    I hope we get the opportunity to do more house sitting, but I suspect it will take a lot to beat this sit. I mean where else could you get the phone number of a serial killer, if you were in the market for such a thing (which I am not by the way). London is bringing all kinds of new adventures.

    Mike and our host Farrukh