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Castelgrande
We went to Bellinzona, a city nestled in a large mountain valley-per usual in Switzerland-about 45 minutes from where we reside. This proved to be quite a significant event in my life, because I got to explore the towers and grounds of a castle. If you were a normal child, you loved learning about, reading about, and being about a castle. The dream of huge fortress where you’re the king, somebody like Carmen Electra, Jenny McCarthy, or Pam Anderson is the queen, and your best buds are your knights and nobles, should not be foreign to any child in the world. All you do is run the township and countryside, fight with swords on steeds, and slay dragons. I can’t say my dreams were completely validated there yesterday, but they were absolutely refined and reshaped to my current interests.
Castelgrande sits on top of a hill overlooking Bellinzona, and has developed from the times of TePees and Huts into the monster it is today. Different spreading empires of the Old World made their way through here, building up the castle to protect such a coveted trading post just north of Italy. Now its a free public museum and major tourist attraction; rightfully so.
Seeing all of this for the first time really blew my mind. I have a particular interest in repetitive elements in architecture, whether it be a building unit like a brick, or a long string of battlements like the ones above, for the clean lines they can bring to a building, along with different layers of human interaction. Human interaction in either case adds another aesthetic to the building as a whole, marking it as an object of curiosity for other people. When people want to know what’s going on, or what was going on in a building based on how it looks or feels, I think that’s a step in the right direction for its architect.
So I didn’t slay a dragon or run the township. I felt like a king though, ate some grapes off the vine, and saw some beautiful things. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, more photos on Flickr. Ciao
