Each year for five years we have studied the unique urban environment that is Florence. Why Florence? It is a "knowable" city: everything human-scaled.It is a city inundated by mass tourism, a tourist town. It is as Andrea Branzi has said to us (he is a native Florentine), a place that looks outward constantly, always beyond itself (as Galileo did). It is busy, noisy, hot, filled with mosquitoes, infuriating at times.
But within this city are some of the most beautiful - stunningly beautiful - things, spaces, places that could possibly be imagined.
Take the your breath-away beauty. Sit-stunned-in-awed-silence-for-hours beauty.
It is a city that one must seek out the uniquely beautiful and not settle for those places where others (often day-tourists) dominate the space until the city returns to the local people between 11pm and 7am. Even in or near those places that are "known" are wonders such as Michelangelo's second Pieta, which for some reason, despite its "michelangelo-ness" is off the grand tour. Yet if you took the time to sit before this masterwork for a few hours, it is certain that your life would change, that your depth of emotion would be welled deeper. To seek out Ghirlandaio's Last Supper at San Salvi well beyond the center is to stand, for no charge, before a genius that is hard to grasp. But if you came to this place repeatedly with your sketching pencil you might begin to learn from the great Renaissance colorist as a new master. Draw a hand, a face, a gesture and find the cosmos. Florence is not a place to "do". It is place to slow down - to live slowly, to enjoy one thing; and long time. And then there is THAT view over the city from San Miniato al Monte...
Great cities inspire great works, responses to the place by artists and designers that reflect the inspiration they feel, the humanity and terror, the beauty and depth of faith. This is what we study in Florence each year. We do this ALONE. Not as a group. Every one has a bicycle and are asked to find their own space. We live for two weeks in a wonderful communal apartment staying with our friends Ingrid and Giovanni. This place, Florence, Ingrid's, San Salvi becomes home. Each student is asked to test their boundaries. To think about why they came, what they thought would be here, what they came all of this way to find. The "transcendent moments" project asks them all to find this, and record it.
And Florence is the greatest place on earth to engage such a study.
Transcendent Moments 
| Alex | April | Azmina |
| Brad | Derek | Jenny |
| Karen | Katrina | Morgan |
| Helen | Robert | Ryan |
| Simon | Yosuke |