September 16th, 2009

Today's class focused on the visual process, i.e. using words to describe a building. We have to train ourselves to marry lines and language. We also talked about how every period was/is the antithesis of the period preceding it: from Classical to Renaissance, Baroque to Rococco to Mannerism, etc. We must ask ourselves how our building fits into the context of history and think about how critical architecture represents society.

Other topics we touched upon:
-being intellectual about architecture
-animism
-support (vertical, horizontal, cantilevered)
-thinking while drawing
-Frank Lloyd Wright's love of nature (he used low ceilings to emphasize this) and the horizontality of it
-the importance of controlling or emphasizing/exaggerating ideas vs. trying to keep with standards
-the meaning of MODERN (modernism): a train of thought, a way of thinking --> post/beam technology, materials (glass - light, transparency; steel - skyscraper), spacious/open landscape, clean lines, revealing
-Post-Modern Theory as a return to ornamentation (classic elements with ornamentation)
-the idea of AXIS
-the use of structural forms used as sculptural forms

Chapter II of Experiencing Architecture:

• p. 35 - seeing requires a lot of us; we must see while thinking about details, relationships, contrast
• p. 22 - the description of lines (hard/soft, faint/dark, edge (silhouette))
• p. 47 - figure/ground relationship (taking the in-between spaces of background, white of paper into account); mass (solid) vs. cavity (void); scale and proportion