Bella, Jencks

In his piece, “The Emergent Rules”, Jencks discusses the idea of anthromorphism. Anthromorphism is used to refer to architecture that is humanistic in its physical form. I found this idea to be the most interesting aspect of his piece, because I have seen this type of architecture before. When I visited Barcelona, Spain I noticed that many of the buildings were designed by the artists to look like animals. I distinctly remember one specific building that had the trunk of an elephant as the front steps, leading into a door right in the middle of the elephant head, with two large elephant ear, pod like extensions that appeared to be bedrooms. I’m not sure if Jencks’ description of anthromorphism directly applies, but it seems to be extremely similar. The buildings were not “suggestive of the human body”, rather they were direct replicas of animals’ bodies.

Post modern architecture is not something I have studied before, and I am not quite sure how it will apply to our class other than understanding the full range of the PoMo culture. In his article, Jencks states, “This idea–and old one stemming from the notion of ‘organic unity’–is relatively rare in our culture, where art and architecture tend to have gone their separate ways” Jencks 289. I think that this is a perfect explanation for postmodernism–a combination of art, culture and experiment. They take old and blend with new, mixing unlikely text combinations, pushing the boundaries of reader and writer to pave a new road.