MerryChristmas!, 2.1.09

It was hard for me believe how the concepts we covered in class would apply to so many buildings downtown. At first, I concerned the concepts to be rare and abstract, however, they most likely exist in every city across the world. On our way to downtown Orlando, we passed by a building on the right that exhibited the "deco" theme, commonly found in Miami beach. The sign was neon and the building had sort of a dirty feel. It certainly fit right into the buildings that most would come across right outside of a big city. Across from the deco-style building, we saw a series of what looked like condos. The condos were all connected and each apartment shared the same wall. They looked as if they had been there for quite some time, but were rather clean compared to the deco building across the street. This reminded us of urbane-urbanism. It is the idea of recreating a building to appear as though it had been there forever, but it is actually recently constructed.

The latter part of the trip, after viewing the Bank of America building, we looked across the way and saw the bus station (with no clocks) and the building adjacent to it. The bus station looked as though Disney would be a good fit for it because it seemed very cheesy to me. The top of the station was constructed to look like waves. The construction of the building was clearly visible and the architecture implied that this was purposeful. Thus, double-coding is likely the reason for this. The top of the bus station was made to look like waves, but it also serves the function of putting a cover over the station (probably for the purpose of protection from Florida rain storms).

Throughout the tour, it became apparent to me that the elements we discussed are all around us and open our eyes to new ideas that we once before did not consider. I can recall driving down i4 and looking at the bus station and thinking that it was just neat, but outrageous. It wasn't until last class that I really began opening my eyes to what is behind the construction of buildings and how much thought is really put into it. It is a new perspective that I had never considered in the past, but will always consider in the future.