spagheti, 2/1

I really enjoyed the class trip to downtown Orlando on Thursday. I too had never really thought of the buildings around us any of the things Jencks talked about. In the powerpoint, Doc Rog used extreme examples in order to illustrate the points, most of which were in foreign countries and obvious. Even on the drive downtown, the other students riding in the car with me started calling out the various buildings we saw on the way and we found examples of everything even before we got downtown.
In re-reading Jencks’ piece after the field trip, I began thinking, isn’t everything technically disharmonious harmony? The paradox says it all. While all the other specific examples such as urbane urbanism, art deco, etc. each identify something very specific, they overlap. And the blending of several of these themes in one building is disharmonious harmony. As Jencks points out, part of the reasons we are able to recognize all of the past influences of these modern day structures is because of the ubiquity of such images. For example, not everyone in our class has been to the Parthenon in Greece, but everyone recognized it in our class. It says something about the age of reproduction in which we live. I remember in CMC100, reading about the notion of “authenticity” and the construction of meaning. The debated question is whether the massive reproduction of such images takes something away from its meaning. Therefore, when disharmonious harmony is so prevalent in everything we do/see (i.e. not only buildings but also music, writing, the amalgamation of cultures especially in the United States…), is some of the original meaning lost?