Kiwi, 9/20/09

This week’s class discussions specifically Thursday’s class on Jencks really helped me to better understand concepts of postmodern era and the points that Jencks was trying to make. In class we looked at and compared all of the forms of architecture which I thought was a great way to relate to Jencks reading. Learning the terms traditional, classic and modern and how they each help to form new types of architecture around the world was new to me and helped me to realize that postmodernism isn’t just something we see in the media and art but also is in things such as architecture. Taking a closer look at the pictures of the varieties of the architecture pieces and matching them with different terms was probably one of my favorite exercises that we have done this year. One idea in particular that Rog explained to us in class that really interested me was, “Anthropomorphism.” This architecture was putting human characteristics on a building (Ex: face building, rabbit bottle opener) which I thought was very cool. When Rog showed us pictures of this it reminded me of when I was a kid and would ride in the car with my mom. I used to always look at building and houses and be able to resemble the buildings; cat faces, pumpkin faces, human faces etc… I used to always think I was crazy that I could see all of these different faces but who knows…. Maybe I was actually looking at anthropomorphism architecture and I never even knew!
One other architecture that I thought was interesting to learn about was the
“urban urbanism.” Making a building look new and like it’s been there forever sounded unreal to me. I had no clue that this was a type of architecture when designing buildings until Rog gave us a perfect example of this which was Baldwin Park.
As we delve deeper into topics I become more engaged in this class. This week’s topic was interesting because it was a subject that I have never explored in classes before