Ron Burgundy, 9/17

This week’s class lectures, specifically Thursday’s discussion on Jencks, are extremely helpful in understanding the abstract and difficult concepts that we are studying in this course. Reading the Jencks article is was difficult to make sense of all of the key terms that were being explained through describing architecture. However after Thursday’s class I felt I had a much better grasp on the concepts that Jencks was trying to explain in dealing with the postmodern era and even gained a new perspective on what Jencks' points were. In this particular major when we think of postmodernism we initially think of media and the influence of the postmodern attitude on the productions of our media companies. This article and class discussion was extremely enlightening as it opened my mind to realize that postmodernism isn’t just something we see in the popular culture realm or media and art but also in things such as architecture. We often forget that architecture should be revered as an art form and just as any other art is influenced by the times, periods of influence that our society experiences. Seeing the pictures of varying pieces of architecture to coincide with the different terms was extremely helpful and interesting in understanding postmodernism. One idea in particular that was explained that was interesting to me was the “tradition-reinterpreted” kind of architecture that takes a classic architectural style and uses it for a completely different function. When Dr. Rog showed us an example of this I immediately thought of the architectural style that is in the store that I work in. At the surf shop I work at the walls are decorated with Greek-like columns every eight feet or so with arches between them. Although they look stone and heavy the columns are actually made out of a cheaper easier to work with material but still give the classic look to the store. This exemplifies the “tradition-reinterpreted” well as these classic columns which would usually be seen in an ancient Greek building are seen in a surf shop giving it a bit of style.