FloRida, 9/19

I am really happy that Louisa read those specific blogs this week. They really helped me realize how to connect different theorist to one another. I have been having trouble connecting all of them in my mind but it is a great idea to read other blogs to help you put the pieces together. The past few theorists have been pretty difficult to understand and reading/seeing other people’s takes on what the readings are about truly helps.
This past week we discussed Habermas and Jencks. Habermas was extremely difficult material, while Jencks was a little less difficult to comprehend. One point that Dr. Rog discussed through Habermas was the concept of conservatism. We constantly label our society with two different parties, when in reality the use of the words conservative and liberal means something completely different than what it used to. According to Habermas there are three types of conservatives: Young-claim centered anti-modern revelations (AKA: Theorists)/ Old- decry decline of reason, yearn for Renaissance (AKA: Liberal Arts)/ Neoconservatives- technical, capital, rational (AKA: Cheney). I believe the quote that conceptualizes this point is when Habermas states, “Hegemony never sees itself as “political” or “ideological.”
Jencks was somewhat more readable. He wants to move from the classical to the neoclassical. This means that we move away from a very simplistic style to a more ornate, decorative style. Jencks discusses eleven rules or canons that he uses to describe art or architecture. In my pre-class post, I discussed how I could really understand the first one which is about beauty and composition. He describes them as dissonant beauty or disharmonious Harmony. Through Dr. Rog’s presentation and the use of visual I could truly understand the other ten canons. I really liked the concept of Urbane Urbanism. I feel like a lot of architecture does this, where the builders try and make the building or art form look like it is much older than it actually is.
I could connect the two through their concepts of art and architecture. Habermas uses the ideas of traditionalism versus avant-gardism, while Jencks uses his eleven canons to explain different reasons for why art and architecture are presented a certain way. Both have interconnected ideas when looked at in depth.

Graham, 9/18/09

I really enjoyed the reading for Thursday, and I thought that the architecture that we looked at in class really helped me to understand what Jencks was talking about with disharmonious harmony…etc.
I never really looked at architecture this way before, and the fact that I went to many of these places that he showed on the overhead, it really made me think that I need to appreciate architecture that I see and notice the work that has been put into it.
I now see that I did not understand the reading fully, I focused my pre-post on Urbane urbanism, and thought that Jencks was trying to say that we try to combine too many ideas into one building (making the building have multiple uses) but I found out that Urbane urbanism is something that is extremely popular in Colorado, Florida and California. The idea of it is to be urban and condensed, but appear that it has been there forever. For example, Baldwin Park and Celebration. Now that I think of it, this occurs so often with the new apartments and subdivision that are being built.
I also thought the other slides we looked at were interesting too. The buildings that looked like faces was so odd to me. I have never seen a building that looked like this. This also went along with the rabbit corkscrew that is sold at Target. They are beginning to give living being features to every day products.
Anamnesis: Den Kub was actually inspired by a rubix cube, and I thought that this building was really fun to look at.
I think that Thursday’s class was very beneficial, and it made the reading extremely clear to me, and cleared up the misconceptions I had when I was reading. I really liked this topic.

Ron Burgundy, Jencks

This piece by Jencks was extremely confusing to me. The preface of it didn't seem to lead into the main points of the article well enough so I was terribly confused on what the author's intent was in the article. It seemed that Jencks was writing on some aspects of the postmodern era that characterize it, specifically looking at art and architecture. Although much of the article was extremely hard to grasp I tried to make sense of a particular section in which Jencks wrote about the tendency of the postmodern architechture to be a play between the old style and the new technology. Jencks talks about the ironic "cardboard architecture" that is meant to resemble the classical style of historical architectural pieces but is made up of new innovative, and more affordable materials such as cardboard (291). He explains how in the postmodern era artists often show reverence and make reference to the past but to reform it in a new way that makes it postmodern. This way of explaining the concept of postmodern makes me connect it closely with the avant-garde, which is against the traditional. In particular it makes me think of an episode of project runway in which the designers were meant to create avant-garde pieces to display on the runway. What the different designers came up with were extremely interesting and reflect the idea of being inspired by the past but recreating it in a new way. All of their garments resembled a certain era of fashion and history but had been recreated with new twists of modernity which in essence made them very postmodern pieces. They were pieces that we would associate with certain periods of history but also recognize that they were a new innovative take on an old traditional thing. As I read ideas about the concept of postmodernism such as this one, it leads me to believe that much of what can be considered "postmodern", specifically speaking in the realm of art, consists of aspects of the old traditional works that are reformed with a more modern perspective.

DoubleBubble - Jencks

"Often in history there is a combination of continuity and change which looks perplexing because of view of both the old and the new is altered". This is how Jencks starts his article. After reading this article and also reading the other students blogs I think that this quote is the most important aspect of what Jencks is trying to say. History, there is a mixture of what we are use to and also a mixture of a change. Sometimes we are scared about this change. Why are we scared, because it is a mixture of both the new and the old. Sometimes within our society we are scared of the new and changing our lives to new things, but actually those types of things are important to our everyday society. We can't just live our lives like the past always has, or else we would never be changing. But also, we are terrified, especially our older generation of exposing ourselves to the new. For instance, my mom is always terrified to go on the computer, she thinks it is way to technological for her and she is just not living in the type of technological generation we are. Even worse, my grandmother just got an answering machine two years ago after we forced her to install it, and she still uses a rotary phone. yup.

In our society I think a lot of the time people are scared to face the idea of new and better things. But also, we do not want to live in the past. The old is what is altered and also the new is being altered. I truly think that the way that Jencks starts his article is the most important way for us to think about how we view our postmodern society as well as our modern society.

The present to us looks weird and disturbing, but yet also so does the romantic age when we look at it. So is there a happy middle? Who knows.

Nate Dogg, Jencks

I liked Jencks quote towards the end of the piece "The ambivalence accurately reflects this double state of transition, where activity moves away from a well-known point, acknowledges the move, and yet keeps a view, or trace, or love of that past location" (293). It's interesting to think about how many buildings you've been inside of, or even seen, that owe their creation to an architect, who in turn owes credit to another architect, and so forth. People like to bring things from their past into their present. We save books full of pictures of old friends, old scenic views. The past affects our present and future in every facet, leaving it's imprint on everything we do and everything we will do in life. Post-modernism wants us to put the past aside and do something that hasn't been done before. With daily reminders of continuing tradition and savoring nostalgia existing in the buildings we live in, go to school in, or work in, its hard to find inspiration for something new and creative without invoking some aspect of the past. Capitalism adds to this problem by stifling creativity to an extent. How do we break the rules when making something?
I also liked how Jencks wrote about how the difference between living in a world that is in cosmic harmony, and living in one that is evolving affects art. "Vitruvius equated the "perfect" human body with the celestial order and then justified the perfected order of the temple on these assumptions." (282) What would Vitruvius think of his creation if he knew that the universe was ever changing, and that the same celestial bodies that he based his works around would be in far different shapes and places as more and more time passed? Would he feel that it takes away from his creation? Would he be happier without the knowledge that those stars would change?

FloRida, Jencks

Jencks begins his article by stating, “Often in history there is a combination of continuity and change which looks perplexing because our view of both the old and the new is altered. Thus, with Postmodern Classicism the meanings, values and forms of modernism and classicism are simultaneously transformed into a hybrid combination.” He makes this statement in relation to art and architecture. I believe that this statement also relates to most everything in our lives. Life constantly changes and evolves, never slowing down and always progressing. Postmodern Classicism, in my mind, means that we are breaking boundaries for new ideas but still forming them from classical concepts and perspectives by keeping the classic in the back of our minds! Jencks relates a certain set of rules to the new ideas and architecture. He comments that, “Now, rules or canons for production are seen as preconditions for creativity, a situation caused partly by the advent of the computer, which makes us conscious of the assumptions behind a building.” We consciously make decisions about things based on our minds being conditioned to think or do something specific. There are eleven canons (rules) that he mentions and the one that I could understand most was the first one about beauty and composition. “In place of Renaissance harmony and Modernist integration is the new hybrid of dissonant beauty, or disharmonious harmony. Instead of a perfectly finished totality ‘where no part can be added or subtracted except for the worse’ (Alberti), we find the ‘difficult whole’ (Venturi) or the ‘fragmented unity’ of artists...” Society no longer has one concept or meaning for anything. We connect ideas, beliefs, words, and art to create what we find beautiful and meaningful. Pieces are used to create a whole. “Inevitably art and architecture must represent this paradoxical view, the oxymoron of ‘disharmonious harmony’, and it is therefore not surprising that we find countless formal paradoxes in postmodern work such as ‘asymmetrical symmetry’, ‘syncopated proportion’, ‘fragmented purity’, ‘unfinished whole’ and ‘dissonant unity’.”

ESPN12, Jencks

"Often in history there is a combination of continuity and change which looks perplexing because our view of both the old and new is altered." Jencks starts off with this quote and though short, it says a lot. If I understand him right I got that there are things within the post modern culture that can change are views of both present culture and past. I found it interesting to think that this notion can change the way we view the past. I understand that since we are living in the post modern world that are view of the world can change because of it, but I never really thought to much of how it can affect our views of the past. To me it makes quite a lot of sense.
In Jencks view of post modernity he states eleven of his most significant cannons to help better understand his view on the creativity of the arts and the architecture in this new culture. In my understanding of his explanation of the arts the quote "When several possible readings are presented simultaneously, it is left to the reader to supply the unifying text" helped me better understand. I was able to see it is similar to Bartes in the way that he says sometimes the authors cannot even predict the tmesis in their art and they are not sure what they meant. They leave it up to the reader/viewers to try and figure out what they mean. He mentions at times that it can be frustrating for readers because they want clear cut answers. However, it can also be a good thing and people will sometimes enjoy figuring out what they think is trying to be said. It leads to debates and people are able to relate the items back to themselves in a way that they think it was meant for them. Such debates and thought makes me think of the way that Jencks uses this sense of a pluralist society in the way there are multiple sides for everything and more put into the simplest of ideas art work and architecture.