Adoness Hall
3/3/2014
ARC 2201
Dr. Culver
Paper Assignment Two
“An Examination”
Feeling the Miami breeze embrace my skin as, I sit down in the brown leather concourse benches, relaxing in Miami Dade College’s building one. Building one, architecturally speaking is considered to be associated with brutalism architecture. Brutalism is a geometric style that is massive and blocky in appearance. Usually it contains an extreme amount of poured concrete. The style was more notable in the mid-1970s and first introduced by Le Corbusier. As an architect and a designer who exhibited a trend of design in its simplest and most raw form, Le Corbusier brought a tantamount of attention to brutalism with the design of his Secretariat Building in India. *
Miami Dade College’s campus is composed of brutalism architecture. However, just because the architectural design may contain raw material such as slabs of concrete, does not mean it cannot be pleasantly aesthetic. The conformity of the rhythm, texture and even ornamentation can create pleasant aesthetics to a design. Aesthetics is a set of principles involving nature and the appreciation of its splendor. Building one creates moments of awe to me because of its choice of materials, placement and functionality. The building contains sedimentary stones embedded into the outer walls of the edifice. This distributes a natural and contented impression towards building. Creating an element of invitation towards the bystander. The sedimentary rock is not only embedded into the walls, it is also strikingly placed around the structure thus, contributing to that natural feeling. On the outside of the building there are plants and trees also for the environmental sense. In or...
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...y this naturalistic area. The building is quite congruent in space, divided only by the only two entrances to the edifice. Circulation in this design is moderately simplistic due to the corresponding angles being completely identical. The symmetry is being used as an aesthetic element to express the calm environment it is supposed to be. This systematic expression can be found all throughout the structure. Whether it is the windows, the set of stairs and even the columns, the simplicity is being allocated.
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Building one expresses what beginning and the start of a magnificent campus. The open area for socialization and comradery displays what this campus is about; unity, diversity and colloquy.
Dell Upton is a historian and renowned professor of architecture and Urbanism at the University of California. He has published several books on architecture; one of them is “Architecture in the United States”, published in 1998. In this book, Upton analyzes the architecture of the United States in different aspects, such as nature, money and art, thus depicting the great variety in architectural forms, and how throughout the decades, different interests have lead communities to different ways of building, different purposes and materials, thus reflecting their way of thinking and their relationship with the environment. By exploring so many different architectural styles, Upton reveals the great diversity and richness that has always, and continues to characterize American architecture.
It is the new decade after the end of world war two and modernism is a well-established practice. Its pioneers and spearheads are prevalent figures looming over the new architects and designers who are trying to make their mark in the shadows of such historically influential people. With new technologies and materials emerging from the world wars the next era of modernism had started to evolved, bringing with it philosophies and ideas which seemed far removed from those of the pioneers of modernism “What emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s was an expanding synthesis of questions utterly removed from the confident statements of the pioneers.”(Spade 1971,10) Two significant buildings were designed in the 50's, both of them for educational institutes and to house students of architecture, there were both designed in completely different styles and methods. The first is Ludwig Mies van der Rohes' Crown Hall, finished in 1956 and designed as a part of a campus master plan for the Illinois Institute of technology in Chicago. Mies' design for Crown Hall is one of his most realised expressio...
James F. O'Gorman, Dennis E. McGrath. ABC of Architecture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Document. October 2013.
Mies' well known theory of “less is more” is apparent by the spaciousness and functional quality of the Seagram building; everything serves a purpose, either for aesthetic appeal or functionality. “Less is more” is a concept used throughout the architectural world today. “Mies van der Rohe stands as a great moral force of the International Style. The essence of architecture, to Mies, lies in the expression of structure. And his precise, sophisticated, and consistent style of architecture sets an exam...
But these contrived differences give rise to esthetic difficulties too. Because inherent differences—those that come from genuinely differing uses—are lacking among the buildings and their settings, the contrivances repre...
In conclusion, the debate between aesthetics and functionalism has been around for a long time. It becomes clear however, through research, that the first thing architects consider is function, and then aesthetics. It is because of this approach that aesthetics becomes somewhat of a by-product of the whole design process. By looking at examples of various buildings, it is apparent that aesthetics is important to structure and in many instances has been successfully coupled with function. But in no circumstance should aesthetics take precedence over the function and practicality of a building. It seems more likely that a happy medium between function and aesthetics can be reached, on a project by project basis, and then applied to the design process of creating the building.
...of the house as a result towards the unconventional design. Nevertheless, in the landscape point of view, this residence is surrounding by the trees and it creates a complete sense of privacy around the suburban site (Gehry 1979,73).
There is a Romanesque style in the arched windows and the brick walls. The Beaux-Arts tradition is a T-shaped floor plan. The building measures 75 feet in diameter with three wings. The Rotunda’s walls are made of Italian marble and the floors have mosaic tile. The statue in the center of the floor is called “Three Muses.”
The essence of modern architecture lays in a remarkable strives to reconcile the core principles of architectural design with rapid technological advancement and the modernization of society. However, it took “the form of numerous movements, schools of design, and architectural styles, some in tension with one another, and often equally defying such classification, to establish modernism as a distinctive architectural movement” (Robinson and Foell). Although, the narrower concept of modernism in architecture is broadly characterized by simplification of form and subtraction of ornament from the structure and theme of the building, meaning that the result of design should derive directly from its purpose; the visual expression of the structure, particularly the visual importance of the horizontal and vertical lines typical for the International Style modernism, the use of industrially-produced materials and adaptation of the machine aesthetic, as well as the truth to materials concept, meaning that the true nat...
A smaller pool lays adjacent to the building on the opposite side enclosed by a wall of marble. Mies designed the pavilion to blur the lines between inside and outside space. There are parts of the walls that seem to be missing which creates a flow between the two main spaces. The pavilion’s thin sweeping roof is supported by eight cruciform columns clad in chrome. This created an open and free space where he lined the outside of the building with glass. He then carefully placed a thin slab of onyx in the middle of the open volume.
Architecture is the concept of bringing structure, materiality, form and space together as a whole, provide people with enclosed atmosphere to experience. Considering this, it is important to identify that materiality and the purpose of details has been a key methodology to bringing architectural intentions into the design in an affective manner, more over producing an architectural expression. However, this position is rather declining in architecture, reducing tectonics and materiality to being secondary to form and space. With the start of modernism, the attempt to achieve minimalistic style has caused detailing to increasingly develop into a decorative aspect of a building, neglecting its individual contribution to architecture.
In developing this contemporary and iconic building, the design focuses on practical attributes and optimises energy efficiency. The design strategy encapsulates four key aspects:
In conclusion, although the development of modern architecture and the intervention of computer technology to advocate this development, the contemporary architectural outcomes have became more complex and complicated with potential formulation problems. As a result, the new architecture theories came to put boundary lines between being in the range of these problems and producing elegant modern built environment. The seduction of computer-produced form also enhances architects to involve in seeking for new theories to develop the discipline and work to combine formulization with materialization. Finally, some of these theories are accepted and some other still a controversial aspect in architecture.
The book as a description of modern architecture, its styles and influence succeeds but falls short as a prescriptive methodology. His work is still recalled for the need by modernists to categorize everything into neat little boxes, not necessarily for the sake of uniformity, but for sake of some ambiguity. The ambiguity may be the triumph of this book as post modern architecture era is supposed to create more questions than the answers.
This usually entails the manipulation of texture, proportion and the setting pleasant utilization of sunshine with the intention to realize symmetry, harmony and an accurate equilibrium in complete human life. The essential ideas of good design are pure and to an enormous extent innate. When analyzing the universal properties of sunshine, house, colour and supplies, the inside designer appears to be like at the interplay of the natural legal tips that govern them. The precise design of a room works not only on the customarily ignored senses of odor and listening to but additionally on the emotions. Coloration schemes are selected to copy the mood of a room. Understanding how every side of a design contributes to a common look and feel of a room or area constantly takes precise experience and each architects and designers manipulate these to good