iar221 in 140 for unit three : explorations

week 11 : the world’s fairs serve as a microcosm of stylistic explorations: anything goes in architecture + design…conversations of style + substance.

week 12 : in the continued search for contemporary design, “good design for all” stands as a major mantra for twentieth-century designers + architects.

week 13 : multiple modernisms take shape throughout the globe; the world can be seen increasingly moving from individual to global economies + scales.

week 14 : reactions to modernism take multiple forms; we end where we began, thinking about the meanings, makers, and users in the practice of design.

final blog post (for 27 apr 12)

taking up the theme of a design autobiography, select an OBJECT, a SPACE, a BUILDING, and a PLACE, each of which encapsulate your own design sensibilities.  for each image you include (and there should be a total of four), provide a substantive annotation that connects the selected artifact to your world.  make explicit connections to your understandings of design as it has unfolded during the course of this semester.

blog post for 16 april 2012

select an object, space, building, or place that you believe to be modern and explain why this might be the case. illustrate your blog post with your selected artifact.

blog post for 09 apr 2012

in light of our discussion in class this week, select and analyze an object, space, building, or place that embodies the idea of "good design for all."

unit two [reverberations] 140 statements

i've pulled all of the summary statements for the six weeks of unit two here...be sure to consult the comments from unit one summaries as you make these summaries for unit two.

week 05 : eyes dance across surface, music enfolds, light washes from above. worship spaces stand as tangible expressions of faith in glass and stone.

week 06 : the first millennium ends, the modern world map unfolds: we see more enlightened places + people than previous notions of the “dark ages.”

week 07 : making rules to break with gothic ideas and re-link to the ancients of the western world : observing continuities with the past in the east.

week 08 : as western rules made + written, designers work across genre + scale to bend + break them; eastern designers maintain a continuous approach.

week 09 : colonial expansion brings ideas + people around the world. in these encounters, emulation and maintaining difference both become important.

week 10 : architecture and design obscure significant political, social, and cultural change brought by revolution and invention throughout the world.

blog post for 02 april 2012

considering the idea of style + substance introduced in class, analyze a present-day object, space, building, and place. link your exploration to your understanding of the rise of modernism in architecture + design. why do you think it was so important for people by the beginning of the twentieth century to be working so hard to be modern?

All's Fair at the Fair

Hopefully this video will allow for a visual connection to the topics we discussed in class.

 Today in class we talked about the world's fairs and what they showed and how people perceived them. This cartoon made in 1938, a year before the 1939 world's fair in New york, which was one of the first world's fair that looked to the future instead of the past.

The poster advertising the 1939 world fair was looking towards the future and the possibilities rather than past inventions.

It starts out showing how fast the buildings to house the fairs were made since they were only supposed to be temporary. The building is very futuristic, containing both the sphere and the "wu-wu" shown in the poster above. All of the machines and mechanisms are futuristic and things that haven't yet been invented. The cartoon shows just how many people people would attend these events (although they probably didn't show up in trains that are like sardine cans). The people are all average looking, including the couple that we see arrive on horse and carriage. The image of the horse and carriage is meant to juxtapose all of the futuristic inventions, making people leave behind the past and go towards the future.

The 1939 fair was meant to celebrate the end of The Great Depression, so the cartoon shows all of these wondering thins being made with no regard to expense. For example, the furniture literally being push punched from the wood log and another wood log being made into a single clothes pin. But at the end of the cartoon, the old couple we first saw turn become a young and modern couple, abandoning their old ways, which was exactly what the 1939 world'd fair was meant to do.