What Is Jimenez Lai's The White Elephant

This essay will focus on how those works are informed by both regional and international course. In this context, Sydney Ancher and his strong Miesian simplicity as well as Peter Muller’s affinity with Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture principle.

Two examples that I find especially thought provoking are the Danziger studio and the Goldwyn Library. Built to blend into the local surroundings, the luxury residence was given a humble, rough exterior. Davis' explains that the rough exterior of the architecture reflects the underlying social phenomenon of "repression, surveillance and exclusion"(Davis, 224) that collectively forms the "fragmented, paranoid spatiality"(Davis, 229 ) that LA embodies. Moreover, The house's "camouflage"(Davis, 229 ) exterior creates a stark contrast to its luxurious interior, which places further emphasis on the exclusion and barrier between the "opulent"(Davis, 256) interior and the "rough"(Davis, 224 ) environment. I find Davis' assessment of the Daziger studio particularly agreeable and accurate as I truly believe that an architecture, its purpose and characteristic, sheds light to not only its physical environment but also its social environment, something that might not necessarily be as apparent. On the other hand, I find Davis' assessment of the Goldwyn library rather exaggerated. Judging from photos taken, the fifteen foot security wall is not as grotesque and 'fear-imposing' as Davis puts it. Davis described the library as "baroquely fortified...menacing...bizarre"(Davis, 246) and "paranoid"(Davis, 251). Although security and 'vandal-proof'' maybe, as Davis suggested, the initial goal of the design, I do not believe that it is as exaggerated as Davis

Frank Lloyd Wright is one of the most important architects of the twentieth century; with his buildings and his ideals of an organic architecture, he got to be known by everyone. Who does not know about the Fallingwater? This building is considered his masterpiece and represents all his principles. For him, organic architecture was designing by integrating a building to its site and context, and he was able to achieve it with most of his projects. However, Wright’s career did not started like this; he went through a lot of complex periods that ended consolidating his ideals as an architect. Moreover, each of these phases had different kind of influences that Wright took and learned from. Therefore, it’s important to acknowledge how outside architecture and social factors influenced his “Organic” idea.

In A Home Is Not a House, Reyner Banham starts by arguing that the main function of the typic American house is to cover its mechanical structure. In fact, he states that the use of mechanical services in architectural practice varies constantly because mechanical services are considered to be new in the profession, as well as, a cultural threat to the architect’s position in the world. To show his argument, Banham states that American houses are basically large single spaces divided by partitions inside that give a relative importance to the use of internal mechanical services, causing a threat to the need of architectural design. Similarly, American cultural characteristics, like cleanliness and hygiene, also foster the use and need of mechanical

Architecture should be nurturing, responsive and alive, dynamically shifting spatial balances, organically expressive forms, subtly luminous colors and biologically healthy. To achieve such life-enhancing architecture, it has to address all the body senses simultaneously and fuse our image of self with experience of the world. By strengthening our sense of self and reality, architecture serves its all-important function of accommodation and

Different architects have different styles because they are trying to get at different things. Architecture is not just about making something beautiful anymore, it is about trying to get across a set of ideas about how we inhabit space. Two of the most famous architects of the twentieth century, one from each side, the early part and the later part up until today each designed a museum with money donated by the Guggenheim foundation. One of these is in New York City, it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The other is in bilbao, Spain, and it was designed by Frank Geary. My purpose of this paper is to interrogate each of these buildings, glorious for different reasons, to show how each architect was expressing their own style.

On his book on Modern Architecture, Curtis writes that modern architecture was faulted for it’s “supposed lack of ‘recognizable imagery’” towards the end of the 1970s. This statement supports the idea of Jencks’ double coding where architects must now make

In Wright and An alto's houses, a powerful sense of insides is generate by opacity. Which, in Falling water is express in roughly dressed stone masonry walls and, in Villa Mairea. By white-painted, solid walls. The transparency of glass windows in both houses thereby connect the two. In both houses, the architects created a strong sense of insideness yet, at the same time, devised ways to connect inside and outside and thereby create a robust continuity between the two. This inside-outside relationship can be translate into environmental and architectural experience in four different ways: (1) in-betweeness; (2) interpenetration generated by inside; (3) interpenetration generated by outside; and (4)

Gropius traces the growth of the New Architecture and the work of the now well-known Bauhaus, with accuracy, calls for a new artist and architect educated to new materials and approaches as well as meeting the requirements of the age. It is also mentioned in The New Architecture and the Bauhaus that the intention of the Bauhaus was not to reproduce any “style”, system or belief, but simply to exert a revitalizing impact on design. Even though the outward forms of the New Architecture differ primarily in an organic sense from the old, it is the inevitable logical product of the intellectual, social and technical conditions of our age. A gap has been made with the past, allowing us to face a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age we live in. The analysis of the dead styles has been destroyed. Furthermore, the new building throws open the walls like curtains to allow an abundance of fresh air, daylight and sunshine. Instead of securing the building ponderously into the ground, it poises them lightly, yet firmly at the same

Relationships can be difficult when two people have an opposing stance on a controversial topic such as abortion. Men, in their self-interest, perceive this option as an easy way out, in which they can have all the pleasure and none of the consequences. However, for a woman an abortion causes both physical and emotional pain which a man could never understand. Thus, making this one of the utmost difficult issues a girl may need to face in her life. In Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” there are two Americans traveling in Spain. The setting of the scene is a bar located near the train station where the man and the girl discuss this life altering operation, as they await the arrival of the train to Madrid. Throughout the story the man is persuasive, as he attempts to convince the girl to have the operation, while at the same time, the girl expresses her reluctance and remains unconvinced that an abortion is the answer to their problems. Abortion remains as controversial today as it was when Ernest Hemingway wrote “Hills Like White Elephants”. Although Hemingway never used the word abortion in his story, he found ways to evoke emotions of sympathy for the girl and disdain for the man through his creative use of symbolism, setting, and characters in the short story.

The book consists of twelve chapters that propose this idea that designers should explore the nature of our senses’ response to the spatial built forms that people invest their time in. It tries to cover a specific topic in each chapter that in order to deconstruct the book, it is necessary to cover each chapter individually.

As suggested by the title, this piece of literature attempts to highlight the importance of sensory experience in architecture. It is indeed a response to what the author terms as ‘ocularcentrism’ of Modern Architecture. Ocularcentrism is the act of prioritizing visual stimuli to all other sensory stimuli available to a human perception. He quotes famous German poet, Goethe, in his defense, “the hands want to see, the

“ Architecture organizes and structures space for us, and its interiors and the objects enclosing and inhabiting its rooms can facilitate or inhibit our activities by the way they use this language”(Lawson pg.6).

Using the quote by Habermas as a starting point, select up to two buildings designed in the twentieth century and examine what ‘sudden, shocking encounters’ they have encountered, or created. Analyse the building’s meanings as a demonstration of an avant-garde, or potentially arriere-garde, position.

Architecture can be viewed with two different types of properties. Properties that can be seen like shapes, their composition, the spaces they create and, the colours and textures that make up their appearance. These properties are considered to be visual while other properties are considered to be abstract. These properties can only be described using words; the meanings behind the architecture and the stories that can be told about it. The context, its cultural background and its function also affects how we view architecture. The question is, what