Reflections

The reflections unit has been a huge turn in the type of architecture that we have talked about. In this unit we moved from past architecture types to buildings that are more commonly seen today such as skyscrapers. We started out the reflections unit in a country that we had not talked about until this point and this country is the United States of America. We started talking about how architecture in America was a lot like in England however the materials used in America was more often likely to be wood because it was readily available and fairly easy to use. We also talked about the design of buildings in Washington DC and the fact that a lot of the buildings took inspiration from Grecian and Roman design. The biggest invention as far as materials go during the industrial revolution is iron and glass. When talking about iron and glass we talked especially about the Crystal Palace in London which was built for the World’s Fair. This building was extremely impressive because of its massive size and the innovations of large spaces without structural supports such as columns, iron, and glass enabled this to happen. Also in this unit we talked about how because of money and materials were more abundant people began to build and design rooms for a specific reason and with specific design ideas. An example of this that we learned about was the peacock room. Moving on from this point in time we began to talk about form vs. reform in which people were debating whether or not it was better for things such as furniture and a variety of other things to be built by machine or by hand at the time it seemed to a lot of people that machines were a bad thing because it took away jobs and things built by machines were a lower quality than those things built by hand. A large topic of discussion this unit was Chicago: the second city. When talking about Chicago we really began to talk about the beginnings of skyscrapers. The original skyscrapers were not very large just a few stories but they eventually grew up to being hundreds of stories high. We talked about design of skyscrapers and how they are divided into three sections the entrance level or bottom of the building the middle of the building and the top of the building oftentimes the bottom and the top of the buildings would be the most designed parts of the buildings. Overall the reflections unit was a good unit I personally really enjoyed it because the material covered is closer to our time period and therefore seems to be more applicable to my life and my design. The picture below that I chose to use that well represents this unit is the crystal palace. The reason that I believe this building represents this time period is because of its materials which lead to the ability to build things such as skyscrapers and so forth.