Unit Summary: EXPLORATIONS

The final unit that we studied in my history and theory of design class was titled explorations. This unit moved us into the 20th century. In this unit we started out taking about post impressionism and how it moved us into expressionism and futurism. We also talked about art nouveau and about how it branched out over Europe and even to Australia. While talking about Art Nouveau we talked about hotels in design which is really the first time that we have talked about hotels in the since of being in relation to good design. One of the biggest themes that we talked about in this unit would be modernism. We started out talking about modernism with the question what is modern. We answered this by saying that modern can be defined in two different ways. The first way that we said modern can be defined is in the form of technology or the newest inventions and the most advanced technology. The second way that we defined modern was in the form of modern design this would be defined by sleek and simple looks. In talking about modernism we talked about the Guggenheim museum in New York and also a lot of other famous buildings that are still impacting architecture today such as the Sydney opera house. We talked about how design was being spread through television one specific thing we talked about was the staircase from the Brady Bunch. Modernism was a huge topic of this unit but we moved past modernism also we talked about post modernism and we began to talk about sustainable design. Sustainable design is the actual design movement that we are in right now we are living in it and participating in the direction that it moves next. When talking about this movement we talked about some specific buildings that have just recently been built such as the bird’s nest which was built last year for the Olympics. One building that stood out to mw that we talked about was the Walt Disney Concert Hall. This stood out to me because I am doing my precedent analysis on the building in class we talked about how the titanium that it was made out of caused some problems because it reflected so much and about how Gehry the designer tends to be very consistent with his designs in that a lot of them look just alike. Finally we finished of the year by talking about the direction that design is going we have been talking all semester about where it came from but we spent the last class talking about where it is going. In review of the unit explorations it was about how design today is really moving away from what it has been in the past and really exploring ideas and trying to figure out how much we can push the limits to see what design can become.