Opus Week 8

Mid-century Modern Furniture: A twist of modern and mid-century designs. See Phillip Starck's Ghost Chair (right)

As designers we revise our work constantly, always looking to improve upon our creations. In class this week we touched on the fact that a current generation never looks back at their parent's generation for inspiration, rather we are inspired by our grandparents era and so forth. We are not seeing the demand for avocado cabinets and orange shag rugs because that is what our parents generation made popular. Today mid-century modern is a popular twist between the style that is popular today and the mid-century designs from our grandparents era.
Relating the urge for a current generation to rebel against it's immediate forefathers, the first Americans rebelled against the British and their opposition was reflected in the furniture of the time. In class we looked at two dining chairs, one predates the American Revolution and the other was made afterward. The dining chair on the left was made before the American Revolution and reflects the heavy imperial style of Great Britain. The chair on the right is much lighter in appearance and is more clean cut in it's lines possibly represents a fresh start, rising above the heavy ruling of the King. People of the renaissance looked back not to their immediate forefathers but to their ancestors before that. Renaissance architects looked to the classically inspired Romans and endeavored to make new forms with the fundamentals of the classic world intertwined in the design (Roth 397).


Throughout history, rulers and Kings have made their mark on the landscape through elaborate building programs from the Pyramids to the royal palace at Versailles. La Chateau de Versailles, the royal Chateau grandiosely revised by Louis XIV was originally much smaller and was used as a hunting lodge. Louis XIV took his revisions to an extreme by not only adding onto the building but changing the landscape completely (Roth 418). Revisions set design apart from the norm, they make work stand out, and they have a great influence on politics and social thought for the time.

Architecture tells a story to it's audience. Architects think deeply about the context of a building when devising its plans. For whom is this building for and where is it located? An audience not only is made up of a buildings users, but also the audience is made up of viewers of the building. For example, a building represents an institution such as UNCG or a government or kingdom. The architect of such buildings should always think about what message the building projects to the world since the world is architecture's audience.

This week we were introduced to the baroque period which was an architectural movement following the renaissance in the 17th century. Focus on light, movement, color, and materials characterize the baroque period. Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini was a prominent sculptor and architect of the baroque period. His most famous work includes his sculpture of the Ecstasy of St. Theresa and the Piazza Di Pietra, also known as St. Peters Basilica (Roth 410). Piazza Di Pietra is mapped out so that all points are centralized, leading us to believe that all points really do lead to Rome.

A precise transition between one style to the next in architecture has never been achieved nor ever will be. Styles and periods overlap one another and skip generations periodically. Inspiration is drawn from numerous different eras in order to achieve a certain style. Blakemore speaks of transition as being a temporary moment between two eras (290). That is exactly what a transition in design is, a temporary moment. When we design a home the transition between the outdoors and indoors is a moment where there are two different entities joined by a common ground (the outdoors joined to the indoors through the doorway). Transitions are just as important as the main components in design because without transition our story can be lost in translation.

The datum of the midevil period left architects of the renaissance with the data to devise complicated structures such as the domes in renaissance churches. Each generation leaves a bit of datum for the next to build upon and improve. The French took what the people of the Renaissance did and revised and reworked what datum was left to them. Roth and Blakemore are historians that provide us, the next generation of architects with the datum of the past so we can better create the datum of the future. Datum now has another part to its definition within architecture because now technology holds the codes and plans that create architectural forms ie AutoCAD (1).

1. http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=2704278