Words of the Week, week 1

Artifacts- Artifacts hold extreme importance to everyday life. They can be anything. All it takes for an item to be an artifact is to evoke memories, enlightenment, curiosity, etc. According to Roth, author of Understanding Architecture, "Architecture is understood to be the whole of the human-built environment, including buildings, urban spaces, and landscapes."

Cycle- Society, as does history, repeats itself. While wars and truces regenerate themselves, clothing styles, hair-dos, and building styles make their comebacks.

Translation- This word puts in my mind the image of my fourth grade math teacher performing a dance in which she slides, or translates, across the classroom. Translating an object can mean simply moving it to a new location, but it can also mean interpreting its meaning. In Suzanne's drawing class, we drew items important to us and then discussed as a class the symbolism behind them. A big part of our history class is devoted to interpreting the hidden messages of architecture. Buildings often display current social conventions of taste, and especially those of past stylistic periods. Oftentimes, the function of a building influences the aesthetic basis for the construction- churches reach for the sky, banks look strong and confident and safe, schools are generic and unoffensive...

Stories- Storytelling is a great way to express an idea, whether fictional or factual. Stories can be told in a plethora of media, such as literature, illustration, sound, color, design, etc.



Multiview- The most obvious application of the term multiview for me refers to drafting. When designing, observing and/or drawing an object, you must consider the structural and aesthetic values of every side of the object. With the project we have of designing furniture for "Pat", every view is supposed to be different, which makes thing more interesting...and more difficult to draw. Another instance of multiviews is from the movie we watched, A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the plot, there were people who were looking at the same problems, whether love or theatre, and we were shown the different opinions and insights of the characters.
There are different ways to look at a structure. There are buildings and there is architecture according to Nicholas Pevsner, such as "a bike shed is a building, Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture."