Post Class Blog Scott Fusco

In class on Thursday, Dr. Casey’s presentation applied the terms we learned in the reading by Charles Jencks by showing us different pictures of architecture from across the world. He talked about the different periods of architecture and drew examples like The Parthenon being classical architecture. After his presentation I thought about a city like Las Vegas, and what type of architecture they use in that city. After looking at different pictures of hotels, and buildings in Las Vegas it became clear that there really is no pattern of architecture in that city because it draws from so many different places, and periods in time. The way that Dr. Casey presented the different terms made it easier to understand all of the terms in the Jencks reading, and made Jencks ideas seem more real than they did when I first did the reading. One Structure I thought of when thinking about classical architecture was The White House in Washington D.C. The white house is very symmetrical, and has the great big pillars found at The Parthenon. Its interesting that the designers of federal buildings in the U.S used examples from past government buildings. One of the funkier design principals / Jencks terms was the Absent Center. This concept is kind of self explanatory meaning it is the lack of center, but can also mean lack of center of community, and goes back to communal values which means that everything is very wide open and for everyone. At one point in Dr. Casey’s presentation he talked about the idea of new urbanism and how Baldwin Park is a perfect example of this. Another example that I thought of was Celebration Fl. Celebration has parks set up perfectly in between different houses to create a more centralized community. The parks are there for people to gather with their neighbors and be more connected with eachother. The only problem with places like Baldwin Park, and Celebration is they end up having kind of a creepy look, and seem way too cookie cutter like the development found on the show Weeds.