When reading “Architecture as Space� the first thing that caught my eye was the explanation of architecture being in forms of the different views of plans, and not seeing them as different spatial views. I have always thought of architecture as sculpture with interior space, which I have gathered through building plans. I never made the connection that you have to physically see something in reality and see it in its “fourth dimension� to grasp the thought of architecture. I just always put two with two. As I was reading the article I asked my roommate, what is your definition of architecture? She said, “the different views in drawing plans.� After reading the article I realized that she was correct but that is true in the 2-dimension form. That architecture isn’t the drawings on paper, it’s the physical form of those ideas, and more it’s the human interaction that we have with environment that the architecture holds. I understand and agree with the article that architecture isn’t just the schematic or construction drawings it’s the physical reality of the structure.

As said before, I have always thought of architecture as sculpture with interior space. As said in the article, it is something that man is physically inside. Unlike every other form of art, you view the 3D structure through the outside along with the in side. It’s something that you can describe and draw on plans but to physically be in it and be able to see every angle and dimension, including perspective, exact color and natural light, the creativeness of details with materials, you cannot obtain these things in a realistic and exact way. These things all create space. Zevi gives the definition of architecture as space. I had never thought of it this way, because it’s too broad and many things that aren’t architecture could fit under this category. Like the ocean or desert, or a rowboat, or box.

Space is a good description because it covers all aspects of architecture, including the architecture that doesn’t include man inside the structure, but I also think it’s a bad description because we could use this noun to describe many things. We use “space� to describe a characteristic or feature of something. The car had plenty of “space�. The ocean had all the “space� in the world. The airplane seat was in a tight “space�. I don’t like the definition of space for something that is so unique and influential of the world. Something so powerful, like the Chartres Cathedral, gets to be defined as a plain word of space.

To be more specific of what architecture is we look at the obvious, as stated in the article, interior space. Something I hadn’t thought about were the things that don’t hold interior space, like bridges, obelisk, fountain, or a monument.

I can see the point made, what makes it architecture is the human relationship and connection with a structure. Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin.
It doesn’t hold man inside, but around it. The relationship and connection associated with the wall puts it under the architecture category. It could be landscape architecture, because of how the area is arranged for human to interact with, but I see the memorial as a structure, a sculpture. A bridge, I see as architecture. It has all of the physically structured requirements, external form, internal organism, the muscles, and skeleton. And it’s connection with human interaction. The Eiffel tower I see as architecture. It’s not enclosed but it’s, yes, a monument, but the human eye is in it.
Just like the Statue of Liberty. Although I truly believe that if you aren’t physically occupying it, then it’s not architecture. Like Monument of Garibaldi. What is the difference from this to a pyramid, or the Parthenon, or the Nike of Samothrace? The Nike of Samothrace is a statue. It has a base and a form of movement.
What is the difference of that to the Parthenon? The Parthenon is the monument of Athena. It has a statue inside, except you physically have to enter a structure that holds interior space.
So the difference from the Parthenon to a pyramid is that a pyramid is a monument and structure and is only meant for one single human, and that is the being who is buried at the bottom of it.
The area around it is for the other humans to interact at the spirit of the burial grounds. That is not what makes it architecture though, because a head stone does that. It’s the single presents of that one person; it was created for human kind. And now back to the Monument of Garibaldi, it is a monument, not architecture, because it is not meant for the occupied reason of human kind.

I do understand the conceptual relationship with Urban Space, or Urban Architecture, as I would like to call it, because of the relationship of humans and a structure that takes place outside of the “architecture�. As before I used the example of the Veterans Memorial. This consumes the relationship of human interaction, so I would agree that is architecture. Like Central Park, which was designed to look that way so that NYC would interact with it. That is where Landscape Architecture comes in. But I believe that there is a huge gap between Architecture… and … Landscape Architecture. Because to me the actual definition as discussed earlier is a 3D structure/sculpture that obtains human interaction through interior space. I understand that Central Park has a sky for a ceiling and a fence for walls, but it’s missing the 3D structure/sculpture aspect. So to say that Urban Architecture is actually Architecture I think is a big stretch. People often categorize them in the same group. Are you going into Landscape or Residential? Well to start with there are many kinds; bridges, monuments, skyscrapers, etc. But they do not all exceed the definition of what architecture truly is, a 3D structure/sculpture that obtains a connection with human interaction through interior space.

Key points covered just for clarification: What is Architecture? Argument of Space. Phenomena of man in architecture. Interior space. Physical Structure that makes Architecture. Human connection with architecture. Urban Architecture

The Fab explanation is relative to the Digital or physical realm. It is the creation of an object though the signals and information represented in a physical value.

The Light explanation is relative to the Virtual or Mental realm. It’s given the appearance of something through the physical existence of an object and light.

Together they make a representation of a way to create man’s needs. Together they also enter the Realm of Information-Communication. Using each technique and information they can collaborate to move from the ideas of something into bigger grasps or ideas of something that comes from the original.

I speculate that both are correct. Light creates images. Light creates dimensions, depth, and physical reality to the eye and perspective to a person. It is descriptive and informational. It is the key to understanding something. Like the word, ‘en-light-en-ment’. Root word light: the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible. The personal fabrication devices are used to create physical objects. They are machines that can create anything the mind might visualize. The key point to light is that, if you can’t see it, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Your Fab machine can create something and if you turn off the light and physically describe it without seeing it, you could describe the shape and smell, taste, flexibility, material, size, almost anything except for color, by relating the object to other familiar objects in your mind. You know how big a toaster is, and if you have an object that you cant fit your arms around, you would know how big it is because of the relative comparison to known objects. Being able to physically see something, through the description of light, is a different way of communicating to your mind of an object.

For instance I could describe an object to you, and without even seeing it, you could imagine it in your mind. So pretend your are sitting in a chair in a room with the lights off. I hand you an object. By feeling it you can tell it is: round, about 3 feet in diameter, it has a texture of flexible rubber, with little lined ridges on it. When you press it, it indents a little. It is hollow inside. You can tell that it is extremely light. You toss it into the air lightly. It lightly comes back down. You can smell it. It has a rubbery thick smell. You drop it. It bounces back. What do you think it is?
Click image to see if your guess is correct.
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What color did you imagine it to be? Without seeing it, there was still an object. If I was to set the ball 4 feet away and without you even touching or smelling or hearing it, with three seconds of the light on you would be able to tell me everything that I described to you with an addition of the color. Light creates the image in a different way. In a mental way. Where everything but light creates the image in a physical way. Light is described to be all the colors in one. We use light as measurement. The speed of light. The color of the paint is to light, or dark. We can determine what race you are by light and the effects of your pigmentation of your skin. Even what flavor your toothpaste is.

So to a point, I think they are right. Well they are right, but there are other factors. Kahn talks about light as if it is the only aspect but I just showed you how you can sill have everything but color without light. Of course if light never existed then how would you have built the perfect building or even rendered the images for it, for you wouldn’t be able to see how it was going to look. How would someone have designed that exercise ball if at some point in time they never couldn’t see it? So I believe that light is the start of things, objects, relationships, and connections. But from that we build other descriptions to declare other relationships and connections. Like you would be able to describe the difference from one object to the next because of those connections. The Fab does the same thing but it uses technology. It describes something to create an object but it uses the machine to do it. So a machine can describe the texture, size and even color to create it. That to me is takeing the object to the next level. When the human doens't even have the interaction to describe the object.

We have shaped technology to make them better equipped during tasks. Transportation, eating, learning, medicine, etc. As time goes on, life and generations evolve, along with technology. We have abused our planets, now we are searching through technology to help undo the damage. We work with nature when creating technology, like emphasized during the lecture that Lance gave. These factors that can’t be changed are gravity, sunlight, climate, etc.

Nature is a constant in the experiment of life, what we do to it and with it are our variables. We cannot change or manipulate the constant, but what we create using nature is the resulting experiment.

For example:
We create buildings on ground, because the force & weight of a building levitating in the air would define the laws of gravitation. Although as architects we can use this knowledge to create buildings that are cantilevered and other forms of ways to manipulate structure. We reflect nature and technologies through architecture. As lance said, “ Architecture is the stable matrix of life.�
During lecture technology was broken down into 5 different categories: Tool, technique, craft, construction, and manufacturing. All of these aspects are important when creating something that reaches the objective of technology.

If we look at an airplane and critique it on these five aspects you get:

Tool: Levers, air dynamic shapes, wheel, wings, seat buckle. These are all small tools that make up the airplane.

Technologies: Using all the tools together, they create the technology of safety, flight, and transportation. Tools create new technology.

Craft: The craft of the airplane was a development first tested by the Wright Brothers. They invented something not yet known to their cultural society. Once the concept of flight and air, with motor was concretely developed, it was improved.

Construction: The construction increased in size and how much weight it could hold. It was then constructed for war, fast transportation, shipping cargo, and personal leisure.

Manufacturing: The manufacturing of the airplane has now been about convince and location. They were manufactured in many different styles and forms. Through time, the technologies were changed to improve the manufacturing abilities.

These 5 aspects of technology have influenced our culture. How we communicate to the prices of our goods. Recently an airline went bankrupt, and within hours, the other airlines almost tripled their costs to meet the demands. A two hundred dollar flight jumped to a $600 flight. The need to travel by plane, especially during the holidays has affected our culture and other cultures greatly. I fly a lot and my mom called and asked if I wanted to fly home before our spring break vacation or directly there. I have the choice if I want to fly two times in one week or four, for the convince of time. A four hour flight to the Bahamas is close to a six or plus day trip by car and boat. The convenience of the technology of the airplane has taken over my culture, at least. Would I want to go to the Bahamas if it was a six-hour plus trip, just to get there? No, my vacation time is only 7 days. The importance of technology is that they make life easier, for the people who can afford it. It depicts what cultural society you are apart of. A Mayan tribe wouldn’t be using a can opener. During discussion we talked about how the factors of transportation has affected other cultures. My personal story with traveling and affecting other cultures was during vacation to Playa de Carmen. My family and I went on an adventure tour on the sacred land of the Mayan tribe. During our tour we had a spiritual ritual, where we all sat down and breathed in a mixture and listened to the Mayan priest as if we could have protection for the day. Then all the Americans went swimming in the Mayan’s water hole. How ironic. We were told that we shouldn’t wear any perfumes, deodorants, or bug spray, because the toxins and chemicals go into their water stream and they drink and cook with it. If we didn’t have the airplanes to fly us to foreign countries, we wouldn’t be invading the smaller cultures habitat and lifestyles. And airplanes are only one modern day technology impacting the world.

The golden ratio is from Antient Greek Mathematics. It was also used during the Antient Greeks time period to construct architecture. The facades and floor plan of the Parthenon uses this mathematic equation.

Le Corbusier also used the formula to design the modern International Style with his peice Modulor.

Le Corbusier's Villa Stien also uses the golden ratio or rectangle in the floor plan and elevations

Many single family homes by Mario Botta also display the ratio in his designs.

All information was taken from Wikipedia.

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Things:

The sun is experienced everyday in feeling and seeing. A close enough experience could conclude with death of touch, taste, and smell. It is always in the same place, and is relative in every aspect to every individual. Without it, life would not exist. The sun could not feed the trees and produce, and we could not breath oxygen or eat the animals that live off of vegetation. It would be wintertime all the time, like the artic, but worse, and there would be no solar heating mechanisms to bring warmth to our bodies. Nor would we have coal and oil because they are fossilized energy by the sun.

The sun is a large mass and consists of many gasses. It is almost a perfect sphere with 110 times diameter of the Earth's.

Frameworks:

This third generation star has the framework of 74% Hydrogen, 25% Helium and one percent combination of Oxygen, Carbon, Iron, Neon, Nitrogen, Silicon, Magnesium & Sulphur.

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Clockworks:

Like Earth the Sun has it's own clockwork of rotation. Because the sun is formed of gas and plasma, it is possible for the Sun to rotate faster at its equator (approx. 25 days) and (approx. 35 days near the poles. The two different rotations cause a twisting action in the magnetic field with reverses direction approx. every 11 years

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The Sun completes the revolution of the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It completes this clockwork approx. 225-250 million years.

ALL INFORMATION AND PICTURES WERE TAKEN FROM WIKIPEDIA: SUN, OCTOBER 2006
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Magnetic_field

I get a "Genius Loci" feeling when I'm at home walking in my yard... I live in the woods, three acres of about 15, and I have lived there for 9 years. My family and I built our log cabin ourselves on the property when I was 10. At that age I wasn't a whole lot of help except to pick up nails around the ground, so I would venture off in the woods by myself. Being an only child in a new neighborhood, I played in the woods with my imaginary friends, and we seeked out treasure hunts, walks by the ponds, "hidden" trails, climbing trees, all sorts of stuff. I would pretend there were people in the woods watching me, ghost pilgrims that came out at night looking for their lost home, once I even believed that Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street was lurking behind the trees. I had quite the imagination as I walked down our 1/2 mile driveway at night, alone. I’m not going to lie, I was scared.

So at nighttime it was scary, but during the day it was beautiful. Especially during the fall. All the trees, different kinds, are all 100 feet in the air and they would all turn a golden marigold as the fall settled in. Before they all fell, within a week’s period, to the ground the sun would illuminate a warm glowing sensation below where I would stand. I don't know what heaven is like, but I hope it looks and feels like this.

This picture is the only picture i have at college of what our woods looks like... This is after a tornado went through.

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A social design issue is something that conflicts with a social aspect because of the way something is designed. So basically it could be the movement of traffic at a courtyard, or negative aspects of transportation. Or it could be the way people converse, and how it effects everything because of the way it's designed, for instance public/private cell phone conversations at a sit down dinner. Or at least these are the issues that come to mind when I hear "social design issues"...

So the issue I pick is freshman drinking. The social design issue with this is:
You can drink just not in the dorms... Well you can't "drink" because we are mostly all underage but you could go to any house party or frat and drink. And the police sit right outside of the frat house and on the corners, but they never pull anyone over or bust the parties...mostly because they are frats. But if a CA sees your door open and you have a beer can or a bunch of cups lying around, then you get written up. I think this design is poor.... wouldn't you want to have freshman safe and drink in their rooms; rather than drink other places and either walk or drive back. Where a lot of unsafe things could happen. Two weekends ago three guys got beat up a little bit past dinky town.

I’m not saying that we should just let all freshmen drink when and wherever they want because after all, we are underage...but then maybe we should be a little stricter about drinking, period... Right now it's basically ok to walk into the front lobby completely trashed and not even get questioned. It's like the dorms have a policy of don't see, don't ask. So at one end of the spectrum you have, do what you want, it's college... and at the other you have... if your in a room with alcohol, your going to get written up, and if it happens three times, your getting kicked out. After all it's college and that's one of the aspects of college, is drinking. You don't gain the freshman 15 because of food... I'm sorry, I know they tell you that, but the food is not that good.

I'm honestly not going to do anything about it, I’m not going to lie. It just seems so ridiculous... I would like to see some kind of meet in the middle for the issue. I'm not saying it's bad that freshman drink, because there is really nothing the college could do to stop it, but it seems unpractical to kick a freshman out of their dorm for "getting caught" for drinking.

Never seeing anything like it, I was amazed at what I found. For those of you who have not adventure inside, here is a little description and it's interactions with energy:

*The main entrance to the side of the main street brings you to a food/cultural market of many different cultures. There was Native American, Indian, Italian, Greek, German, etc. There were many different nationalities shopping and interacting with each other. Each customer and employer interacted with verbal and visual energy between each other. Each little cultural corner created and exchanged an individual energy.

*At some of the cultural corners they had different things for the visitors to do. Some had restaurants. Some had places to get your hair braided (the Jamaican corner). Some had places to just sit down and watch TV. One Italian deli had a series of tables made into large chessboards, sitting by a bench. There was a family sitting at one table teaching their toddlers how to play (or at least trying). They weren't eating or buying anything from the deli, but there where exchanging the energy between themselves, that the market had created for customers.

*On the walls of the market, there were large paintings of different cultural activates. Each told a story... At this point I became apart of the energy. I was trying to use the energy from the paintings to understand what those stories were. Accept at this point I was being engaged in energy with a very polite old man.

*This old man was very interested in what I was doing with my notepad and pen walking around his "home". I say this because he described to me what exactly the Midtown Market was... an environment. He lived in one of the 17 floors of housing connected to the market. Each floor had a series of apartments or condos. He parks his car in the parking garage across the street that he walks to through the skyway. He goes grocery shopping in the markets. And he "could go" across the street to the fitness center. His bank is in the main lobby of Midtown Market. There are restaurants in the Market, and a Human Services Department in the lower floor of the building. Each of these activates displays the many ways he creates, uses and exchanges his energy in one day, in one place.

*ENERGY...
Defined in the dictionary as "A degree or level of this capacity possessed by something or required by a process.
*ENERGY...
Defined by me "environmental interactions between people, places, things, technology, buildings, and cultures."

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