Thursday, September 3, 2009

The Minicity

In this post I want to tell you about my experience of the 'minicity' (campus) we've been studying.

We have been studying the Brown Building on Tate Street. This building is a music building. You can read that off the walls, where the names of famous composers are engraved (see picture). The building is shaped in a classical style; it has six capitals. Brown Building was built in the 1920's.



The Stone Building (School of Human Environmental Sciences) was built in the same time period as Brown. These two buildings show many similarities. Stone also looks like a very classical building and is also a block (shaped as a square or rectangle). On the other hand, buildings like McIver, Eberhart en Brian were built in the time period 1960's till mid 70's. These buildings look more functional than the classical ones and are not shaped like a block.

The building on 320 McIver Street is called the College of Human and Environmental Sciences. Economics was teached in this building and it used to be called the Home Management House. This is why the building looks like a dorm. Students were teached here how to run a house.


Then we studied the Music Building. There are two major towers in the Music Building were the entrances are. This building is a beat, but also has several beats inside, especially in the hallway. You can call them subbeats. The hallway floor consists of squares. These squares are matched up by the windows, which are also shaped as a square. The Music Building has some classical elements in it, like some pillars, but for the rest it looks very modern.



As the last one I want to discuss another beat on campus: the Caf (Dining Halls). In front of the Caf there is an important classical element (see picture); it is like a recognition for the students so that they know where the Caf is. This is convenient since the Caf is attended by many people every day. You can see this element also in the Parking Decks.

1 comment:

  1. what do you make of all this observation? i appreciate your good efforts at describing some of what you see in the built environment...and it's clear that you are listening well in class. just be sure to verify all of the information you list on your blog...and THEN, speculate about what it all means. in essence, this course is about doing some deeper thinking about the "fixed" world around us and to wonder about the impact of technology on the ways that we see and use our world. what do you think about all of that in relation to our campus walk throughs these last couple of weeks?

    also, you title this post as the mini-city...what characteristics of a city do you see on campus? how is it a mini-city for you?

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