#lecture 16

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11.25.19

So I wanted to say I did, in fact, catch up on the reading this weekend. And celebrated Friendsgiving.

What I’m thinking about lately is art. I don’t want to quote the sentence from Morris because it’s pretty lewd, but it got me thinking. Are we desensitized to art? Like the image I posted below. It just took a few keystrokes to bring up an image of sculptures that would’ve taken days and days to carve.

The discussion of women’s nudes in art and how it was quite the development that it was now to be seen from all angles (doubly weird because like.... men and women differ more on the frontal aspect). But now I could go to the MFA in about 45 minutes on the shuttle and see art from a range of centuries and when I scroll on Reddit I can see an image of watercolor being made so it has gold-foil leaves and if I want something to hang in my room I can order or amazon or if I want a specific print of a photo I can go on shutterstock and in 48 hours have the print of my choice.

No style of art seems revolutionary to me. In the past, there were changes. The display of dimension in art during the renaissance, the change in sculptures from god-like to human, the development of movement and balance. Or when Pollock made his weird things or the impressionists. Maybe it’s because I’m not an art student that I am no longer aware of the schools and what have you but while I may see things and I like them, I don’t get stunned.

I really quite like art. I went to the Guggenheim and saw these glass panes painted with some type of gun powder (which I now see I didn’t take any pictures of, RIP), I think, cool, not, this has blown my mind.

I wonder what it would take for me to find art like that.

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11.19.19

And now back to our previously scheduled journal entry. Mainly just four points I was confused on and thinking about.

1. Firstly the fact that not only did no one adopt Alexander’s (and Philip’s) polygamy policy but the Ptolemy’s actually did a complete reversal by only marrying within the family which is a great way to styme political connections.

2. Speaking of the Ptolemy’s I would swear up and down Prof. JHP told us the museum and library were two distinct entities. The former for sciences and the latter for humanities, essentially. I wish I still had my notes from that class!

3. Also what happened to the coinage??? I didn’t write down the name of the place but the one that made those really nice coins that are perfectly round and pristine. What happened? 

This is from the 7th century, almost a millennium late and it looks nowhere NEAR as good.

4. Just thinking about how the scientific competition was akin to the USSR and USA space race in the cold war. 

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Blu Homes Inc is building modern, durable, eco-friendly prefabricated homes around the country and changing the way prefab is interpreted. Unlike traditional views of prefab as impersonal, cookie-cutter structures, Blu lets home owners choose where walls will go, how many and what kind of rooms the house will have, etc. Yet, they do have seven models for the skeleton of the house which are put together in their factory and then magically unfold onto the foundation on site over the course of a day! These houses have the benefits of prefab (only take a couple months to build instead of a year) but you would never know that they were prefab just by looking at them.

There are dozens more videos online of Blu homes being unfolded, and I'd highly encourage watching them - it's really incredible to see the transformation. It's also worth noting that though it's Boston based and seems to mainly build in California, Blu's third office is right here in Ann Arbor!

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Japan National Stadium

The link above is to one of my favorite websites—check it out if you have some time! However, the specific page linked is the final list of 11 stadiums commissioned by the Japan Sport Council. Tokyo is one of the final three cities that could be chosen to host the 2020 Olympic Summer Games and that would be one of the many applications for this new stadium. However, what triggered this post was not the stadium itself, but the companies that have submitted design plans and ideas for the stadium—the companies that have made the so-called "shortlist."

Great Britain, the Netherlands, Australia, Japan, Turkey, France, and Germany. All of these countries have at least one stadium included in the shortlist of designs. Architecture firms can be located anywhere in the world and still design a plan that gets built on a site thousands of miles away. Additionally, many of these stadium designs have similar attributes such as retractable roofs and a very modern and sleek style. This is all due to globalization and spread of ideas across national boundaries. It is so easy today to collaborate and share ideas across the globe that globalization on big projects, such as this stadium in Tokyo, is almost unavoidable.