Opus week two

Illuminate- While using watercolor this week in Suzanne’s class I learned how adding a bit of color to any drawing can make a huge improvement in its quality. We had an assignment where we drew three people’s artifacts. I drew them in black pen to begin with and then went back and added watercolor. I found this made my drawings pop off of the page and look more professional.
In history class this week we talked about artificial mountains and curving lines in the earth. These places such as Ziggurat in Mesopotamia, the Great Wall of China, and the curved snake figure in the Ohio Valley illuminate our world. They accentuate what is already there, the ground, just as watercolor does for a drawing and just as good lettering can improve a drafting assignment.
Light of course illuminates the world around us without light we could not see, it enhances our vision. "Our principal receptors for sensing the environment are our eyes, and the light illuminating that environment is critical for the information we recieve." (Roth 85) Without illumination we would not see the architectual environments that same way and therefore we would not be seeing them to their greatest potential.






Idiom- An idiom is something that appears to be one thing but can stand for something else. A great example for this week would be in studio when we made artifacts. The artifacts we made were supposed to be wearable and something you might find in everyday life but they needed to have an unseen meaning.
An even better example is how in some houses today certain aspects of the house are used purely for decoration. The front door is one of these. You have the front door but you don’t really use it, its just there because we know that every house is supposed to have a front door although most people use the garage door. The formal living room is another example most families only use this space when they have company over not for every day use.















Material- Materials are a big part of design. Choosing material can make or break a design project. Our artifacts were due Friday and as I watched the critique materials were a big part of the discussion. Some chose material because of the way it made them feel in relation to their fairy tale and some chose material because they said it meant something. The professors did not seem to like the idea of choosing material colors because they mean something.
We are learning about Egypt in history and as we talked about the pyramids at Giza we discussed how they would use polished limestone and gold points on the top of the pyramid to make it stick out. They chose materials that they knew would be very different from the sandy terrain of Egypt and would make the pyramids very noticeable from a far. These pyramids housed pharaohs and were made with the vibrant materials so that people would know to stay away from them.










Zoser became the Pharaoh of Egypt in 2750 B.C. and he "...substituted limestone throughout for the mud brick, bundled reeds, and wood that had been used in royal buildings up to that time...he literally invented the pyramid." (Roth 195) By utilizing the materials around him Zoser created one of the Wonders of the World.




Commodity, Firmness, Delight- In history class this week we have learned a great deal about Commodity, Firmness and delight. These three things are very important to design and with out the three, the design is not complete. Commodity is “…the functional arrangement if rooms and spaces so that there is no hindrance to use and so that a building is perfectly adjusted to its site.”(Roth 11) The space needs to be utilitarian and functional. Firmness is how well the building will stand up; will it stand the test of time? Firmness implies physical structure or “…the literal bones of the building.” (Roth 25) The Egyptians were the first to use a Post and Lintel system for structure. The posts are vertical to the ground and the Lintel runs from post to post horizontally. Delight is positive reaction to the aesthetic portion of architecture. By utilizing a number of details such as positive and negative space and proximity you can create delight. After all “life is not life at all without delight.”(Roth 67)

















Summary- In Summary this week was about the elements of design. All topics above are elements that need to be included in design for it to truly succeed. We utilized these words and their meaning in all classes this week. In every exercise we did this week these principals of design came into play. We always need to think about the materials we use, the things we can do to illuminate and object and the creative ideas we can come up with to make a design abstract and make it be an idiom. Finally these three things are part of bigger categories commodity, Firmness and Delight.