Frank Lloyd Wright

      Frank Lloyd Wright was a very well known American architect.  He designed more than 1,000 projects and finished nearly 500 of those.  He influenced the architectural world in many ways.  The different styles that he undertook in designing his buildings were very unique.  His organic architecture was truly breathtaking.  In these homes he used many of the materials that surrounded the area.  He also used the natural landscapes to his advantage and built the homes on top of them while accentuating some of the features.  He is also well known for both his Prairie style homes as well as his Usonian style homes.  Although many of his works took place during the early to mid 1990s, they still seem extremely modern in today’s eyes.

      One of his most well known Organic homes is Fallingwater, which was built in southwestern Pennsylvania.  This house is truly remarkable.  It makes excellent use of the natural surroundings.  This home was partly built directly on top of a waterfall, which adds amazing aesthetic value.  This house also makes spectacular use of different cantilevers, which was seen as architectural “genius” during that time.  Wright got some of his stylistic ideas and features of this house from Japanese architecture.

      This house has received many different awards and recognition’s such as “the best all-time work of American architecture” in 2007 as well as twenty-ninth on the list of America’s Favorite Architecture according to the AIA.  Frank Lloyd Wright is an excellent influence on me as I look to architecture for my future.

Warhol Reaction

When Pop Art came about in the 1950s, it was seen as a radical movement that developed from the ideas of abstract expressionism.  Its main focus was to take images from mass culture and reproduce them in such a way that imposed a sense of irony on the viewer.  One of the masters of this type of art was Andy Warhol.  When he was developing his ideas for painting someone had told him to paint what he loved.  So keeping that in mind, his first major exhibition consisted of 32 of the exact same canvases with identical screen-printings of Campbell’s Soup Cans in the center of them.  The only difference being the flavor of the soup, which was meant to represent each of the flavors available at the time.  When asked about why he created a piece such as this one, he simply claimed it was because he had a can of Campbell’s Soup for lunch every day of his life!

Flavin Idea

Today, we placed a lot of emphasis on talking about ways to incorporate work in the Babbio Atrium for our final exhibition at the end of the year.  After walking over and taking a look at the space, and keeping the work of Dan Flavin in mind, it would definitely be interesting to incorporate some kind of fluorescent lighting in the space.  The pictures shown here are from a display Flavin created for the store front of Louis Vuitton in Paris.  Not only are the lights themselves interesting to look at, but the reflective and metallic surfaces that surround them add an entire new dimension for the viewers eye.  Thinking about Babbio, an installation of lights along the large glass windows would have somewhat of a similar effect.

Physical Connections

Last week in class we discussed different pieces of art that were developed through the unifying principal of physical connections.  We took a look at artist Jackie Winsor, and used her piece "Bound Square" as a source of inspiration for our pieces.  After discussing her use of wood and twine as the mediums of her work, I was able to understand and develop my own idea using wood and glue.  Having an interest in architecture was also another factor that helped me develop this small scale 3D piece.  The idea was to use all different size pieces of wood and construct a sort of tower that would continually build up.  To do this I used the wood and glue and made each layer as a single piece, waited for all of them to dry, and then placed them in varying directions and locations atop each other to create the whole.  Although I had pictured a more tower like structure, that would have consisted of many more layers and materials, I like how the piece came out.  I think the most interesting part for me is the varying angles that the pieces of wood jut out at between each other.