Felix Candela

This past week we attended a lecture on the works of Felix Candela and how his use of technology has helped to create these sculptural beauties. The professors at the MIT lecture were very interesting and made his works open my eyes at least to different methods we can derive building ideas from. Candela uses these saddle like structures to create buildings with a thin layer of concrete but still very elegant and functional. When we think of concrete designs we think of these massive blocks kind of sitting in space. Candela used a method where he could create these shapes off a grid and using straight lines. I found in amazing how he took this very grid like rigid thing and created a flowing structure even though it is completely comprised of straight elements. I think that Candela proposes a great way to look differently at how we design and how by understanding the weight and stresses on a building could allow for these interesting new shapes to be created. He becomes a great influenence on the discovery of pushing certain materials we may never have thought to be able to use in certain ways to a limit.

StelArc and Bill Viola...

On tuesday, we had a presentation on two different topics that were polar opposites, StelArc and Bill Viola. StelArc is an artist who in a way somewhat scares me and makes my stomach twist with his puncturing of his skin with hooks and suspending himself in different areas. I can understand how for StelArc this may have somewhat of a religious meditative kind of effect on a person. You are pushing your body to do something you may not have know it is able to do. His whole idea of the body as a structure and everything being attached is just a material over the structure interested me even though the images of him doing it grossed me out. There are many different cultures who have been doing these kind of ritualistic things for centuries. Bill Viola on the other hand uses many different video techniques to show different elements that are in the world that we can all relate to in some way or another. For some cultures around the world the elements are important to us because they are main sources we use in our daily lives to sustain life. While watching some of Viola's videos I felt more at ease and calm with the trickling water rather than StelArc's shock and awe technique that he uses.

Robo Scientist...

While reading some articles on Yahoo! today I came across one that really caught my attention. This article was one that talked about robots actually starting to take the place of scientist. Researchers are now able to create a robot that can reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on their own. Now this is very scary to me. I understand that a robot can be helpful in getting into small areas and being very precise and accurate but I do not know if I would trust it running on its own to open me up. The article explains that for right now they are performing "humble" tasks but soon scientists hope that these beings will be able to unravel complex biological systems, designing new drugs, and model the world's climate or understanding the cosmos. One of the creators of this machine from Cornell makes that statement that these machines will not make scientist obsolete any day soon but believes that one day they will be able to perform the research development needs of scientists. I wonder though is science all about researching and developing things on your own so that you are familiar with what it is you are doing? What is the need for machines to figure everything out for us just so that we can in turn pretty much repeat what it is they are doing? Does that then make us a living machine following the same repetitive pattern in our own lives almost becoming a slave to these machines? I think we can see this today in our own world with the internet. No longer are the days of researching in the library under stacks of books searching for answers, we can just hope on our hand dandy computer. But really what do you get out of the research if you are really not experiencing it for yourself and just repeating what is being shown or told to you. All I know is, it seems like machines are more and more over powering our daily lives and I am scared to see what happens when we are all just sitting around one day kicking ourselves for bringing about our own downfall with careers and daily tasks. We must realize our limits and make sure we are maintaining control over the situation, because right now it seems we are just trying to constantly out do each others and in return I see many of us becoming lazier and lazier.

Always Dreaming of a Utopian Dream...

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley shows us this idea of a "utopian society" where everyone belongs to everyone and everything is pretty much predetermined for them leaving them not a lot of ability to change and become what I feel it means to be a human. To me these people in Brave New World are just robots interacting with the things surrounding them but not realizing that these things were already all laid out for them. To be a human in my eyes is being an individual with your own distinct characteristics that is a part of a greater whole that learns from events that happen in their lives and reacts in a certain manner not pre programmed in our mind. To me it is that freedom of choice that is my utopian dream.

Freedom is something that means alot to me and is a big part of my life that I feel I am always working and striving to achieve and up hold within our society. America seems to be an example of this idea of freedom and kind of always being an beacon of light to other places in the world as the "land of the free and home of the brave". Yes we do have freedom here in America but sometimes it still feels as though we are trapped in a way. For example, this idea of freedom of speech. Sure we can say what we want but there is always someone there kind of censoring what we are saying to make sure that certain things do not provoke some ideas to occur with people. With these freedoms can come some set backs such as drugs. In our world today we use drugs to escape from the world around us, forget about our worries and even sometimes be someone who we are not. We can also see this in Brave New World with people taking SOMA to go on these mental vacations because they are feeling depressed and need to escape from their problems instead of facing things head on. If you are at the point where you are trying to escape your freedom by allowing yourself to fall into such a set back I feel as though you are just harming yourself and pushing away from this freedom by comitting yourself to something so powerful that can metally control you.

Lastly, with this idea of freedom and the utopian dream in general I feel that you are always striving for it but ou can never fully reach it. Yes maybe you can find a utopian mentally but in the physical world I feel it is much harder to escape unless you are seculded by yourself and never really see anyone. The interactions of people and the creation of conflicts are something that hold us back. Instead of talking things out with one another we use violence and guns to prove whose freedom is better than someone else's. In the end the utopian dream becomes that holy grail that we always strive to achieve and can see but never really touch.