Holy optimum.

Leaving Tuesday’s class, my mind was off in a thousand directions thinking about this damn optimum. At first I was a little confused, and then Jack gave the example of Marilyn Monroe’s dress in the iconic photo of her with her dress being blown upwards by a subway vent (?). Then it all made sense. Mind was blown for the rest of the class…and day.

It’s crazy to think that if her dress were just a little bit shorter, then it would be seen as too revealing, where as if it were just a little bit longer, it wouldn’t be revealing enough. This optimum and balance is crazy to think about because it applies to so much. I found what Carmen said in her post about this being a formula that could essentially envision new trends so insane and true! It’s like we would have the answer to whether something would work or not.

However, like Carmen said, I’m not sure whether the optimum should be known or not though. I think for it to remain unknown seems more interesting and allows us to look at this idea more critically.  But I don’t know—it is still a very new concept to me, yet fascinating. These are the kinds of concepts that make me truly appreciate CMC—I literally can’t think of one other class that I would learn something like this in J

On Thursday, we looked at a number of architectural buildings in class to better understand our knowledge of Disharmonious harmony, Radical Eclecticism, Urbane Urbanism, Anthropomorphism, etc.—all from the text with Charles Jencks. I found the power point very helpful because it gave us images to look at these crazy terms with. One in particular that stood out to me was when we compared the first two slides, focusing on Disharmonious Harmony. I kept staring at the first image because I thought, as simple as this sounds, that it simply had more of a sense of design, as opposed to the second slide of the building that literally had no sense of design to it.—yet they both fell under the category of Disharmonious harmony. I wish I could remember the names of the buildings because that would make this easier, but I concluded as I was sitting there that regardless of whether a building does not look uniform and harmonic, some naturally have more of a sense of design than others and work better.

Then again, who knows. This could just be me thinking I have an eye for design haha.