        Ayash, Cynthia : AssignmentsWhen one hears the word 'street,' many things come to mind. There are manydifferent interpretations on the exact definition of a street, which results in many different definitions used by a great variety of people. For example, some define a street by what it consists of, why and how it was originated, and what it could become. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, a street is "a thoroughfare especially in a city, town, or village that is wider than an alley or lane and that usually includes sidewalks". This might be what streets were formed as, but this is not what they could be. Fifth Street is interesting because it has lived through avariety of faces, all of which house different uses and efficiencies. At first, it was a street that people lived off of, then via years of transition, it gradually became a place where one would not want to be found after dark, and it was definitely not pedestrian friendly by any means. It was a place that housed drug dealers and bums. Now, after most of the fifth street renovations are complete, it is a friendly haven for people to interact, and it also provides much room for improvement, additions, and expansion in the near future. Streets exist for one purpose, and one purpose only: to facilitate the transport of people from one place to another in a quick and simple fashion. This includes three groups of people-namely pedestrians, bikers, and motorists. So, in a perfect world, all streets would have a side walk, for pedestrians, a bike lane, so they do risk injuring the pedestrians using the side walk or being injured by motorists in the main street, and of course, the actual street for the motorists. Where are all of these people going? Are they going to eat, to shop, to a friends house, or to somewhere entirely different? What happens when the places one goes are the very streets that one travels upon? What type of transportation is then considered? On Fifth Street in Tech Square there are only a few parking spaces, and the sidewalks are large and separated from the street by trees and a bike lane. Fifth Street was an area that utilized its original intent. It was a way to pass from one place to another. It did not really have any particular place for multiple people to interact at once. Today, Fifth Street is anything but the simple design it was in its original state. There have been many times during the warmer seasons when a few of my fellow students and I would venture up the hill leading to the Fifth Street Bridge, refusing to take the Tech Trolley, in order to get something for dinner. However, on a colder day, the Tech Trolley is not a bad idea; in this aspect, the Trolley helps one stay connected to Tech Square. There one finds lots of choices for food and methods of eating within those choices; there are a variety of eating places, and a lot of times one has the choice of eating outside or inside. The Fifth Street Bridge is a nice area in and of itself to just sit and relax, or even to do some homework. Traveling further down Fifth Street, the scenery changes, as there are no longer trees next to the side walk; this makes a huge difference in the mood of the street. As one strolls past the fraternity houses, one begins to feel a stronger sense of community. Finally, as one reaches the Klaus building, they really feel the fact that they are truly on campus. This connects Tech Square to campus; there is a genuine flow all of the way down Fifth Street. One could say that Fifth Street is as close an example as one can find to the perfect street, giving pedestrians, bikers, and motorists a way to commute simultaneously in ease. The value of a street can often be measured in the amount of memories that one has there. Oftentimes, when one goes back to the house in which he or she was raised, he or she will look at the street in front of him or her for a lengthy period of time. This results from the person "seeing" their childhood memories played out upon the blacktop. This is a fairly common phenomenon that occurs due to the fact that people usually associate a certain place with the memories that occurred at that location. Tech Square is a good place for making new memories. It is very crowded, with good food and a lot of normally overworked people just relaxing. This makes the atmosphere quite soothing. It is hard for someone to bring in bad feelings into such a laid back atmosphere. If one is looking to create memories, the weekends bring the fraternities out of their houses and into the public space. These times can consist of anything from a nice game of basketball to a live band rocking out until the early morning. Further on down the street there is a nice sitting area in front of Klaus, which never seems to get utilized. This is a result of the area being a fairly poor choice to place an outdoor public area. There is no shade for the benches, and it is in front of a computer science building. The only other people that are in the area are waiting for the buses and are standing at the street. The benches would get a lot more use if they were at the bus stop itself rather than their current position where they merely make the entrance to Klaus more visually appealing. While visiting Tech Square, one is not a visitor, but a part of the community. A community is, according to Merriam-Webster, "people with common interests living in a particular area." Though no one actually lives in Tech Square, it is a community of common interaction in that the people inhabiting Tech Square may actually spend more time in it than the location at which they live, making it somewhat of an adopted community. This interaction could be as simple as smiling at a stranger, to discussing the weather with their waiter, to meeting a few friends and or colleges for a meal or a quick snack. The Fifth Street renovations have helped the Georgia Tech community expand, and made it safer then it was before they took place. Before the renovations, there was very little pedestrian traffic crossing the bridge to go shopping, or really anywhere else for that matter. By renovating this seemingly dead block, the community raised the property value, and is also raising more money for the community. Throughout the course of the day, Tech Square comes alive with people, especially during the major eating times of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Whether they are headed to or from work or class, Tech Square is a common place for people to interact. For pedestrians, it is a long friendly path that expands the peripherals of the campus. Taking this street, it is not hard to mingle down to the Barns and Noble bookstore a few blocks down, or even the grocery store. It really leads roaming people to the heart of midtown. As one goes back to campus, they pass through a vibrant community of plants and can start to see a whole different world. Once on campus, one can see many individual communities down fraternity row. Each fraternity house or sorority is a small community in the larger community that is the Georgia Tech campus. One can easily tell that Fifth Street is a main thoroughfare on campus; it can take one fairly close to anything on campus and allows one to walk the campus instead of driving or riding one of the many campus buses. As people are able to enjoy a walk with many different eye catching objects, Fifth Street has a fairly seamless transition between Tech Square and the original campus. The Fifth Street community encompasses it all: from studying, to working, to partying. Perhaps an even more important factor is that it is not a closed community; it is very welcoming, and if you even sit and have a glass of sweet tea in Tech Square, then you are a part of it. In the suburban area, most places are in shopping centers off of streets. They give the car the right-of-way. However, when you get into the city, there are wall-to-wall office buildings with little regard to human life outside of business. The Georgia Tech campus houses hundreds of people and is located within the city limits of Atlanta. If one goes off of campus, one will see the aforementioned wall-to-wall office buildings. It is a refreshing change of pace to have an area that encourages the incorporation of necessary human activity into a cityscape. So with the city theme, having the buildings at the street to utilize space, they created restraints and shopping centers to highlight the cityscape. Fifth Street has come a long way in that aspect, while it also gets more intimate when one crosses the Fifth Street Bridge to campus. While all of this is great, there is still more that could be done to help Fifth Street achieve an even greater sense of community. There are not many parking places in or around Tech Square, making it mostly accessible by bus and waking. If there were more parking, it would entice people from further away to come and enjoy Tech Square, for meals, and even the ambient atmosphere. A solution to this problem would be installing parking decks under new buildings or towards the edges. Fifth Street is an atmosphere within itself, but it does not really transition into other areas well. A gradual change is needed from area to area; in particular, Fifth Street does not decompose into midtown properly. Midtown is a active part of town, but the streets cater to the motor vehicles above all. Making one's way back onto campus, one crosses the Fifth Street Bridge and is subjected to fraternity houses. On Saturdays this change is not that much based on the amount of people that are just outside. During the week days however this is a noticeable change, on one side, people relaxing, while on the other people are loaded with books and heading to class. No one smiles; they just go to their classes and then go to study. Every once in a while the athletes are on the baseball field; these are not only baseball players, all of the athletes use the field. It is good to see that that space is utilized to its fullest and not just waiting to be used. Traveling a little further, one would notice all of the school buildings and all of the scholars eagerly awaiting the weekend. As of now, Fifth Street goes beyond expectations for a common street; after all, it is quite the exceptional street. It took many people a lot of money and a lot of time to create. It went from a line during transportation planning, to a typical midtown alley way, to a beautiful place to have a drink and share a meal with other friends and colleagues in need of a refreshing break from the daily grind. It even forms a small community lost to itself. It has been through many generations, each with different thoughts on what it should be and how it should look, to its present-day form: a collage of different cultures, lives and recreation. Fifth Street utilizes space, and it creates an incredibly welcoming atmosphere. In the future, Fifth Street will be used to relax, and, whether that relaxing be from school or work, it will be a place to study and succeed. Fifth Street is headed in the right direction, and it will grow, as should all good ideas. It is easy to see Fifth Street's ambiance filtering throughout midtown as one that creates a livable and workable space. Architecture, Culture, & Behavior; This lecture was about how the buildings we create inspire and run peoples lives. It was interesting to hear him talk about the general reactions people have to buildings. How when a person walks into a building and sees stairs, they naturally chose them over the elevator. I admired his way of thinking and would really like to delve more into his, and others findings on this subject. Photography; This was a very interesting lecture that was based on destruction and rebuilding. This lecture showed us the steps of turning one place into another. It was interesting to hear her talk about the utopia of the parking garage, and hear how inspiring a paring garage can be. It showed me how many different things one can be interested in design and construction. How to Look at Palladio; I really enjoyed the flow of Palladio’s work and could see the geometry and symmetry in all of it. Sonit, though he was late, presented the material in a flowing professional manner and really got me to look at the relationships and proportions of Palladio’s work. It is interesting to view and criticize others work. CATEA: Stephen Sprigle discussed disability and assistive technology (at), and how it is changing. He looked at the options out there for people with disabilities and he explained to us how inefficient the options are for example, people with wheel chairs. He used mostly plain vocabulary, but it was interesting to hear words like anatomical device and mobility device. After some research it was interesting to learn that anatomical devices are things like prosthetic limbs, whereas mobility devices are things such as wheel chairs. Learning about these things are probably more beneficial to industrial design majors while they can influence the way an architect would set up a building. This could change the discipline of architecture by making it more assessable for people with handicaps to get into the field. This could change the teaching to a wider variety of students, through hearing seeing and speech modifications. ACE: Brian Bowen was a very interesting professor and he went through the construction industry from its past to integrating to the present and he even looked into the future of the construction industry. He showed us what was wrong with the construction industry and slightly highlighted on its good parts. I enjoyed hearing about vertical integration (though I had no clue what it was…), fragmentation, lean construction, supply chain, and value engineering. I thought that vertical integration and value engineering were the most important terms to know. I found that vertical integration was a company has a hierarchy with each producing a different product or service, and the same person owns all of the companies. Value engineering is a way to improve the value of materials by improving function. This information is important to the learning of architecture by opening are minds to the new/old concepts and see what we can do with it. This changes the profession of architecture by making them aware of finding the most efficient way of producing materials, and this changes the discipline of architecture by creating new and better ways of doing things. GIS: I believe that Steven French was showing us about how we can use GIS (Geographic Information Systems) to find data and plain for the future. He showed us how his research center has used this information. He used concepts such as one-meter photography, land sustainability analysis, as well as remote sensing. I was very interested in Land sustainability analysis and remote sensing. Land sustainability is defined as a process or state that can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely. Remote sensing is defined as the process of sensing the acquisition of information of an object or phenomenon. These things can help the learning of architecture by showing students what is in this world, and others. The professions of architecture can use the information to design based on location. Recording and data keeping for future generations to study and build upon can affect the disciplines of architecture. Classical Architecture: This lecture was very confusing to find the point. After careful observation I believe that they were trying to show how classical and traditional architecture are astatically conveyed in the modern world. They did this by bringing in many different concepts and ideas of classical and traditional architecture. They showed me many different motives of building to this degree and gave us a wide diversity of classical architecture. The different speakers used interesting words like vernacular, sprawl, eco-friendly, classical, and traditional to generate interest in the field. The two terms I found most interesting and useful were classical and traditional, mostly because it was hard to differentiate the two. After some time I found classical to refer to the long lasting civilization patterns based on belief systems, while traditional is referring mostly to customs handed down between generations. This means that classics stay closer to the original for longer times while traditional things change frequently. Classical architecture plays a huge role in the discipline of architecture, and it will change as frequently as we learn more about are past. The profession of architecture will slowly get into the classics based on what I saw was being created by the larger architecture firms. This affects the teaching of classical architecture buy requiring that all upcoming architects learn about the past before preparing for the future. Solar Decathlon: The second big lecture was presented very well. Though Chris did not work on the entire project, he knew enough about the whole thing to affectively convey the message of the process of calibration for a multi discipline project. He did this by showing a case study of reviewed procedure to create a house. He used words such as functionality, structural integrity, nesting, sip walls, off the grid, grey water, and sustainability. I found grey water a very interesting concept and I wanted to know exactly what it was. So I found that it means water that is dirty, not processed, but also not contaminated. I also found out that sustainability is a characteristic of a process or state that can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely. These processes that are being tested are going to be important to the discipline of architecture by creating new ways to do things. This will change the way we think and design houses. All together we will teach are predecessors what we learn from it. CAD_CAM: This lecture was not concise, but displayed that he wanted to experiment with how to find material to support a concept. He did this by showing different projects that illustrated putting how new techniques and procedures effect the design and production of the built environment. He used a lot of terms that were new to me including master builder, non standard, local and global variation, unitize, feedback loop, and combinatorics. Found combinatorics to be a branch of pure mathematics concerning the study of discrete objects. Feedback loop was a new and useful concept of checking your own work through a series of procedures. These things made the discipline of architecture easier to keep tract of. They make the Architect more computerized. The teaching of architecture though has expanded to include the digital world. Plexi Glass structure: This is a structure is made of ½ in plexi glass and is one to one and a half stories tall. It is about six meters long, and it is laid down. It is a structure of organized chaos. The lower end of the structure is obviously organized and slowly starts expanding. The higher end of the structure is like a school of fish. It moves in three to four different directions and it does the same everywhere. Trying to follow one part is like trying to follow a single fish in a school. This structure does not look different in light or dark. It seems to always have a natural glow. In the rain one can see its natural beauty; the rain makes ones eyes travel down slowly and allows you to see direction inside of it. Next to the Achitecture building this structure looks happy. It is perfect in proportion to the building and gives one something to look at other then the building. The plexi glass looks sharp next to the brick exterior of the building. If one however were to just look at the structure it would seem too big and bland. This is because all of the parts are oversized, and it could look gaudy. This structure could have been made to test out the material in the exposure of the environment to see how long and how well it could stand up to certain environmental conditions. I believe that the material was heated and bent into its current shape. I also believe that the creator could have shaped many pieces at once. This structure would like to snake itself into the ground and build tunnels in its spare time. If I were to name this piece I would name it rapture, because it has the energy to destroy millions. Wooden structure: This structure seems to be made of plywood and is three stories high. It is three to four meters long and changes with constantly. I really feel this structure come to life in the morning with the fresh light falling in down the “waterfall” that is created. The structure fits really well in the building, almost to the point where one would ask if the structure was made for the building, or if the building was made for the structure. The waves fall from the third story, where it could be a long plant growing out of the third floor, and down to the bottom floor. It is neatly tucked into the second story and from that perspective is a work of art in itself. This is a very functional piece and shapes the whole building well. The wood does not go with any of the other materials in the building and it really contrasts it well. The first time I looked at it I saw an organ. The bench at the bottom was the keys and the different planks would lat out such beautiful sounds, especially if the building was full and energetic. The detail of this structure is minimal it is made more for mass then detail. The binding of the wood and the notches made for the pieces to fit together would have been an interesting thing to observe. I think that it would be a completely different building if one were to extract it from its location. The most interesting part of this structure is seeing how people interact with it. Some not even noticing it is something so great. I can see this structure forming sacred bonds with each individual. It relaxes the mind and takes worry away from those who need it. I would have to name this structure wonderer. Link to this Page
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