The Seagram Building was designed by Mies van Der Rohe, who is the architect I have been studying. It is located I New York City, and was originally unused space. It is a tall office building and the design consists of bronze and dark glass windows. It is very simple but still very classy. It was built pushed back from the road, so that there is an outdoor plaza people can sit and mingle during the day. The ceiling in the foyer is white, and makes it seem as though there is no defied kine between the sky and inside the building. Many different techniques were used and it was very well thought out.

https://www.archdaily.com/59412/ad-classics-seagram-building-mies-van-der-rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is a German-American architect who directed a school in modern architecture. He really strived to have his own architectural style that was modern and simple. The Nazis opposed modernism in architecture, so the school he taught in was closed down and he came to America. he taught modernism in Chicago, and created designs with minimal but strong and clean materials, such as steel and glass. He created many many world renown structures that I will show in future posts, but his style has been used and imitated and he even has his own section in the Museum of Modern Arts.

The Tianjin Binhai Library is another fascinating design by the MVRDV in accompany with the Tiajin urban planning group. This library is one of a kind in many ways. For one the massive globe in the center of the building is the stand out it all. With a sky roof beaming down light at the globe, it illuminates the room and creates an amazing centerpiece. The rounded architecture of the structure seems to be molded around the ball almost as if you were standing in the middle of a gyroscope.

To me this building is a representation of future of architecture. I feel this way about a lot of non american architecture recently as I think there is more progressing overseas. The buildings put out by MVRDV often fit this new age criteria, or futuristic style as I like to call it. This sort of futuristic style, gives me hope for our future as a world. That we can progress as a society rather than stagnating in our ways. Would love to visit this building sometime in the future.

This building is divided into 3 main parts. There is the main lecture building which consists of the base of the building (operating part of a blender), the several story section that rises almost as tall as Dale Hall (the actual blender part), and then a connecting building to the Old Science building that is used for the associated labs that the lecture halls require you to have. When I first came to campus everyone called it the blender because it sum’s up what the building looks like. Science has a bunch of tools that make them looks like everyday appliances which makes the name suitable for this science building. At first I didn’t see the building that way, I initially thought it looked more like a blocky foot from the side. I realized that the entirety of the main building seems to have no windows which is different from most of the other buildings on campus.

It took about half a semester, but during my freshman year, up through its demolition in the spring of my sophomore year, Cate Main lounge was one of the most important places on campus to me. It was the place where my campus ministry met to pray every day, and gradually it became a central location for many friends from that ministry and tangential groups. It is one of the primary locations that I remember forming friendships and having meaningful conversation in. A couple of my friends practically lived there freshman year, and I began to spend many hours there as well. Located in the same building as the Cate Main cafeteria, with our meal exchanges, we were well-equipped to live there out of our backpacks, working at the tables, eating, and napping on couches.

The lounge was wide (the above picture looks across the width), but was also very long. Despite a piano, ping pong table, pool table, and plenty of furniture (four couches, five or six armchairs, and three or four tables), most of the room was open space. Two walls were covered in windows and glass doors, allowing for plenty of indirect lighting. The windows looked out onto a garden/lawn/sidewalk area in front of the Honors College, a building just as aesthetic as the rest of campus buildings, and with a little more charm to its shape. The doors opened onto a patio, hedged in by bushes, with a few picnic tables. Right outside the windows was the main sidewalk between the dorms and class buildings which would fill with students between class periods and subside to its usual quietness during class periods. The building itself was located very conveniently near class buildings and near the dorms.

The impressive thing about Cate Main was this versatility and convenience, combined with an interior that made it easy to use the space to socialize or work, without disturbing people doing the other. The piano was also an excellent addition. It was somehow well-tuned during all my time in college (and last I checked, it’s still doing well at the bottom of Walker Tower!), and the musicians among us, or sometimes strangers, would often provide music in the background. Because the space was so large and carpeted, it was always easy to hear clearly, but rarely too loud.

But however much Cate may have added to our lives as students, the university’s employees making decisions about buildings did not feel so warmly toward it. The outside they probably considered ugly (as evidenced by the fact that it is currently difficult to find any pictures of the building online). They disliked how the sidewalks narrowed to that one passageway by the building. They did not have a high opinion of the Cate dorms the lounge was meant to service. Many of the advantages students found in it were not perceived from the outside. There were no flashy whiteboard rooms. There was no fancy-looking-but-actually-just-uncomfortable studying furniture. There was just empty space in an inconvenient spot, with a few old pieces of furniture and a piano. Who was it doing any good? And maybe they were right and it was the best decision for the university as a whole. But we well knew its value, and felt its loss when in March of 2018 the furniture was removed and over the following months that part of Cate Main was destroyed.

We never found a good replacement for the Cate Main Lounge, and it’s only reasonable to expect that we had an unusually good place in Cate. The perfect fit that it was for our community, and the lack of value perceived in it by the university, reflect the fact that some of the most important components of a space are not among first the things one would consider when evaluating it. This has made me think more in recent years about what it is that we really desire in a space, room, or building. It’s not often the fancy things, but rather the things which affect the intangible components in our experience of a place.

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In the latter half of Michael Graves career he began focusing a lot of his attention on producing health care facilities and assisted living homes that were centered around the needs of the humans in them. Michael really began to focus on these designs due to his own health crisis where a simple sinus infection would leave him paralyzed from the chest down. During his time in the hospital Michael noticed the inefficiency of the hospitals from furniture and equipment to the actual building design. Toward the end of his life Michael had partnered with Stryker to create better furnishings for hospitals, designed hospitals and assisted living homes that all focused on the humans that would be living and working in them. Michael even had a TED talk on the subject of the future of hospital design that was really interesting.

The OU Clocktower has had some special significance to me since a certain Saturday a week after finals week Freshman year. That day I walked around campus, taking pictures of different spots, buildings, and statues. It was a nice day and our campus was beautiful as ever so as I walked around reflecting on the end of my first year of college I decided to take some pictures.

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One of the places I came to was the clocktower. I knew the legends about it: how walking under it means you graduate late (which apparently was never a risk since I’m graduating late anyways!), and how walking under it and looking up means you never graduate (still definitely avoiding that one!). So maybe that gave it some significance when thinking about the years passing in college. Maybe it was also simply that it was a nice structure, and a convenient one. Whatever the factors were, somehow as I took pictures there an idea came to me.

I don’t know if I had already decided I ought to come back and take pictures at the end of every year, but if I hadn’t yet, I decided to that day. And when I came for a walk on campus I would take a picture with the clocktower. In fact, I would take pictures from a number of different sides, depending on how far I was into college. Taking these pictures would be a way of looking back at college, seeing myself at different times, with the clocktower as a sort of landmark which might not change much, but would reflect the years of my time in college and signify those walks on campus at the end of every year.

I wasn’t as used to taking or posing for pictures freshman year, but I was already getting better. The one that year was taken from the south side of the tower.

In subsequent years I was not so good at going for that walk soon after finals week. It often got pushed back into the summer. My sophomore year I took a summer class during the June session and on July 5th, during my last weekend in Norman that summer, I went for my second end-of-year walk. That year I took pictures from the south and west sides of the tower.

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In junior year I did a little better, taking the walk and pictures on May 23, 2019. That year, instead of wearing my normal dark blue/gray t-shirts, I was wearing a special shirt I’d just gotten that semester. In the spring semester I had been in the Auden course, an intense but incredibly rewarding (intellectually, not on paper) Letters course taught by the professors from History, Classics, and English. I was joining a good friend for this second part of the course, and she was a student in Creative Media Production. She created a class t-shirt that was adopted and given to each student (the majority of the design is on the back).

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When classes went online in the spring of 2020 and I began to work from my apartment in Norman, the spring and summer began to blend together. There wasn’t quite a clear dividing point as there had been in previous years. Nonetheless, on the Sunday before the last week of the June block of summer classes, I went on an end of year walk on campus for the fourth time. Again, I came to the clocktower and took pictures. This time I took one from the east and had a picture from all four sides.

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The clocktower at OU signifies time, progress, and the graduation goal of college for many students. This sequence of pictures carried some of that significance for me, but also signifies the ends of my academic years across college.. It has also been a landmark of my life every week passing between the library, physics classes, math classes, and other parts of the academic life that I have loved at this university.

I’m not sure yet what I’ll do when I walk around after I graduate, but I’m sure it will include some sort of exciting fifth shot of the clocktower: perhaps from underneath looking up!

This beautiful and profound memorial is one that has gone down in history as one of the most important ones of all time. To remember the sacrifice and scrutiny that the people of the civil rights movement went through is a sacrifice like no other. This creation from architect Maya Lin opened in the year 1989 in Montogomery, Alabama; helps us a day in history where 41 people and countless others helped change the way people of color in America were treated. Although we still see these despicable problems today, it is always good to revisit these historic monuments and know that with great sacrifice comes great rewards.