DAB525 - Week 1 Reflection

The first thing introduced in this class was the acknowledgement of the traditional owners of QUT. How does this relate to this subject?

The lecturer for this course is Mirko and compared to past lecturers he displays lots of depth in the theories he is teaching. 

The following pictures below were displayed and we were to come up with three comments.

  

The three comments I came up for the pictures are.

• ·         Organic Layout
• ·         Rivers Edge
• ·         Landscape

Why? As my eyes scan the picture to locate place and setting, I understand that the city was designed organically as there are no straight lines or attempts of “Master Planning”. The Rivers edge define the city’s layout and the landmark is somewhat centralized to the city and form a landmark due to the scale and context.

In my own terms and opinions I believe that architecture is the unity of space, form, context and history to create a built form which enhances the current context. 

I totally agree with the neighbors diagram, though I believe that sometimes they may be mutually exclusive. Why can’t you love your neighbor and love yourself? Many of these examples are shown in residential and commercial terrace architectural designs. 

As the lecture developed on Mirko displayed different functional cities. Some examples are military, capital, market, university, harbour, religious, factory, palace, bath cities. Most of these are situated and expanded due to the functionality of the city. Due to the era these were essential but as the times are advancing with the introduction of modernization of technology and evolving culture it would be interesting how new cities are developed. In the end he also showed how cities can be mono-nucleated or poli-nucleated through observing earth from space.

 

We soon had to describe the displayed cities organic or designed and i found myself looking for specific elements to understand both. For the more organic layout i found that it expanded out from a central area with minimal links and an erratic formation where "organized" is thrown out the door. I found designed cities were designed more around larger roads to allow for high amounts of traffic between areas. Even though there were some organically layed out with a city design they proved both useful for planning landscaping to separate districts.