patrick ruminates on opus three

as part of our regular weekly posts, we will select five students at random to feature for some evaluation on their opus project. we provide this feedback as a way to indicate to the whole class the patterns that we see in the opus project generally and some alternative ways to think about and write about design. remember, above all, that the opus project allows you the intellectual space to synthesize all that you are learning from the various classes into a seamless entry. the “summary” post is a good place to be sure we understand that you can link all the PARTS together into a well-considered WHOLE. without that summary, it’s very difficult for us to reasonably situate the other annotations within a sense of your growing understanding of design.

the opus three random selectees: chey shelton, brian peck, hailey granetz, ellie griggs, and rebecca pryor.

drawing courtesy of d. chey shelton

with chey shelton’s post, we discover his characterization of parts to the whole in as a UNITY in design… though he mentions entourage as an alternative way of providing vignettes, he does not make explicit the connection between vignettes (collections of objects to tell a story) to this idea of unity. in nailing the idea of SCALE and tying it to several civilizations we have studied thus far, we see that he has begun to understand that all buildings have some relationship to the humans inhabit them. whether they are used to “induce a feeling of unworthiness in commoners and an ego boost in aristocrats” or whether they act as “a veil to outsiders,” buildings and their components (porch, court, hearth) and the walls that inscribe them represent some of the most basic elements used by environmental designers to shape the world for human experience.