W3_The Muses are Not Amused

Silvetti in the Muses are Not Amused focuses on four categories of form making in a more current academic setting that were looked at from a negative viewpoint. He specifically looks at programism, themeization, blobs, and literalism, and although I agree with some of his descriptions and the short-comings of following those certain patterns, in my opinion there is so much more to designing. Yes, programism doesn’t think out the necessary detail of spaces and circulation well (ex. Seattle Public Library’s need to be color coded to get through), and making blobs because we can, and even making them because we can and applying useless meaning over it is shallow and most often doesn’t work, but buildings that fit into those categories are cop-outs from my viewpoint. At the present there are also so many other groups of thought that current designs and designers can fit into and it is hard to judge them all because of the fact that they are so current. Even though we can assess our designs now and have a certain degree of insight into the building, it takes time to take a step back and realize all the positives and negatives of what is going on in a larger scope of things. I am sure during the time of baroque architecture there were bad designs as well, but now we don’t focus so much on all the short comings, as much as we look at the positive attributes of the time. In the future when this time period is looked upon I doubt that buildings that fit into the categories Silvetti described will be focused on for those attributes.