In this blog I will be connecting the dots between Philip Glass (composer), Batman/Gotham City (superhero), Watchmen (movie), and Union Terminal (place) and showing how they are all related and how they each relate to architecture.
An architect thinks in terms of the experience of spaces and building structure. Philip Glass, a composer, thinks in terms of rhythm and musical structure. However, I believe that he is an architect, an architect of music. He created the the theme music for the movie "Watchmen", which is based off the comic book series written by DC Comics. DC Comics also produced the comic series "Batman". Batman's creators, Bob Kane and Bill Finger, I feel are also architects. They take an idea and construct a character through drawing, then they construct a storyboard through writing. They create a character and stick him in a certain environment just like an architect creates a building and places it within its context of where it would best be suited. Now DC Comics also created another series based on some of their most popular superheros, including Batman, called "The Justice League". Their headquarters was modeled after Union Terminal in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was designed by Alfred T. Fellheimer, a New York architect. Now obviously, Fellheimer is an architect and needs no explanation. However, he and his consultants hired an artist by the name of Winold Reiss to paint fourteen murals depicting the most important industries to come out of Cincinnati. I would make the same argument for Reiss being an architect as I did for Bob Kane And Bill Finger. To tie this mess together, the first mural that he painted was of the Baldwin Piano Company based out of Cincinnati. Philip Glass, mentioned earlier, started the Philip Glass Ensemble in which he is the piano player. As a side note that I found entertaining, Philip Glass, Winold Reiss, and Alfred T. Fellheimer all studied and lived in New York City, which also happened to be the site for "Watchmen" and what Gotham City was based off of.
I fully believe that everything is architecture because no matter if its a building, song, painting, comic book, etc., they have an affect on your senses and how you perceive things in your everyday life. As for David Pye in his "The nature of design", he says that architecture is different from the other aspects of design because an architect is not given nor designs with an intended result in mind, but "decides what the principal objects in the result shall be." I don't fully agree with this because if an architect is given a certain program or their client has specific needs, then isn't there an intended result in mind?
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I find these connections very interesting. All of the little ways that these things relate make it crazy to think about how so much more things in the world are probably tied together in all these underlying ways that we don't even know about. In your question posed at the end "if an architect is given a certain program or their client has specific needs, then isn't there an intended result in mind?" based from David Pye's statement "architecture is different from the other aspects of design because an architect is not given nor designs with an intended result in mind, but "decides what the principal objects in the result shall be," I think that to a certain extent we are given an intended result on the surface of our design, but not necessarily the deeper meaning behind it. An architect could sit down with a client and be given a program or criteria to meet their needs, but that is only in a way the beginning of the design. It is then up to the architect to decide what more this building means and what the principal objects in the result should be to maybe influence more then just their specific client.
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