Friday, December 5, 2014

Rice and Architecture Nerdiness

     I just got back from Rice, and it was a blast! It definitely got bumped up a few places on my college list. Anyway, when my father and I arrived on campus (40 minutes early because, well, Father DeCorte likes to be "punctual"), we walked around Lovett Hall (pictured below). As we were walking, I looked up to a dome at the corner of a walkway and said "Oh, dad! Pendentives!" My father gave me a quizzical look and said, "Yes... Yes indeed."
     A few moments later, I noted (to myself this time) the the arcade that circumscribes the quad. While walking around campus, I noticed a bunch of the architectural features that we learned last unit in Humanities that had been applied to secular buildings.
     This made me think about the future. A lot of the theoretical knowledge we gain at St. Martin's will influence (whether willingly or unwillingly) our lives well down the road. This seems like a pretty obvious thing to say, but this simple, concrete example of me geeking out over architecture (a field in which I have no desire to do anything career-wise) made this all very real for me. St. Martin's (and especially Humanities, of course) has made us well-rounded people that are interested in a broad scope of academic and practical concentrations.
     Here's Lovett Hall:

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Joey did they tell you the story of the engineering students who turned the statue pictured around for a prank and then broke the bottom? It was so expensive that to raise money to fix it they had a foam party in the quad.