LA Past Lives Reflection - Daniel

            LA Past lives was a class where we learned about the Schindler house, architecture in Los Angeles, and the nature of the city itself. We visited the Schindler house and learned about its history in class and also learned about the history of LA architecture. We were made to think critically about the relationships between the Schindler house, modernism, and our own personal projects.

            For our group project, Chris and I designed a website for the Schindler House and Rudolph Schindler himself. It was inspired by the modular layout and functionality of the actual house itself.  We were encouraged to think of the conceptual meta-ideas regarding the house and ended up with a site that was much better than the current site. We designed a website that was organized like the layout of the Schindler house, and clicking on different rooms would lead you deeper into the site. These different rooms were categories which would lead you to more specific options regarding the type of information you were looking for. For example, clicking on the room titled “the man” would lead you to a page with the different categories: timeline, projects list, styles, influences. Picking the room titled projects list would give you a page listing all the different buildings Schindler worked on. The layout of the site had an elegant simplicity to it that was very stress free on the user, allowing the user to navigate and explore the site without overwhelming distractions. Its design was also more intuitive and fun to use because it gave you a sense of exploring the house, and it indeed gave a much better sense of what the Schindler house is like than the current site.

            Also during LA Past lives, we visited the Los Angeles Public Library on 5^th and Flower Street in Downtown LA. The library has beautiful architecture itself. My favorite sight was the beautiful paintings on the ceiling of the children’s section of the library. There as a class we learned about the tools available at the library and eventually presented our Schindler house inspired web design project to them.

            All in all it was a good class. I learned a lot, got to explore some interesting places, and had a fun time. The web design project was especially interesting for me because it was something I’ve never really done before. It made me think deeply about the nature of how we experience online media, along with how you could make that relate to something as different as modernist architecture. Also I felt presenting in front of the class was a good exercise to do.