Reading the Signs of Architectural Spaces

Directions: Once you have broken into groups, briefly remind one another of your names and then elect one member to function as a recorder, the person who will report to the class as a whole when we reconvene. Then, using Peter Gibian's essay "The Art of Being Off-Center: Shopping Center Spaces and Spectacles" as a model, offer as a group a reading of your assigned space. Questions you might want to consider include:

How am I expected to react to that space?

What does it signify?

How do individual aspects of the space help to create this signification?

Do some parts seem incongruent and thus don't work toward the main signification? Why?

Are issues of consumption at play here? (This is perhaps obvious with the Bookstore, but what about the other spaces?)

Does the space reveal the decade in which it was created as Maasik and Solomon assert it may? If so, what decade?

Assigned Spaces:

Group 1: Rand as a whole.....including "the Wall"
(names of students)

Group 2: the Vanderbilt Bookstore (interior)
(names of students)

Group 3: Kirkland Hall (exterior)
(names of students)

Group 4:    Vanderbilt as observable from West End and/or 21st
                    Avenue
                    (names of students)