Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Assignment 4

 

The building on campus I decided to take a picture of was Sims Resident Hall in the Women's Quad.  This beautiful building has several Greek columns in the front of the building.  When first looking at the building, the columns are what caught my attention.  They really give the building that old historical look.  There are three Greek column styles, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthians.  These columns are Corinthian style.  Corinthian colunms are the most ornate style out of the three Greek style of colunms.  They contain fluted colunms and have very decorated capitals.  Capitals are located at the top of the colunm and are what allow you to distinguish what type of style the column is.  The Caorinthian capitals are decorated with leaves and scrolls.  These columns attribute to much of this building beauty.  The second feature I notices when looking at Sims was a small dome located on the top of the bulding in the center.  A dome is a hallow upper half of a cirlce.  I found that with this dome being small it allowed me to look at the overall building instead of just a huge dome.  For exmaple, when I look at the South Carolina State House in Columbia I find my attention totally directed to the dome and overlooking the other architectural features of the building.  Both of these architectural features provide beautiful decoration to the building making it a pretty sight to look at!

The architectural style of Sims is Greek Revival.  The two architectural features that classify this building as Greek Revival are the Greek columns in the front of the building and the dome on top.  The buildings that are the Greek Revival style of architectural are much older and have a history behind them.  The buildings are modeled after historical architectural structures such as the Parthenon in Athens, Greece.  This is my favorite style of architecture because the buildings have so much elaborate detail on them that it makes them so pretty to look at.  The buildings on the University of South Carolina's campus are one of the first things I noticed when visiting here for the first time.  So many of the buildings on this campus are old and have so much history behind them.  I would much rather look at an old building modeled after the Greeks than a modern styled building.  Our buildings are what make our campus look uniform and united. 
Pathenon in Athens, Greece

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