James Fulton -- Blog Response #4

The Forsyth Institute building presents an interesting parallel with Roman temples and the process of aging and renovation made readily apparent by most examples of ancient architecture. The building maintains certain Roman proportions, albeit bastardized in places, such as a seeming adherence to the 2:1 length to width ratio of a Roman temple that manifests itself as a 2:1 width to length (with the street-fronting side as the width) in the Forsyth institute. And, like the Maison Carrée, the columns that line the building are seemingly set within the walls -- revealing only a part of the whole to our view.

While the parallels in design and presentation on the exterior are interesting to a degree, where the building truly becomes a paragon of the ideas of architectural and cultural translation is in the adjoining modern addition to the building. The building is attached with absolutely no forgiveness to a monolithic concrete building with little-to-no decoration and only the most basic attempt to blend in through the use of a repeated vertical window divider that acts as a continuation of the columns found in the original building. While the addition shows a certain carrying-on from the ideas of old, the design calls back visually to the Mogao caves and other similar rock-cut spaces. This calling back to the old of one place in order to move away from the old of another displays the cyclical nature of architectural evolution and the progression of the arts through history in general.