4/7 & 4/9

4/7

Smith Hall was really beautiful to see. I had been in there once before, but it was for an event a really long time ago, so I had totally forgotten what it looked like! I had never understood why the main entrance to the building wasn't facing the quad, but it's to open the building up for the music majors coming from the East, as well as the public coming to view the show. The walls are built so that it's acoustic, which I'm thinking is pretty standard nowadays for grand auditoriums. Walking through the building was really cool though. I loved hearing the music played in the hallways (there was some jazz violin going on at the time, which I didn't know was a thing), and the beautiful water fountain, which didn't work unfortunately... We weren't able to go into another room because there was a class in there, but from the little I could see of it, there was a beautiful chandelier.

The Foreign Language Building has always interested me. It's so weirdly shaped and just never seemed to fit in. There was an interesting story that Professor Hinders came up with about how the architect was inviting God to come in. While that is a really cool explanation of the building, and it makes complete sense, I don't know if that's what the architect was actually thinking. I suppose the true story behind the design of the Foreign Language Building will remain a mystery to me.

The Institute for Genomic Biology was really cool to see because I had never been in there before. The statues by the building are meant to represent the fact that sciences like genomic biology are always changing, and are being progressed by the work of scientists. Well, that's what I think anyways. Inside the building was cool because there were a lot of subtle biology things incorporated into the building. The ground was made up of long dead, pressurized living matter. The walls had wood on them, and another wall by the sitting area had a ton of fossils prints hanging from it. It's kind of funny how the Morrow plots had an effect on that building too. I hadn't noticed that part of the building was pushed underground because of the plots until someone pointed it out to me. One thing that I really liked was out on the sidewalk across from the blobs and over the open space near the flowers. When I was walking back, I noticed that the sidewalk had a pattern on it that resembled DNA helicase. It's just kind of cool to see the subtle things that can be put in.