Rebeca Rojas

  Adolf Loos Adolf Loos (December 10, 1870–August 23, 1933) was a European architect who became more famous for his ideas and writings than for his buildings. He believed that reason should determine the way we build, and he opposed the decorative Art Nouveau movement, or, as it was known in Europe, Jugendstil. His notions about design influenced 20th-century modern architecture and its variations. Famous Quotes: 'Ornament and Crime' Adolf Loos is best-known for his 1908 essay "Ornament and Verbrechen," translated as "Ornament & Crime." This and other essays by Loos describe the suppression of decoration as necessary for modern culture to exist and evolve beyond past cultures. Ornamentation, even "body art" like tattoos, is best left for primitive people, like the natives of Papua. "The modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate," Loos wrote. "There are prisons in which eighty per cent of the inmate...

  Who is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe? Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a pioneering architect whose works – alongside Le Corbusier’s and Walter Gropius’ – defined a separate strain of modern architecture known as International Style. He was a true modernist pioneer and an iconic figure of 20th-century architecture and design. Sustained by his famous trenchant statements like ‘less is more’ and ‘God is in the details’, the textures of his Barcelona Pavilion (1929/1986), the steel-and-glass aesthetic of the Seagram Building (1956-1958) and his paradigmatic examples of domestic architecture like the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois (1945-1951), have become some of the world’s most emblematic and widely-recognized architectural elements and structures built in the last century.   One of his characteristic works is Farnsworth House Designed 1945 and eventually completed in 1951, the Farnsworth House is a bright, one-floor weekend house in what then was a rural setting by the ba...

  The Three Forms of Water Pure water is tasteless, odorless, and colorless. Water can occur in three states: solid (ice), liquid, or gas (vapor). Solid water—ice is frozen water. When water freezes, its molecules move farther apart, making ice less dense than water. This means that ice will be lighter than the same volume of water, and so ice will float in water. Water freezes at 0° Celsius, 32° Fahrenheit. Liquid water is wet and fluid. This is the form of water with which we are most familiar. We use liquid water in many ways, including washing and drinking. Water as a gas—vapor is always present in the air around us. You cannot see it. When you boil water, the water changes from a liquid to a gas or water vapor. As some of the water vapor cools, we see it as a small cloud called steam. This cloud of steam is a miniversion of the clouds we see in the sky. At sea level, steam is formed at 100° Celsius, 212° Fahrenheit. The water vapor attaches to small bits of dust in t...

 T he largest dinosaur that ever lived. The titanosaur Patagotitan mayorum is a big deal—literally, the biggest dinosaur that scientists have discovered to date. This long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur lived over 100 million years ago in what is now Patagonia, Argentina. Named Máximo, meaning “maximum” or “most” in Spanish, our titanosaur cast reaches 122 feet across Stanley Field Hall on our main floor and stands 28 feet tall at the head. Modeled from fossil bones excavated in Argentina, this cast conveys the sheer size of the biggest animal ever to live. (It’s longer than a blue whale!) Patagotitan weighed about 70 tons in life—that’s as much as 10 African elephants, like the two specimens on display next to Máximo.