Point: Reflections

Reflections unit has shown the numerous ways that design pulls techniques and styles from past foundations and other countries, while shifting the rules to impact the designs to what they believe to be the "new, better look". With the availability of large exhibits full of traders from different parts of the world, textiles continued to enter the Americas, allowing individuals and designers to enlighten their houses and guests with the foreign objects. A revolution can be defined as a dramatic and wide-reaching change in the way something works or in the way people view it.

The discovery of materials, like iron and glass, on the development of structures was a revolution in itself. It allowed designers and architects to literally bend the rules of a basic foundation, able to add thiner columns, iron arches, and the combination of the glass against the iron creates an experience of nature while still having the stable coverings from the natural elements. Train stations, factories, greenhouses, libraries, arcades, and exhibitions all began to display the use of new materials for their own purposes. Greenhouses benefited from the glass, allowing people in one climate to grow plants in their own climate. While Biblioteque Ste. Genevieve was built with iron arches and skeleton because it was the cheapest way to build the largest library. Overall the Crystal Palace made the largest impact on the world not only for the use of materials but the use of the exhibition center, bringing together extremely different artifacts and materials from all over the world to display for the nation to see and judge and later on take as their own to create a "brand new" mold of the original piece they viewed.

Even with the new discoveries, designers and architects seem to follow the same idea that past eras such as Baroque, Renaissance, and Gothic are basics for all structures to be build and messing them together has an effect that compliments any building or artifact. A cycle of the design eras in always continuous and always changing if many like to think that some have concluded but the truth is that individuals are always looking for ways to enhance, increase, and entertain the idea of a better design than the last!