All the Arts Under One Roof

This is the last assigned project of my undergraduate program. The task was to re-work a previous project from one of our earlier studio courses with the purpose of build on upon it (rather than fixing or improving it). I chose a simple drawing exercise I did in my drawing class; an orthogonal projection of a building (Sage Art Center).

Orthogonal projections are interesting to me because they don’t represent the object as in a perspective, but rather describe it, and in a way, abstract it or reconfigure our understanding of it. The idea of showing architecture in a way different from how we commonly perceive it fascinates me.

I decided to accurately draw the ceiling plan of Sage Art Center, which is essentially an open plan building consisting of 25 columns, and

My goal was to further abstract something that is already abstract and unnoticed–a building/architecture. I like to graphically interpret architecture in an effort to show viewers unseen or unthought-kiof aspects/possibilities of a building they regularly use and perhaps (probably) barely notice.

At the same time, I like geometry and patterns, and architecture is all about that. Sage is a perfect square with multiple geometries embedded in the form of column grids, mechanical chases, light fixtures, etc. Perhaps people can look at the ceiling and its elements (for the first time) as things other than random utilitarian interventions, and find some order and even beauty in what at first seems like an undefined structural chaos.

The Poetics of Space II: College Brutalism

The second building I want to represent as part of my honors thesis exhibition is Hutchinson Hall, also known as “the battleship,” and its vertical peer, Hylan Tower.

Here are my photographic studies so far (discussion after the pictures).

I have witnessed many negative remarks by students and faculty about this building. They wonder why do we need a bomb shelter on campus, and why couldn’t they do an ivy-covered brick building instead, with little stone cornices and details on the corners.

We do have a couple ivy-covered brick buildings on campus outside the main academic quad (which is a wonderful architectural complex) and neither of these catch the slightest of interest from anybody. They simply can’t shine. Their half-hearted historical allusions were ill thought about and executed. Hutchinson is for me a beautiful expression of pre-cast concrete, the material being one with the form. Buildings like Hutchinson are not built anymore. In today’s campuses there is a tendency towards washed-away glass store-fronts and the like, and less permanent, bold solid forms.

Hutchinson Hall is an example of the ever decreasing list of so-called “brutalist” architecture, which was until very recently regarded as inhumane and ugly in its entirety. Built during the 60s and 70s, some scholars have proposed that this is the kind of architecture that universities hoped would offer some greater form of resistance against the student movements of the time. I could not find any public evidence of this in the case of Hutchinson Hall. After looking at the documents available at the Rare Books and Special Collections department, the main concern of the university had seem to acquire enough space for the chemical and biological sciences; a fire resistant, and structurally sound structure in case something went wrong in the labs.

To me, the theme of this style is that of volume and shadow. In my exhibition drawing, I plan to incorporate the very lucid three-dimensionality of this building and the play of light throughout the days and seasons across the building.

 

(Flashback) Video Art and Wilson Commons

Even though my serious research of Wilson Commons started just last semester, my interest and fascination with this building started a while back. For my first project in my video art class more than a year ago, I did a one minute in-camera cut video. Using fairly old tape cameras, we were required to create a final product without using any editing software. This is the result:

The Poetics of Space I: Wilson Commons

“The success of the masterpieces seems to lie not so much in their freedom from faults–indeed we tolerate the grossest errors in them all–but in the immense persuasiveness of a mind which has completely mastered its perspective.” – Virginia Woolf, “The Death of the Moth.”

I have embarked in my school’s honors project. I envision myself creating several very large mix-media architectural drawings of symbolic buildings on campus. These drawings, while relying on the traditional techniques used by architects to describe buildings (floor plan, section, elevation, orthogonal and perspective projections, etc) are really meant to illustrate in literal and symbolic ways, those architectural elements–physical, historical, symbolic, functional, mythical, etc–that integrate these buildings and which are often overlooked, or not even thought-of. My plan is to create viciously detailed large scale drawings that will amaze their typical users and encourage them to look at them with new eyes, and encourage them to think about how these spaces are in fact affecting their bodies and minds on a daily basis.

One of the buildings I have in mind is the student union at the U of R. We call it Wilson Commons, and it was designed and constructed by the firm of I.M. Pei. Judged since the beginning of its existence, there is only one thing I can answer about its architectural value: considering its lack of “beauty,” its awkward functionality and multiple daily inconveniences, it is in the end, and aside from Rush Rhees Library and maybe another couple buildings, the only piece of Architecture (mind the capital A) on campus. It is, in other words, the complete fulfillment of an intellectual structure bestowed upon a physical structure; the full released intensity of a design. The integrity of the design survived gravity, budget and client–until they McDonaldized the food court 20 years later….

Here are my photographic studies for the drawing so far:

 

 

Week Plan: A Möbius Strip?

I recently submit the piece below to an undergraduate art show her in my school. Last year my work was one of the elected pieces for the exhibition but this year I was not lucky enough. Nonetheless, I consider this piece to be quite a step forward in my research involving the graphic representation of space.

What if a psychologist, instead of asking you to write your week’s activities in a log, presumably to “optimize” you’re time management, asked you instead to write down, or rather, draft, the spaces you occupy during that week? How about “space optimization”? What’s the space in between? What’s the space within? Without?

With this proposition in mind, I set out to draft the spaces I occupied during a whole business week of my life, using only measuring tape and standard architectural software to create a “floor plan” of each day, Monday through Friday. To reduce my scope from global to doable, I eliminated the spaces where I spent less than 5 min. engaged in an activity. With this rule, hallways, roads, and parking lots were eliminated to create a fairly tight plan which was arranged according to the geographical position of each room or place in relation to the others.

My room and dorm bathroom happen to occupy the northernmost point of my plan. Usually, the library lies to the south while the food (dining halls) lie towards the East and center. Computer lab? West.

Once these plans are joined, they form a kind of Mobius strip, quite illustrative of the daily life of many. A spatial matrix from which there is no escape. The repetition is obvious and almost impossible to escape.

What kinds of spatial patterns exist in each week, for each person? Where do we actually exist?

How do the “powers of architecture,” affect us without our knowledge? What does a wall, or a window, or a column does to our daily life? How can we change the spatial discourse on a personal, citizen level? What would we see, and understand, by looking at our “week plan”?

There is much knowledge to be found in the realm of spaces, if only we look. And measure.

Sage: A Bad Render is a Hundred Thousand Words

Ahh, the world of rendering! Here are some of my first trials from a year ago or so. Today, they seem quite poetic and kind of make me think about the building in ways I previously didn’t.  Another reason not to trash your artistic failures!

Sage: Architectural Image as Pattern

Buildings are the most visible objects in our environment. Images of buildings are perceived differently then, than other smaller objects, including people. When we look at a postcard of a building, we notice its scale, and in one way or another, picture ourselves in that environment.

How can the image of a building lose its reading as architecture and become something else, something smaller perhaps?

My answer so far is to turn it into a pattern that both isolates its place in the real world, and turns it into an abstract image.

My subject matter is once again Sage Art Center, a building that stands by itself in a particularly desolate part of the campus.

The results are some very interesting visual products.

Sage: Line Drawings

One of my first forays into “artistic” architectural line drawings.

My subject? Sage Art Center (arguably the most plain art building in America).

 

Paper Architectures

What would it be to stand inside a paper room?

That is the question I asked myself in response to the latest challenge from my art professor: a so-called “multiples project:” 350 or more identical items that together construct meaning relevant to their material identity.

Below is the answer to my question and to the challenge. The piece has no title. The empty 400 folded sheets of paper speak of the material and nothing more. At the same time, the empty white walls invite people to project their own meaning to the structure, whether they look at it from the exterior, or experience it from within.

 

In all honesty, the idea had already occurred to me at least a couple of months ago. I had been toying with the idea of paper architectures for a while in relationship to discourses such as “truth of materials:” letting the brick, wood or concrete speak for themselves–no decoration, just pure material expression. Why not give a chance to paper? This assignment was the first opportunity I had to give it a shot.

As it turned out, the execution was not perfect. The installation is not a room per se.The walls reach only halfway to the floor. My original idea also called for a paper ceiling that would follow the same pattern of the “walls.”

It is just another one of those projects were “you’re never done, you simply run out of time,” as my mentor would put it.

Nonetheless, something did seem right in the end, perhaps not in phenomenological terms as I’d hope for, but visually. It was described several times as poetic.

What do you think?

Interventions III

The final installment in my interventions series, and, I must say, my favorite.

This piece had to be done in a space we considered as “personal.” I decided to take the meaning of personal liberally and so selected the Art and Art History Department floor as my place to intervene, the reason being the fact that I spend quite a lot of time there, and a lot of important memories have been forged within these walls.

The problem with the department is that it presents an incredibly institutionalized, boring facade. I believe that if there’s a department that should stand out visually for fundamental reasons that is the art department.  So I went to work and this is what I did:

ART PARASITE

The tinfoil pseudo-organic structures make people have an above average visual and physical engagement with what’s normally a very plain environment, more akin to a prison than an art department. Scattered across the floors, walls, doors and furniture of this passage, the tinfoil structures are an outgrowth of the building’s necessity to become something special after so much regularity. They do not make the space prettier, but more interesting.

The point is to get a reaction from people who usually get anesthetized by this kind of environment. If people laugh, get pissed off, wonder what’s wrong, or otherwise just look twice at this environment, I consider it a success. If in this closer inspection, people find something new about this formerly ignored space, that’s some valuable bonus points for me!