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.
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