(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: