SURVEY OF TODAY

WHOA

Summer came and went and now I’m about to enter my 4th week into fall term.

Small recap of last term :

This lovely thing is my final production. A live/work building for persons of craft and fabrication.

All in all a good go at it.

NOW onto the now.

January-March/Winter term complete

So, here it is, two weeks into my last term as a second year. The following is a nearly verbatim narrative of the final presentation for last term, which ended three weeks ago. As the images emerge through your reading, imagine that the visual cue to look at them is from my gesturing to them gracefully, not merely for their existence on your computer screen, and it will be like you were really there. Oh and also when you get to the end imagine all the thumbs up.

(So,) This term was focused on photography as an applied art and its relationship to architecture. We were to begin analysis of it through the understanding of it. We worked with pinhole photography and focused on a subject that would later help to inform our design for a museum of photography. (Sidenote: Interestingly enough, the very first photograph was of architecture. Architectural photography and the idea of the ‘frame’ is a branch of this inquiry that could fill an entire term all on its own.) (see previous posts.) I focused first on biological analogy, finding geometry in the body: the diamond tracing the lips, the triangular implications of bent legs, etc. Simultaneously, I had found a precedent artist who worked with origami to create pinhole cameras from the folded photographic paper. (This idea of folded/unfolded, furled/unfurled has been of recurrent interest throughout many of my projects.) So, I tried it and failed at it several times. Capturing only darkness, due to excessive light leakage in the paper cameras. Through the attempts and changes to the variables, I became less interested in the idea of biological analogy and more intrigued with the process driven aspect of my work. Eventually trial and error won out and I was able to produce something. Abstracted yet. At this point in time, we had a midterm review. I was about to make the shift from theory to design. I’d been working primarily on the development of the folding methods of the paper so I was worried about venturing into origamic architecture. A move that would be too literal and potentially over-done. At the midterm review I was advised to study the qualities of the photos produced by the cameras and combine that with the needs of the program (i.e. the components that make up the museum).

The photos produced by the cameras were abstracted. There was logical input and an obvious illogical output. Activity being written from a 3d object onto a 3d’d 2d plane (folded paper). The images were diagrammed onto the paper in an abstract method, not providing any understanding, only offering the information to the viewer objectively, seen from 2 eyes (there are apertures on the origami cameras, hence the abstraction. The closest precedence I can think of is the world map, cut to lay flat.) Also, the idea of layering came into my periphery. Because of the two apertures, the images were layered onto one another. I started to think of this in sense of context, the way history is layered in cities. A consistent building upon the past. This brought me to choose the site at SW Stark & 10th, sharing the lot with a Pietro Belluschi building which has recently been updated. (I liked this site because it embodies that idea of contextual layering, with the traditional and the modern on the same old building.)

So to begin the design of the building, I started with the basic footprint of the site, which is trapezoidal by nature. I derived the external shape from this. I knew I wanted to keep an element of the folds without it being overt that the structure was derived from origami. So I began to think of the floors of the building as the paper, a unfolded linear plane where floor acts as ceiling and vice versa. I derived the height differences and ceiling heights from multiplying the footprint of the building by 4 onto paper and folding it in reference to itself and the angle of the site’s corner (this is how I developed the folds for the camera ultimately, thru mastery of traditional origami and then experiementation by folding the paper in reference to itself). I took the angles of the triangular fold lines on the footprint of the site and used those 2 angles, 40 something and 50 something, to determine how tall each side of the building shoud be (based on the number of floors). I had already compartmentalized the space into 2 categories: gallery and services. I knew I wanted them to remain separate. The gallery space included a rotating gallery, a permanent collections gallery and a room sized camera obscura. The services included curatorial offices, workshops, a darkroom, a cafe, and a bookstore. All the electrical and such services reside in the floor/ceiling/walls.

That’s how the form emereged. From wanting the building to look like its just been folded and layered/distributed into place. The floor/wall/ceilings would be made from wood planks running horizontally, encasing all the services in its belly. It would be encased in a glass facade that does not touch the internal structure. It is merely a shell. (The reason for this is to act as the light safe box i had to make for the paper camera obscuras in order to make them work. It was a container. The glass is the container.)

The plan is drawn as if the top floor were pulled out like a map. The elevation is similar, a cut out model of the original.