Churned these out today. Some changes. More depth. Added mirrors as props.
4.4.12
3.4.12
2.4.12
Any ideas?
I want to combine collage scenes in some way with those clock drawings. (Merging "illustrations" of two separate texts.) The final product will be 3 18x12 drawings. 3 ideas involve [1] laser-cut and layered drawings using the clock lines as templates. [2] convex/concave images, as if the scene is warped by time/speed. [3] Using lines from the clocks to fracture and warp the image.
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Any ideas? Here's an example of where collages are heading. (More saturated than before, pulling from the colors that form naturally inside clocks from enamel interacting chemically with copper, brass, etc.)
19.3.12
Clock drawings cont.
A seminar class called Measured Representation asks us to select a text and derive a drawing. The text I chose is from the 2010 Pulitzer novel, 'Tinkers":
"Lay the clock facedown. Unscrew the screws; maybe just pull them from the cedar or walnut case, the threads long since turned to wood dust dusted from mantels. Lift off the back of the clock like the lid of a treasure chest. Bring the long-armed jeweler’s lamp closer, to just over your shoulder. Examine the dark brass. See the pinions gummed up with dirt and oil. Look at the blue and green and purple ripples of metal hammered, bent, torched. Poke your finger into the clock; fiddle the escape wheel (every part perfectly named -- escape; the end of the machine, the place where the energy leaks out, breaks free, beats time). Stick your nose closer; the metal smells tannic. Read the names etched onto the works: Ezra Bloxham-1794; Geo. E. Tiggs-1832; Thos. Flatchhart-1912. Lift the darkened works from the case. Lower them into ammonia. Lift them out, nose burning, eyes watering, and see them shine and star through your tears. File the teeth. Punch the bushings. Load the springs. Fix the clock. Add your name."
A few antique clocks from the Pickens jockey lot and some teeny tools from Home Depot have me scrunching up my eyes to dismantle the metal and springs, scan in all the components, and document them. In the next few weeks, these technical representations will be combined with a collaged scene which represents a second selected text. The idea is to merge, via invented sections and delicate layers, the dual sense of time: its illusory and/yet rigid nature.
15.3.12
thesIS done
“The melody begins, an undulant, endless melody. [It] loses itself horizontally, escapes from our hands as we see it withdraw from us toward a point of common longing and perfect passion” –Federico Garcia Lorca
13.3.12
10.3.12
2.3.12
1.3.12
building form!
so trying to get a solid grasp of what my thesis is going to become -
so My thesis discusses the need for preemptive design and community development before the event of a disaster. Time and time again, in disaster recovery situations, the culture of the area and the peoples' needs are often over looked in the rush to save lives and return to normality. After a disaster we have the ability reinvent our communities for a more sustainable future, however this often isn't the case because the rules are not in place before hand. I am proposing a new civic presence in Portland could help support planning how to redevelop in case of disaster. This would be actualized as an urban resource center where people can go to find out more about their community and sustainable living, and local businesses can find support and information on emergency preparedness. Connected to this will be open park space with a local market to promote a place used regularly by the community. The program will be able to change over time and will be a central emergency aid location. The structure will be lightweight and playful and interactive, and can be resilient. The building will be able to function in a disaster situation and smaller 'pods' of the building will be located throughout the city as smaller aid locations.
the form is derived from a circle and a canopy - structurally seems to make sense, i love circles,.... the canopy is comprised of circular arches supporting a space-frame with some type of membrane roof. any suggestions
27.2.12
25.2.12
(POST-) POST-MODERNISM
back-peddling while gravity moves us forward
We continue to operate in a post-modern paradigm, but we are still transitioning in some ways from a modern
to post-modern way of thinking. As the avant-garde continues to utilize techniques of shock effect and parody to
undermine established hierarchies, the ability of the public and the non-specialists digesting these products and
images will concurrently dissipate, driving us into the age after post-modernism, or post-post-modernism, an age of
which we are now seeing symptoms.
REBELLION + FRAGMENTATION
The unified Modernist rebellion against established cultural norms was a globalized effort, one that
had slightly varied manifestations in the United States and in Europe. It was a reaction that stemmed from the
same impulse, as a reaction to the same establishment. Frederic Jameson describes the effects of Modernismas "explosive" in his essay "Postmodernism and Consumer Society (Jameson 112)." This Modernism in some ways succeeded in fragmenting the social norm (Jameson 111), causing factions of society to abandon these norms and
invent other methods of thought or subscribe to those proposed by the Modernists.
This very fragmentation ironically disallowed the Avant-garde from perpetuating its own existence. As the
attitudes, impulses, and active forces of Modernism and the avant-garde broke down cultural norms, Modernism as
a movement was simultaneously only partially digested. It was being reduced and commodified by the very culture
and institutions against which it rebelled. The Avant-Garde as an idea became a desirable state of being, thereby
losing its explosive power.
The loss of faith in the avant-garde culture coincided with the post-modern attempts to communicate to the
populous on an individual level. This was a shift from individually-generated ideas to individually-digested ideas.
While Modernism communicated a global message through an individual architectural language, Postmodernism
utilizes a variety of architectural ideas to communicate distinct concepts.
DEATH OF INDIVIDUALISM
Jameson describes individualism as reliant on social norms (Jameson 114). Because Modernism was
successful in breaking down a large part of the cultural norm, individualism as an idea was threatened. Differing
threads of post-modernism continue to fragment society into a collection of styles. As Jameson states, "..the artists
of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds- they've already been invented; only a
limited number of combinations are possible." While every combination has not been invented, the realization of
the limit to uniqueness and invention predicates the full realization of the post-modern period. For this reason, we
are living in a continual shift between Modern and Post-Modern paradigms.
Once a subversive force is marketed to the public, capitalism has begun to take advantage of the myth of
the individual. Just as Postmodern architecture re-appropriates historical elements from the landscape of the city,
personal identity in a post-modern age is similarly curated. While identity in the modernist period was believed to
be unique, self-generating and autonomous, identity in the post-modern period is about re-appropriating external,
pre-generated elements to communicate to a larger public. Through one's association with specific music, fashion,
and symbols, one is able to construct an identity composed of pre-fabricated elements. Modernism was about the
expression of the individual, while post-modernism is about the curation of this individual.
Anthony Vidler describes in his essay "The Third Typology," the availability of the city as an object of
continuous form and history, standing ready to be decomposed into fragments, stating "The nature of the city itself
(is) emptied of specific social content from any particular time and allowed to speak simply of its own formal
condition (Vidler 2)." Vidler also describes the transition from a city with a clear distinction between public and
private to the essentially public nature of all architecture (Vidler 4). This calls to mind the the question of privacy
and publicity and the convergence of the two in the digital realm. In contemporary society, while we spend ample
time isolated spatially from the rest of society, we connect ourselves to that same society with ample public digital
communication.
The format of these modes of communication is also indicative of the way post-modernism works in
a reductive way, transforming reality into images in the way Jameson describes (Jameson 125). Our identity is
represented on our blogs, our Facebook pages, our tumblr accounts as a collection of short statements, photos,
icons and images that disassociate event from meaning, sign from signifier, and as a result, allow society to
interpret our identities through the imagined associations of these objects with one another. The forums we operate
within all require us to participate through standardized templates, that, while providing some adaptability, still
subversively control the way communicate our "unique" identities and interact with other users. These singlepage
representations of one's identity operate similarly to certain works of Postmodern architecture which function
diagrammatically depending upon the relationships between their elemental parts.
PASTICHE + SCHIZOPHRENIA
If post-modernism includes the re-appropriation of elements as signifiers that rely on their previous use and
meaning, pastiche is the re-appropriation of these elements decoupled from their former meanings. This decoupling
leads to a condition of schizophrenia. Jameson writes, "the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which
our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to… live in a perpetual change that obliterates
traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve." (Jameson 125)
Society is undergoing rapid transformation in smaller instances, rather than specific events of massive change.
The question of the position of contemporary culture hinges upon our relationship with this curation and
re appropriation. It hinges upon our collective memory. As design relies increasingly on the reinvention of older
styles, the public simultaneously co-opts these styles without an understanding of where they originated. This leads
to the watering-down of the public understanding of history and the simultaneous emergence of the schizophrenia
against which Jameson warns.
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23.2.12
Ergovisual: Alternative Ergonomics
Resor House Collage, Mies van der Rohe. 1939
Resor House, digital reconstruction. Movement in a fixated field.
Resor House, digital panorama. Exterior views manifest a surface caught between image and boundary.
reimaging Mies's unrealized Resor House through a new surface typology, the Ergovisual. Literally meaning, a kind of visual working through of space according to natural laws of perception. The project takes ergonomics as a point of departure. It takes liberty, however, to invert this idea--introducing a surface that challenges our conventional means of experiencing space, suggesting alternative inhabitations and relationships between interior and exterior, depth and shallowness, surface and image.
22.2.12
20.2.12
thesis
anyone have anything to say about community development and disaster relief through a redeveloped version of the Spatial City concepts of Yona Friedman, Eckhard Schulze-Fielitz, and Constant meets Fuller and Otto....
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utilitarian, efficient construction, flexible change of space, community participation in space forming, light weight, easily rebuilt if damaged in earthquake....
too outdated? i just love it, but i feel like there is a reason why all these theories stayed theories.
15.2.12
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