I've sent the mini version of my room to 3d print for the back section of my model:
Ive also lasercut some new pieces for the model that will allow the audience to "immerse themselves" further into the world of my project.
For tomorrow's tute I am working on: rethinking the naming of my plates, what still needs to be done to my plates/ model and how to present my project "like a play rather than as facts"
*all quotes are from my jury feedback.
'All of my work is about a way of seeing - a view of reality - that controls and is controlled by a set of beliefs. These beliefs direct our actions, which in turn shape our bodies. Over the course of our lives we become physical reflections of what and how we see. But because our view extends beyond the width of our eyes, we have to break it into seeable parts, or crush it into a believable whole.' - Langdon Graves
View into the Room
The door at the top of the stairs
Looking into the wall - parallel possibilities
Facade beneath the meta stair
The facade is the main part that will be updated before the jury. I still have to insert WIP rooms and attach blinds on the rooms without rooms within.
Will spend the rest of the weekend trying to create a case file out of thin air.
The day began in chaos....
but this chaos finally became ordered into a city under the stairs...
Then the facade got window frames:
and I tested views into the city-rooms with the SUPER wip mock-ups I did last week:
(The New York Public Library Reading Room - the archive of the city)
(Grand Central Station Window: The interstitial space between the city and its portals)
case file cover - lasercut from different colours and textures of paper
the model taking shape by slotting into the base piece. Everything still needs to be glued together.
The city under the stairs.
Stair system:
plywood inlay in the cardboard larger stair and 3d printed smaller stair. (I need to erase all the black marks created by the plywood)
Whole stair with mini stairs being assembled with Life Aquatic in the background:
Im hoping that unit 22 can cut the base and the mirrored elements tomorrow.
A lot of cutting lies in my future... fortunately, its of the laser variety but in nearly every material imaginable/ allowable.
I will have to cut the mirror at LAB 36 and the larger MDF pieces for the base and tracks at Blueprint.
Ive also made 3d print files of the stairs and door/tables which Ill hand in on Monday morning.
The axo below explains the materiality of the different model pieces and how I am hoping they come together:
I really want the model to have texture and materiality to feel like a miniature/ dollshouse and like a whole comprised of disparate parts so that the room is really constructed from elements discovered along the way.
Since the tutorial, I have made edits to the model including etching doors of different scales onto the different wall surfaces.
For tuesday, Im hoping to have some of the lasercut pieces (as many as I can cut on Monday, slots allowing) but also more of the room designs for the back section (otherwise known as my thick 2d drawing) and a storyboard of all the casefiles so we can talk about what still needs to be filled in/ crowd construction.
This animation walks us through the different steps of the model of the room. We go from the minimal structure of the room and start to construct the room (and the city) as we assemble the spatial clues that we discover along the way.
Elements like walls, stairs, surface coverings and furniture are added to take us through a sequence of scalar spaces; from wall to room to building to city. We end our journey in the room where we began yet this time, we see the room for what it really is:
an expansive interior with the potential to collapse infinite scales within the confines of its walls.
In honour of Maurice Sendak the creator of the ultimate park inside the room:
These illustrations are inspiration for one of the many rooms behind the façade in my (now rotating) model.
I remodelled all the different elements of the room to scale this time and according to the material they will eventually be made of.
I still have to model smaller details (stair infill etc) and will work on an exploded drawing for tomorrow that discusses the materiality and operability of the model (i.e. how the room will be constructed as the story is being developed)
Im thinking about modelling a fire escape on the building elevation to make it more Manhattan-esque. Will discuss at tutes tomorrow.
Ive been trying to figure out the model in plan and through modelling different elements in order to figure out what scale and material each part needs to be.
Here are some WIP views of it... will blog a more updated version tomorrow.
An edit from friday's tutorial:
Walls and plan view of the new model (with updated grid)
So the key to unlocking my project was obviously the idea that Studio 54 was the city collapsed into the room in 1977. In keeping with this idea, I've been looking at other city rooms.
For example, the Rose Room at the Algonquin Hotel (Midtown - mere blocks from Studio 54) was another dingy (occasionally cockroach-infested) room that was populated by celebrated writers, thinkers and celebrities earlier in New York City's history (1926) The Round Table was a gathering of celebrated literary figures who began to publish a magazine from their regular meetings.
E.B White (author of Charlotte's Web) was one of those who met at the Hotel. He wrote the book, Here is New York from one of the hotel rooms. Never leaving the room to enter into the city but rather capturing the city within the four walls of the room.
I've bought his book along with another book of poems about the city that identifies more New York icons to include in my plates. I also bought a history of the city told through documents, images and diary entries that will hopefully introduce more subtle references into the set of images and give me some EVIDENCE to include in my case file.
Sorry for the text based entry. Im working on designing my reconstruction of the route/ room for tutes tomorrow.
Just finishing off the last few TS drawings from the weekend. Other than Chapter 5 which is all my plates from the Jury, this is the new work I've done on TS since the final jury. (all can be clicked to enlarge)
STAIRS:
Construction sequence
Scalar Mechanical Details
Shifting and Rearranging the City and its Roofline
MIRRORS:
Truth vs. Illusion: How an image is overlaid on a reflection
Scalar Mirrors and how they operate at the various mid-range scales of the project
Reflecting the real and imagined city
I still need to photoshop the views a bit and finish annotating the drawings. Plus the final chapter needs text on most of the pages but Im almost there.
All the mirror drawings have been fixed to show the corrected system.
By a stroke of luck, I had coffee with a friend on Wednesday morning who, after hearing about my project, suggested I contact a History & Theory tutor at the Bartlett who taught a dissertation course on detective fiction as an urban genre so she could potentially provide valuable input into my project.
I also researched the Rockefeller Rooftop Gardens a bit further in the context of what Mike was talking about re: the Embassies that originally occupied some of the buildings. The four main rooftop gardens are atop the British Empire Building (620 Fifth Avenue), La Maison Francaise (610 Fifth Avenue), Palazzo d'Italia (626 Fifth Avenue) and the International Building North (636 Fifth Avenue). They were originally planned as embassies for Britain, France and Italy with the 4th tower remaining unnamed as a result of a controversy where it was meant to be leased by the German Embassy and called Deutsches Haus but this was ruled out after being advised of Hitler's Nazi march toward World War II and thus the building was named International Building North. Each garden uses topiary techniques from the country it is meant to represent.
Still researching other subtle New York references to introduce into the imagery of my project.
Case File in Progress:
The pages are all laid out with the views of both studio 54 and the city. I still need to edit all the text and work a bit more on the sectional layers of the plates and figure out the layers of my "thick" drawing.
The following storyboard shows what I am working on for the jury and how I am organizing my project through the case files and plates. (click to enlarge)
The project will look at how the individual experiences the city as a series of interiors using studio 54 as an example for how the city can be captured within a room.
The case files for the city experience will increase in scale (Ive decided to continually increase in scale rather than zoom in and out otherwise there is too much going on and the story gets confusing). Using Deff's reference of the movie that takes you through time by using the threshold as a signifier, the former memory "triggers" will now be replaced by thresholds that will be documented similarly to evidence in the Wheatley books.
The spatial sequence goes from wall to room to building to city (each of the rows on the storyboard that take you through each scalar space) without actually entering/ inhabiting any of these spaces.
The final plate (what used to be the mountain) will loop back on all the scales revealing the elusive room is the space you have been in all along. (similar to the enfilade plate in my recon) I think this will evolve over term 3 to become my thick drawing - a first attempt will be shown at the jury.
Im still figuring out how it all works and what the plates need to be in order to convey the e(xc)lusivity (haha) of the room but hopefully it will be more coherent for the jury.
UPDATE: 20/04
The city sequence is new and shows different permutations of the city to create a monument to the city (Studio 54) , an exclusive plaza and finally an enclosed island city.
Ive also updated my TS to include drawings of the construction sequence for the city stair and how it operates sectionally through the nesting of scalar mechanisms. I still need to do the same for the mirror but that might be after the jury.
(taken from How to be an Explorer of the World by Keri Smith)
A more informal way of introducing a different kind of detective book that focuses on discovery rather than crime; enjoying the mystery, inspiration and fascination of the seemingly ordinary and everyday.
I found this guide online to writing a detective story - hilarious, racist and ridiculous.
Fr. Ronald Knox's famous Ten Commandment list for Detective Novelists (copyright © 1929 Ronald Knox):
- The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
- All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
- Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
- No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
- No Chinaman must figure in the story.
- No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
- The detective must not himself commit the crime.
- The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
- The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
- Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
"Detective stories are puzzles to be pieced together and reveal the bigger pictures. Unlike a jigsaw puzzle, the big picture shouldn't become clear until the very last piece is placed. The reader eagerly awaits that moment when all the pieces come together; small clues adjoining major plot points and all the gaps filled."
Because the feedback from my jury suggested that my project be located in New York, I remembered this great quote by Agatha Christie about detective stories: "It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story."
When thinking of the story, Ive been struggling to come up with the entire plot but so far have been focusing on how the story could move from the vast city into the "room" of Studio 54 for a brief introduction to the collapse of the city within the room before slowly zooming out again to an ever-expanding universe.
I've been thinking a lot about what was mentioned in my preview about crowd construction. I looked at Gursky's image of Cocoon, a German nightclub that he reconstructed as an image from multiple surfaces, spaces and portraits including one of himself. Rather than a photographer, Gursky in this instance becomes a "composer of pixels." I like the idea of a self portrait nested within his reconstruction of a space - a fictional reconstruction of an existing space.
Studio 54, 1977
- Unit Brief - Room and Universe. Story connects objects to each other and larger context
- Lina Bo Bardi quote on non-linear time
- Collapse of space and time within the room to understand vast universe within microcosm of room.
- Relationship between author and audience. Story as device to understand past/ present, large/ small, fact/ fiction
- Past/ Present example is Studio 54 - den of hedonism and excess from 1977-1991. Intense collection for short period of time of beautiful nobodies and glamorous celebrities.
- Now exists only in memory
- Story constructed through collection of memories to recreate space of Studio 54. Father's memory of the limo
- Using this memory as a muse to construct remaining spaces: Velvet Rope (Time collapses, space is layered), Entrance Hall (Space collapses, time is layered), Dancefloor (Time and Space disappear, only experience remains) , VIP Basement (time and space are layered to reveal continuous loop) Vast library of information condensed into experience that both author and audience can inhabit
- Story collapses time and space but also can collapse scale to understand the complexity of universe within confines of room - understanding the city as an interior
- Stairs stretch out, Stair as connective element in the story, propelling us forward. Stairs move, through the aperture, an exterior world is revealed.
- Exit the wall to be enclosed under the table. Stair is revealed to be nested atop a larger stair (show TS detail of self-similar stacked forms)
- Climb the stairs to look back at the forest emerging from the tabletop. Through the trees, we glimpse the city.
- The city becomes clearer through the window on the far wall.
- Descend to have a closer look, turn to reveal the city under the stairs. Window is actually a mirror (TS detail of interferometric system, TS detail of mirrors within wall framed to look like window)
- Mirror is the picture plane of the story facilitating illusions of exteriority, stair is spatial device that collapses scales into one formal gesture (TS stair details at 3 scales)
- Zoom out to city. 3 vertical towers shift and rotate to become inverted step building hemmed in by buildings, rooted by foundation.
- Zoom out to reveal more of the urban fabric within larger interior of the quarry. City being both constructed and multiplied simultaneously.
- Vertical city - dense terraces suggest collection of city fragments collapsed together. Enclosed entity can still shift in scale to become a scale model on the tabletop.
- Stair and mirror are infinitely scaleable devices taking us from the very large (TS Stairway to Heaven and Space Periscope) to the most minute (microstair and micromirror)
- Architect as storyteller to construct imaginary worlds from the vast library of spaces we encounter by collapsing the macro to create the micro interior.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson quote on fiction revealing truth.
