Different precedents that look at the way in which layered spaces are drawn/ communicated:
Tower of Babel:The fictional city/ building
Metropolis:The aggregated city
Hugh Ferriss sketches Layered building forms
Palace of the Soviets: Nested volumes as an iconic emblem
Coliseum: Sectional nesting of private spaces within a public spaces
Empire State Building: Layered space manifested internally and externally
Stepwell, Abhaneri: Nested fragments to form public infrastructure
Im working on remodelling the under the table view to incorporate the mirror window and the city under the stairs so that I can accurately locate them within the larger context of the fictional metropolis. From there, I will begin to construct the 2d drawing around this view.
Based on my new argument of the plane that runs through my entire project, here are all my TS precedents as seen through the nesting of planes to create layered or collapsed spaces:
"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures." Ralph Waldo Emerson
JONAH FREEMAN, 1983, 2006 DIGITAL C-PRINT
Architectural fiction enables the construction of imaginary worlds that draw inspiration from the real spaces we encounter yet allow us to break from reality through the scale, sequence or way in which we choose to inhabit them. What if the city is suddenly scaled down to fit inside a house? What if the public urban realm suddenly became enclosed within the private seclusion of an interior - a strange inversion that would allow us to navigate through the complexity of the city as though it is familiar, everyday and domestic. Storytelling allows us to understand spaces in new ways. Not constrained by reality, the story imbues spaces with new meaning - scale is arbitrary, sequenced randomly. The story woven around objects within the urban interior define the scale at which they can be inhabited.
VORTOGRAPH, SIMON GARDINER
Just a beginning - will develop the idea of architectural fiction as a way to link the past to speculations about the future, which could tie in my Re-con. Also, the idea of the city scaled to the house - inverting the brief to capture the universe within the room.
Patrick Bill, the set designer that I visited this week suggested this as a helpful reference for my project in terms of nesting buildings inside one another.
Semi-detached by Michael Landy
Exhibition, Tate Britain 2004
For his piece Semi-Detached the artist Michael Landy re-created a copy of the house where his father lives. He copied it in every detail, right down to the bits of flaking paint. This work of art acts like a portrait: a portrait of his father as a house.
Here is a video about its construction within the space of the museum:
I casted my stair models yesterday - was quite a fun if stressful experience and at least through documenting it, I've gained a spread on casting!
Here are some images of the moulds of the three options: (thinking about the negative and positive spaces)
Here is an image of Option 3 of complete wall penetration with the mould of the stairs (with metal runners to be cast inside.)
These were my models this morning post-casting and a day of solidifying but prior to being removed from the mould and left in the unit space to dry out (hopefully by tomorrow - fingers crossed!)
I also went to the studio of set designer, Patrick Bill to consult with him on his nesting of spaces in the Channel 4 TV programme, The House That Made Me. He was incredibly helpful and talked me through several locations they scouted, sketches they made, props they sourced and memories they deconstructed. He works in a great space too!
Here is a terribly quick photosynth I tried to do when no one was watching - its just one room of many thats supposed to be a storage space for a costume designer but has been appropriated as a stage set of a child's bedroom:
Room within a Room!
Im going to cast a few options of my mechanical stair wall. I have a lasercut slot tomorrow to cut the moulds for casting so here are the three options that Im looking at:
The first is similar to the model I built over the weekend but with only the wall for support and with the mini stairs cast into the wall. The second allows the mini stair to operate on both sides of the wall while the third allows both stairs to shift from one side to the other to test how many things can move while the model still functions and the wall still supports the stair.
In each iteration, the nested stair penetrates through the wall further into the adjacent space beyond.
I will work on the lasercut files for tomorrow for the stair model and cast wall elements and will hopefully detail the stair at the three scales
Figuring out the scale of my stair model has driven me a little crazy since everything is at an arbitrary or surreal scale. Anyway - i finally settled on 1:5 for the large stair since that is perceived as a real stair in a building. Alternatively the scale could be 1:100 if the same stair was perceived as the top of a building. Or, the model could be at 1:15 if the smaller stair was meant to be perceived as a real stair.... confusing.
Anyway, this is an axo of the first mechanical wall test:
and all the model pieces that I will start to assemble now:
I have to make two more test models of the other stair options afterwards and then will start working on details.
I found this video of Leandro Erlich's Carousel model - its a bit too literal for what I want to introduce into my project but I like the idea of a spinning stage - in which different memories come to the foreground... (ref: quote from Margaret Atwood - Cat's Eye)
Also, in my version the different spaces stored would be separated by thickened walls that are serve as the backstage area of "the convulsive theatre of the domestic" - The Surreal Landmark.
Had a great TS tutorial with John Noel again that built upon discoveries made in yesterday's tutorial with David Illingworth.
David had suggested looking at the design of teleprompters on the news which use glass instead of mirror to reflect information. This is a quick sketch I did of how it works where the image visible depends on the position of the light source:
Today, John was pleased with the development of my other nested fragments but wanted to talk through the basement to get past its "poisoned chalice" status by thinking of what it was originally intended to be. I thought it would be a great opportunity to insert this teleprompter mechanism since it operates on the system of light vs. dark that is inherent in the basement and then to play with the inverse of what the mirror window fragment is looking at.
If the mirror window creates illusions of the city within the room, the basement could begin to create illusions of the room within a subterranean city so that the two memories could begin to work together - approaching the same idea from two different ends of the spectrum by inverting their scale.
We were both happy with how this idea related to the overall aims of the project so he said to redraw the basement with this in mind (getting rid of the problematic tube tunnels). I will work on that as part of Alex's thick drawing reconfiguration for next week.
When thinking of how to challenge my existing views in addition to formulating new ones (that continue to operate as thresholds yet with different connotations at each scale) I have come up with a quick sketch collage to illustrate how I think the attic view could operate:
(Thanks Graham for the great reference!)
Rather than the warehouse that I have drawn in my thick drawing, the attic space could begin to operate as a series of spaces organized like a panopticon-carousel and accessed through these inhabited-wall corridors leading onto other memory-spaces. Below is an interesting building layout that could become useful:
A quick sketch of how this space could work as a carousel - allowing for multiple experiences to be stored as spaces like boxes in the attic:
A good reference for this would be my man of the moment, Leandro Erlich, the Argentinian Surreal Installation Artist who made this piece called Carousel where the house appropriates the mechanism of the carousel to operate as a stage set of multiple experiences:
Back to TS...
This is what i have so far - its taking a lot longer than expected but hopefully I can churn out these layouts once Im done. Ive only gotten as far as storyboarding my introduction, precedents and the staircase design within my project. Need to rethink the layout of the project pages and add in the mirror window and attic design pages. Will blog an update tomorrow.
I've found better precedents though and researched the rest so i will be able to draw/ redraw information for most. The layout uses the case study format of my whitebook so that the two can become interchangeable.
From the jury, the best quote that summarizes what I would like to achieve by the end of this year was something Tom Weaver said,
"If you, at some point in June, are standing in
front of a wall and on that wall is a huge tableau drawing and in front of that
tableau drawing is a model , a dollshouse model which incorporates elements of
that drawing within it and then you are holding a book which navigates, in a
sense, between both model and drawing and then you could then place yourself
within the book, the painting and the models
- you could set up your own mise-en-abyme that way - a proper
choreographed presentation."
TS Tutorial:
My TS tutorial with John Noel was really helpful. He understood most of my project (barring the view of the basement - he doesnt think the whole tube angle is working for me and thinks it could be reworked to better suit my project). He did say something very interesting when looking at my embedded staircases by questioning how they could be nested not just in space but also in time. I really like this idea since it relates to my Re-con which collapsed space and time whereas the landmark inflates them. The nesting of space and time means not only how spaces can sit within one another but how the same space can operate at multiple scales and be perceived in a multitude of ways over time.
one idea that we discussed was a hinged stair whereby the stair can operate on multiple scales and keep changing its configuration over time depending on the amount and placement of hinges.
Since the jury, Ive been thinking a lot about what my landmark is.
I was re-reading parts of the Surreal House especially the section on the portable house which made me think that the landmark of home becomes a boite-en-valise of memories - a miniature, not-quite replicated collection of all our lived experiences.
Joseph Cornell. Untitled (Bird Box) c.1948
Also, continuing in the line of what Tom Weaver was saying at my jury regarding evidence or found objects: "If the surreal house is a found object, la maison trouvee, then the egg must surely be one of its most wondrous incarnations. And the cage, the ultimate symbol of confinement, also a home for birds, has particular resonance across the entire surrealist spectrum." I dont yet know how this will be helpful for my project - perhaps the symbolism or the idea of the house itself as a found object?
I've updated my three views of the spaces within the Surreal Landmark to reflect some of the ideas present in the thick drawing and from TS:
FORTRESS IMPENETRABLE:
MINIATURE EMPIRE:
SUBTERRANEAN ACTIVITY:
This is a summary of what I will present for the jury on Tuesday. The columns to the right of the of each plate outlines what I still need to do.
I've been working on the big drawing since Tuesday and am now trying to feed in comments from my TS tutorials and the conversation with Alex.
Its time to get busy...
This video shows some amazing inspirational pieces by Brian Dettmer who uses books, cassette tapes and other media that is becoming obsolete. At the end he talks about memory in an interesting way:
"The way that books dictate a linear path while the internet and even the way we remember things, is more of a fractioned experience with a lot of non linear paths that kind of connect at different points."
Brian Dettmer - Remixed Media from Alfredo Aponte on Vimeo.
I would love to use some of these techniques in models of my project since I think it really captures the layered sense of time and space that is present in my project and i think its a beautiful technique to manipulate.
I've been working on TS case studies this weekend. Here are the spreads that I have so far:
I'm hoping that I can dispel some of my confusion re: my project statement by working on the narrative of my detective story. Perhaps by figuring out The Case of the Surreal Landmark, I won't need to mention how memory works?
For now, here is a good quote for my project from Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space:
"For our house is our corner of the world... An entire past comes to dwell in a new house... Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days."
"A detective story must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end."
- Ronald Knox, 1929
"All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The pin-up or group tutorial was helpful in identifying how I should develop my project and presentation of the work simultaneously.
The following notes are the key points I took away from the feedback:
- Important to mention nesting at different scales (objects, spaces, buildings...) at the start of presentation as a lens through which to view the collapsed memories
- construct the view of the cupboard as a counterpart to the basement - both explore darkness but one is welcoming with defined limits while the other is endless.
- consider the other landmark buildings in the metropolis of mind - constructing counterpart views within them as a segue to the overall zoom out of the metropolis and the concept that the landmark of HOME is just one of many
- incorporate the Recon as a way of describing collapse, inflate and the mechanism of memory
- looking at memory through two types of haze: drug induced (Studio 54) and decay over time (childhood home)
- make sure the surreal and the haziness of memory is introduced into all views using the domain of control of the child as a constraint.
- provide contrast in some of the views between the child and adult perspective evolving over time
- Views to the outside world (letterbox/ windowsill) should hint at the metropolis of the mind/ stage-set quality of the view - good place to incorporate TS in how it is revealed
Important points to consider:
- how I describe the space to not be specific as to its function but rather to its experiential qualities so the audience can still input their memories.
- remove dollshouse doors from attic view and concentrate on the nesting within that space.
- dont include people - about the space and the individual's memory
Over the break, my goal is to start all the views outlined in the storyboard below:
As an idea for the corridor view, I thought i could play with illusions of changing the door sizes to heighten the depth of the corridor and alter its perception (adult/ vs. child)
I would also like to work more on the overview drawing on the space of the landmark that brings these moments of collapse together.
and will try to format existing work into whitebook format.
A test of the attic view - I dont know what this view will be doing yet but will hopefully have something more developed for tomorrow. I already like the miniaturisation of the home through the dollshouse since it reinforces the idea of nested space present in the other two memory-spaces.
Also working on a storyboard of other views and a table of contents for my whitebook.
This is the WIP Table of Contents:
Memory Artefacts
"Why do we remember the past but not the future?" - Stephen W.
Hawking
Contents
1. Reconstructing Memory-Space
1.1. The Mechanism of Memory
1.2.
Collapse
1.3.
Inflation
2.
The Childhood Home
2.1.
The Revisit
2.2.
The Domain of Control
2.3.
Imagination and Identity
3.
The Basement as Endless Darkness
3.1.
The Artefact (Playing card)
3.2.
The Memory
3.3.
The Experience
4.
The Table as Fortress Impenetrable
4.1.
The Artefact (Dollshouse table)
4.2.
The Memory
4.3.
The Experience
5.
The Attic as Miniature Empire
5.1.
The Artefact (Wallpaper fragment)
5.2.
The Memory
5.3.
The Experience
6.
The Cupboard as Hidden Room
6.1.
The Artefact (Diary Entry)
6.2.
The Memory
6.3.
The Experience
7.
The Window as Measure of Time
7.1.
The Artefact (Photograph of etched markings)
7.2.
The Memory
7.3.
The Experience
8.
The Letterbox as Periscope to the World
8.1.
The Artefact (Letter)
8.2.
The Memory
8.3.
The Experience
9.
The Surreal Landmark
9.1.
The Route
9.2.
The Nested Spaces
9.3.
The Labyrinth
10.
The Metropolis of the Mind
