How do you show a solid timber wall?
The last week of September was devoted to the not-at-all-ancient art of Visual structure (see the first blog post about visual structure). One part was the familiar assignment of contrasting materials. This time, however, it was on another scale, working with walls, big piles of sand, piles of wooden planks and the like. We grouped into pairs, and I collaborated with my dear classmate Ane Oline Finstad.
An intelligent woman, wonderful to work with. (Loves horses.)
All pairs were given an object in some part of the school grounds, and we wanted to work with the wall. As we had learned the last time we worked on visual structure, one way of showing an object is to contrast it with an object of a totally different materiality. In order to make our wall even more visible, we decided to surround the middle of it with a lighter, non-geomtrical figure. Here's a sketch I drew during our first discussions.
What we did, was to find as many contrasts as we could. The wall was geometric, the clouds were blobby; the wall was matt, the clouds were shiny, the wall was one object, the clouds were several objects; the wall was planted firmly on the ground, whereas the clouds seemed to be floating, at least hanging, etc., etc. Our classmates seemed to think we ended up making the wall a lot more visible, in a quite beautiful way, and I can't help but agree.
EDIT 24th October 2011: Removed the picture of Ane Oline. Still love her, though.
Within the Open Form movement there are two fractions: those who admits, and those who rejects, the fact that Visual Structure is also a subconscious (re)programming tool. Both fractions are presented at BAS.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting exploration of materiality in space. We have done similar projects, and even some more extensive 1:1 designs here at the University of Auckland. What year are you in?
ReplyDeleteThank you, Bobby. I'm in year II. Cool to hear fro someone on the other sid eof the planet. You're an architecture student as well? Had a look at your blog, by the way; it looks cool.
ReplyDeleteYes, I'm in my last week of a 3 year BAS degree. Cool to see what architecture students are up to around the world :)
ReplyDeleteThanks, I like your blog too. Keep in touch