kgrostefon-utcoad2017

[kgrostefon-utcoad2017]

Amazing Things 5

This lecture was quiet. When Kizuyo Sejima walked to the stage she didn’t spend time on music or joking, she jumped right in with deliberateness and honed in each ear of the crowd with her strong Japanese accent, explaining her very innovative designs. I had not heard of her before or seen her works before but after this lecture I know what a Pritzker Prize winner looks like. She has purpose in her pieces and every aspect is thought out. She keeps it simple but to an onlooker it looks like a science fiction piece.

The floor is floating and bending, but it’s just one simple floor. She describes her 21st Century Museum “The Rolex Learning Center” to start the lecture. It has been described as swiss cheese (pardon me but it’s true) but it has so much functionality and thought behind it’s odd exterior. It is a massive building that is only one story but that starts on a first-floor level and has spaces that occupy an area above a first floor. You can pass the building by walking below it or you can enter at four different spots. There is continuity without just a wall and there is natural ventilation and window openings controlled by computers.

She said she spent 30 years learning how to connect the interior environment to a bigger environment. She uses large windows in her designs to accomplish this and her Rolex Learning Center accomplishes this with its holes and views to the outside.

Her work makes me think. I am not instantly attracted to it. There are many sharp lines in her Sumida Hokusai museum that dis-sway me… but the ideas perplex me. The overlapping roofs in her Nishinoyama house trouble me in a way. The lines do not follow a pattern that pleases me when looked at from certain vantage points, however the notion is phenomenal. She is an inventor. One big roof shape formed many roofs. She talked about how this project had to adapt to the housing laws in Japan but how she found clever ways to take on something fresh for Kyoto. She connected different properties giving them walkways and shared spaces and therefore increasing their livable areas overall. I’m drawn to the unity here and the small community.

When she was done speaking she left. Without questions or pauses. She is so intentional and such an example for current female architects and all architects alike.

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Brian Ambroziak, Andrew McLellan, Katherine Ambroziak. Canfabulatores Nocturni _ Columbarium Section - 2010

Observations 4/20/17

This is a section cut in grey scale. All lines are orthogonal. There is a good use of shadow and there are many overlapping parts. Maybe this is Diller Scofidio? I know we've been shown this before.

It is a montage which is a digital collage.

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MANIFESTO

Tegnestue Architects-Min Buri Old Market Library, Bangkok

11] Architecture made to be enjoyed by the masses.

Things do not get built without resources and therefore the best and greatest new structures are the ones which are funded- and funded by the elite one percent of the world. How much better would the world look if architecture was designed for the poor or for the middle class boring old suburbs? Our goal is to bring the “lower class” citizens the same high quality of design that we are afforded with freedom of funds. This requires ingenuity. This requires time. This requires collaboration with MORE types of people. Let’s use our trash. Let’s build amazing things with it cutting out waste and MONEY and utilizing all creative options. This will make us better. This will make mother earth lighter.

Let’s change the suburbs while we’re at it. Let’s make new communities for the working class that cause us to reflect. So much of my childhood was spent in a cul-de-sac. The cul-de-sac is safe. The cul-de-sac is monotonous. How much more awesome would my brain be if I’d spent more time in a more creative environment? With buildings that are not just meeting the standards, but totally crash the standard and inform every viewer of something bigger and brighter and bolder.

Let’s think better, make better, give better.

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Collage

Peter Milton. Points of Departure III

Last semester we had a final project that was entirely collaged by hand. Most of us hated it. I couldn’t find the significance and I felt like it was a huge waste of time. After learning about the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, David Hockney, Peter Milton, and Italo Calvino I can definitely understand where our professors are coming from and why it has been assigned to us to explore.

There are so many useful things that can be done with collage. You mix the real with the unreal, create something new, and display a consciousness and provoking thought that perhaps cannot be visualized by any other means. If architects are always just showing off pictures of their buildings from the get go, they lose this idea of what it could all be. It’s not just a building. It’s not just millions of dollars of umbrellas in a landscape. We can distort reality and create what we want, and propose something bigger. When there is something in the photo that’s not trying to be something real, it invents the object.

I also gathered that through collage we can develop our own aesthetic. It’s important to keep track of our favorite creators and learn from them but do things intentionally. It should be honest. It should represent us and our goals. We can create a set of rules for ourselves like Hockney and Diane Fox, and have a focus to keep our work inline and really stretch it by confining it in a particular way.

The collage we did felt forced. I’ve done my own collages but that project felt like regurgitating someone else’s opinion of what was good. I was able to make it my own eventually and that’s what saved the project for me. Collages are allowed to be a mix our “fragments”. All my travel and life experiences can be pulled into the page or medium. There is such an inviting and exciting potential there.

It was very important to me that it was said by our professor that he’s “not arguing for the absurd.” "Flipping tarot cards is just a means to get to meaning." Collaging something completely unrelated to architecture, taught us how to combine thought and medium and challenge our intention-alism. How do you portray a concept without pasting a picture straight to a page and directly representing it? Taking a longer path, is more meaningful and far more powerful at times.

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Barnett Newman. Twelfth Station

Observations 4/13/17

Rectangle with cream lines and panel of cream to the right. Black blocks and an inkiness to the right past one of the cream lines. This looks like a method of playing with composition or color. There is a small signature in the bottom right. This is very what you see is what you get. Two black slashes on the right in the cream panel. I’m not finding any meaning here.

-explanation- Stages of the Cross.. Human size engages agony of Christ

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Liks-ole Lund. The Future of Architecture 1979

Observations 4/11/17

There is a car with its trunk popped open and a bird flying above. It looks like a watercolor sky but it's fragmented. The bottom of the painting looks like it's tearing. The sun is setting and there's a hole of blackness in front of the car. There is another car in the distance by a building and they both look like cars from the 60's. The building has plants growing out. Is this an abandoned place?

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Computers are not ruining art.

Erik Herrmann - Eroded Urbanism

When you know the tools available to you can experiment with any design. Say you have a new pen. Take it for a spin, and see what its line quality can be… how dark it shades, how delicate it adds airy clouds and from there maybe it inspires you to make a beautiful flowing landscape. The computer does not limit your pen but adds millions more. Obviously, software is innovative and at the forefront but we have a fear of how it may interfere with a stream of conscious. Erik Herrmann showed us software innovation that disrupts the notion of computers ruining representation.

Programming in algothrims and through code expands the possibilities for a designer.

You can try and recreate famous art work. The intentionality is different. Your intent is to make something beautiful more generic but you could also go into a program with a different purpose and make something beautiful on your own. When you let the computer decide where to go and what to do and can be a wonderful stepping off point. There are many times designers get stuck and don’t know where to start when they are trying to create something new. Why not let the computer give you a method to begin? Programming in a maze you may realize your next project should deal with deconstruction. Make the ruins of Rome a part of a housing project for instance.

There are perks to hand drafting and perks to computer exploration. Who’s to say which is better for you? Try each pen.

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Max Bense, Edition Rot 19 - 1964

Observations 4/6/17

The first page of this book looks like it could be a language. Maybe this is a cousin to webdings. The page on the right is a sequence of lines, each orthogonal and creating a dimension by stacks of smaller central squares opening out.

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The Annunciation

Sandro Botticelli- The Annunciation

Art has no boundaries. You are allowed to connect things from different periods and realms and make a recording of history have significance beyond custodial record keeping. Through art you can reference mythology AND Christianity in the same piece to give them a common thread. Art shows something deeper. It is more than colors and lines and more than an image. It’s a story or an extroverted mirror. So much symbolism can be ingrained… and when you are studying the Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation of Christ, this is entirely true.  

Announcing the pregnancy of a baby that is not possible to be had, is a pretty monumental deal. Mary’s annunciation from the Angel Gabriel, of receiving the son of God, was not brushed under the rug. The arrival of Christ and formation of Christianity- well we know the implications. There is a series of artwork that deals with the annunciation and illustrates a story to the illiterate with hidden eggs of meaning for the more invested viewer. These paintings do more than tell the story of Mary’s stages to submission, but explain art to an artist or symbolism to myself.

The details are incredible in Renaissance painting, and they’re the reason Renaissance artwork is my favorite. I had never dug deep enough to learn though, that through a 45minute lecture I could be educated on how to enter the studio of the artist who created a piece and what they saw or believed. In the annunciation paintings shown in class there were flowers, gestures, windows, walls, and birds subtly added that all represented something beyond their physical form.

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Fra Filippo Lippi, The Annunciation - 1435

Observations 4/4/17

The Virgin Mary is bowing to the wall. On the side of the wall with the window is an angel who appears to be receiving her prayer. There is more light on the side of the angel but there is also light on Mary's face and halo of sorts above her. The angel is wearing a light purple gown and Mary a dark robe. Is she holding baby Jesus?

[kgrostefon-utcoad2017]

Amazing Things - 4

Noel Anderson -Unknown title

I didn’t know anything about Noel Anderson when I went to his lecture Thursday night. I decided to go after seeing a sign in the atrium and realizing my curiosity about what a guest Artist would have to share. I stayed late after a long day of working on projects and was hoping for a brief stay in the lecture hall shared with a quick drive home to my bed.

When I entered the room he was playing Kanye West. He played music for quite some time and shuffled through his slides as guests entered 109. Then when his presentation began he ramped up Partition and made a few clever remarks about the speakers in the room and changed the mood and my expectations altogether. This guy was funny, smart, and deep, a trifecta of unexpected traits on a late school night. He pulled me in with his wit and took me away from my goal of finding something to write about, to enjoying the evening.

He went through the beginning of his career fairly fast and exposed a series of tapestries he’d made of a combination of male role models mashed together into an androgynous being. His perspective was very beautiful as a black man trying to access something beyond race and beyond black masculinity. I also enjoyed his process of using word association and reverse engineering to come up with pieces for his shows. He said he started with OJ Simpson and ended with a piece you needed permission to see from an attendant who would pull back the veil to reveal an aura portrait of himself dressed and painted to be Nicole Brown Simpson.

Noel then delved into a break he took in his work to read and relax. He was giving the purpose behind 5 Amazing Things, unknowingly. Working can be simply going to a play or drifting through the MET soaking in and appreciating someone else’s work.

Next, he went through a show he did about tracing our origins and the connections between a cartoon of a black man being shot despite his arms up holding a sign that reads, “Don’t Shoot”, and the Dogon sculpture at the MET. There was a different significance to each of his pieces but they all were connected and made sense together.

After some talk about space, repetition, and the symbolism of a piece with four parts, he showed a 9 minute video. A boy was dying in reverse. Another man was holding him. The beat was powerful. The language unidentifiable. This clip from a show was being revealed backwards. The boy was whipped and each lashing was happening so forcefully and impactfully but in the wrong order. At the end, we watched as the dead boy was being “un-drug” into town looking miserable. Noel said this was doing “Roots to Roots”. He called this “doing the thing to the thing” like professing to a professor. It was very entrancing.

As I walked away from Anderson’s lecture I questioned the role of art in my work. I wonder if a white woman can speak about race, intelligently and without complete naiveté. I also wonder if there is a way to explore race with a building design.

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Amazing Things - 3

Knoxville Museum- Permanent Collection

At the Knoxville Museum of Art there is a permanent collection and several changing displays. It’s a white museum with three floors for viewing. I started on the first floor.

The visiting artist used several bright colors. This was the unity between each piece. They looked as if they’d been photoshopped by hand because images were layered onto each other so that you couldn’t quite tell what you were looking at. At first it just looked like wall art to me and not something deeper but then I could see there was a scene for each canvas. There was always a body on every board and I’m sure if I looked for a while longer I could’ve grasped the story. Maybe though, it was art created just for the joy of color and stacked images.

Next, I saw the digital art hall. In this room, there were screens and lighting displays. There was one piece which took your pulse from your finger and displayed your fingerprint enlarged and duplicated on large screens. It was very interactive and guests were having quite a bit of fun with this art.

I walked upstairs and saw huge paintings on the wall by the steps. The climate was changing. This art was more intense and already felt much deeper. As I walked into the permanent collection I was much more invested in what I saw. The slides of glass in the middle of the room caught my attention. On each slide was a part of the human body. I instantly thought of the recent show Hannibal and the time Lecter cuts up a female very elegantly by putting each slice of her frame in a slide of glass. Although gruesome and tragic in that example, this artwork was subtle and scientific. There was nothing between each slide and from the front of the slides you had no idea what you were looking at. You had to move up and down to understand what each part was and move back to see the human form. It was very beautiful.

This room had a few other human pieces that were eloquently portrayed. There was a silicone back of a head and shoulders. It was massive and EXTREMELY life-like. I was perplexed by the detail of each raised mole and hair follicle. There was a human woman holding a small baby also made of silicone and human hair. This work really challenges the medium we can use to make models. I’m very curious now of how I can use silicone and what form it can take.

There were several other mind-blowing pieces on this level. The Mona Lisa upside down made of spools of thread, an amazing painting of coal workers and the frailty of life, a canvas with an unimaginably lifelike painted tapestry, an achingly beautiful pallet painting, and a huge coca cola bottle sculpture with shards of glass throughout titled, “The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian” which I didn’t quite grasp, were all notable.

On the lower level, there were huge glass pieces showing stages of life and another glass display with cast and blown pieces. The work of Toots Zinsky made me want to make glass a hobby. It was so intricate and the process to make his pieces so strenuous and well planned, that I felt incompetent but also challenged. The piece I like most was titled, Trillio, and was made of glass threads. The glass threads formed a large and waving vase and every thread lined up perfectly with the threads next to it.

I’m truly impressed with Knoxville after walking through its free art museum.

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Amazing Things - 2

Lindsey Orrin- Cycles of our Evolution

The exhibition for student artwork was a great opportunity for me to motivate myself and respectfully elevate my caliber of work from others’ extraordinary pieces. I was very impressed by the first few works I saw. I loved the graphic design work.  It’s very applicable to the work that’s been expected of me in studio. We work on graphic boards for our presentations, but with little idea of what to do and very little guidance of how to make a great display.

I spent a few moments focusing on the book cover, Athens of The New South. It looked extremely professional. The color scheme was very comforting, soft and dark but the white title popped forward. The artist effortlessly blended the title into the background picture which spanned the front and back of the sleeve. Parts of the picture covered the font instead of the font being slapped onto the picture. I looked very closely at these pieces, trying to see if there were photoshop errors but the letters absolutely looked like an original piece of the picture. The same font was used for the entire project with the only variation being changes in size.

Another book caught my attention which was titled PUNCHLINE with a representation of the title to define and interest readers of, “It’s too late for me.” Graphically “It’s too late for me” was printed in cursive script in between blurred lines of text. PUNCHLINE was typed out as if by an old mystery novel typist at the almost top of the page. Nothing was over or understated and the punchline reverberated in my head as I moved on…

I was next intrigued by the etching “Cycles of Our Evolution”. It had amazing details and is a wonderful piece to analyze but the lines were the first thing that entranced me. So many many lines in the composition, flowing together and creating a spectacular image. I’m not sure what the assignment was and the artist may have just found the pieces of the images and stacked them, but in any case, it’s still spectacular because of the flow of the composition. The artist seamed together cycles of the moon with the decomposition of the body as a cycle.

My figurative hat goes off to the art produced at the University of Tennessee and I’m thankful for the challenge they presented me to step up my own game.

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Diane Fox Lecture

Swans, Bell Museum of Natural History, Minneapolis, Minnesota 2015 - Diane Fox

Taxidermy is a very unusual hobby to me. It makes a dead animal last forever without their consent in a form that may or may not display its true actions. The cover of the book Crap Taxidermy summarizes my general expectation of the topic, before I heard Diane’s lecture. Creepy. Weird. Creepy, so let’s make it hilarious in a book of images of failed stuffings!

Before Diane spoke of her own work she walked us through the work of the man who started Dioramas and who started the proper taxidermy method. He lightened the weight of the finished piece by only using the skin surrounding a mold. The preserved bodies became much more life-like.

I enjoyed the works of the photographer, Danielle Fanark. She showed people interacting with the animals in the display through the glass that separated them. There was a dichotomy explored there which Diane also uses to her advantage. They show real life interacting with something that appears very real but is actually long gone.

Diane’s work has humor and also presents harsh realities. She finds ways to make her pictures a mix of irony and sadness. In some images, she may capture a gloomy face next to an overly excited graphic or the ceiling of a museum inside of what is supposed to be an animal’s natural habitat. She forces us think harder about the existence of these trapped figures and the boundaries of their resting place. They look entirely life-like but when we see our reflection, the reflection of some part of the museum (maybe an exit sign they’ll never reach), or a graphic ironically portraying them, we remember the true nature of the system we’re experiencing. This is all fake. They were killed so they would stay forever.

There is a bigger purpose to taxidermy that I had not considered though -A way into Africa, a way into the past, a way into environments that cannot be explored any longer in the physical realm, trying to make that as physical as it can be and accessible in order to be educational.

Although I still think it’s creepy… it’s also an interesting exploration.

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Window - Aperture

The building between the brick buildings on the hill is completely window. It's a sharp contrast to the brick buildings with crossed windows but the blackness of the windows with the reflections of the buildings around it connects the old to new. The windows appear so dark because of the bright light of the sun against an interior space that doesn't emit the equivalent light.

At floor level a window acts as a opening to the sidewalk. It would be a little odd I would think for the person inside during night when they are highly visible without the sun darkening the view. They would be at eye level with the city folk walking by.

This picture makes highly apparent the change that happens from day to night with a window placed on an outside wall. From inside the building the viewer wouldn't know that they are on display to anyone outside because of sun's trickiness during the day, disguising them. I'd say in a dorm room it's highly important to have blinds used at nightfall.

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Window - Aperture

The TVA buildings in Market Square deter from the old style beauty of the town. The windows are long ever repeating and divided by concrete. Perhaps inside the occupants have a nice view, but from the street it looks like the architects did not put thought into the design of the windows or building. They recede into the building behind the concrete and egregiously multiply into a black façade.

This false window realizes the potential of a real window. It reflects the buildings across and makes a building continue into another dimension. These windows would maximize the light that would enter.

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Origami

Photo by author