Seeing Machines

Busy night tonight.  ConMat project due tomorrow, Medieval Art and Arch quiz tomorrow, and crew practice at 5:15AM... wonderful.

But alas I will proceed with life.  I currently have both of my machines for seeing, the models just need to be polished and the drawings need to be figured out/completed but I'm excited for how they should turn out.  Here's some pictures.  Enjoy.

So this is the model you're looking at through the machines.

Machine 1 (without the cover)

Looking through Machine 1 (looks better in person)

Looking through half of Machine 2

Looking through the other half of Machine 2

Machine 2 is made of two parts of a series of layered mirrors.  The halves will be stacked so you look through the horizontal and vertical mirrors at the same time.   This makes for a kaleidoscope like effect.

Vision!

So no cameras at Savers and I couldn't find Salvation Army... So I'm making my own lenses by gluing saran wrap to chip board and then coloring on them.  I also used some plastic from a water bottle with a diamond pattern on it.  These "lenses" will be able to slide into a telescope like box and the viewer will be able to put the lenses in whatever order they want and can put it as many or few as they want.

I'm still not sure what I'm going to do for the "nothingness" machine.  First, I have to define nothingness, which is confusing because how can something be nothing?  Technically, you are always seeing something, whether it's darkness, an empty space, or even the back of your eyelids.  So maybe seeing nothing is when you can't pick out the actual objects you are viewing and everything is blurred or distorted.  If that is the case, then would a cubist painting be a painting of nothing?  Especially the painting I'm studying, The Packet of Coffee, in which I still have no idea what's going on.  So I think I'm going to start in that direction and see where it gets me.

Machines for Seeing

Short crit today.  We presented our axon and model (see pictures below).  I wish I had collaged my drawing more but I ran out of time, per usual.

Got the next assignment today, we are to make a "Machine for Seeing."  Kind of along the lines of a kaleidoscope.  One machine should highlight a certain aspect of the building and the other machine should see nothing or nothingness.  So tomorrow I'll be off to Savers or The Salvation Army looking for old cameras, projectors, and other such things I can take lenses out of.  I'm thinking about getting some colored Saran wrap for lenses or possibly having lenses with dots or with small circles you have to look through.

My Poor Brain..

So after staring at my painting for the majority of class yesterday, wondering why I'm still majoring in architecture.. I finally have some sense of direction.  My site model is almost finished and I know where my building is going and I have an idea of the floor plan.

The building I chose to take hints from is Le Corbusier's Sarabhai House.  This house uses sets of parallel barrel vaults, making a very linear floor plan.  It is very open and was made to look like you could enter without needing permission.  One fun element is a toboggan slide going from the green roof to an in-ground pool.

Currently, my building will be underground, something I forgot you could do (clearly I forgot "cave, hut, tree" from freshman year), and the floor plan will take up lines found in the painting.

So, we'll see how/where this goes...

Project 1: Done.

Wohoo! All done with cubism!! ..just kidding..

So crit went well.  Here are some pictures of part of my final presentation and some interesting points that were brought up in discussion.

-Is the bag of coffee upside down?  Maybe the rectangular piece by the bottom of the bottles is the bottom of the bag, folded or rolled up and the black on the wood grain part of the table could be spilt coffee beans.

-Another interesting point is that the painting is almost like it's setting you up so that the table is angling out towards the viewer, so why are my table pieces in the same plane?  In only one of my models did the lower left portion of the table project out beyond the "object" or "packet of coffee."

So all in all not a bad crit for my first crit of Advanced Studio. YAY!

Next project.  We have been assigned to use the models we made for our paintings as a landscape for a building which is to borrow "Corbusian" details... yikes...

So, until next time, fair winds and following seas.

Space in a Box

For today, the assignment was to make two models, a diorama and a "layers of space" model.  The diorama was to be a "representation of the representation" or a model of what is happening in the painting, but not the real image Gris painted from.  I cut up the painting for this model by trying to look at shading Gris uses.  When viewed from the front, the diorama looks like the painting with some added depth, from the side, however, the painting clearly angles out.  The top of the painting starts closer to the back and gradually kicks out as it goes down.

The "layers of space" model was to be similar to the diorama but flat and show at least 4 or 5 layers of space within the painting.  I cut the painting for this model by looking at where specific wood grains were and tried to layer these by looking at shading.  I chose to make this model by cutting out the layers and gluing them onto clear plastic sheets and feeding the sheets into slots in a box. It looks pretty cool, but unfortunately is really hard to photograph.

My next task is to make another model showing the layers of space but in an opposite way than my current layers of space model.  The next model will be made by cutting out portions of the painting and layering it over other similarly cut sheets of "The Packet of Coffee."

Space vs. Form

So I thought I had found the packet of coffee.  I had decided the packet of coffee looked like a tea bag; see how the top of the wood part has three edges that look kind of like a tea packet?  But this raises a problem with scale; a packet of tea is not bigger than a bottle of wine (sitting beside the would be "packet").  So maybe it's a bag, not a packet.  Maybe it's neither.. I think I've decided the packet of coffee doesn't exist and I am renaming the painting, "Homer Simpson Has a Huge Chin."  Just kidding.. but you see it right??

But seriously, Gris has completely deformed the objects, so how I’m looking at the painting now is just trying to separate the form/object from the space it’s in.  I think the form is the wood colored/grained part and the space is the greeny-blue background and black, which I think represents the surface of a table.  I’m not sure about the two cream colored objects (the wine bottle on the left and the rectangle on the right).  These could either be with the form or in-between the space and the form, but I don’t believe they are part of the space.


Here are some models I've done to try to find the difference:

The Beginnings of an Architecture Blog

So this is my first time blogging.. Not really sure how it's going to go but I'll give it a shot.  I'm currently starting the first project, an analysis and interpretation of a painting by Cubist Jaun Gris called "The Packet of Coffee" which I can't even find the packet of coffee in... Can you?