7-panes Gerhard Richter 2007

Arguably created by Barbara Stafford, Showing Seeing is a way of presenting a visual artifact from the world.  Usually under multiple lenses, this exercise dissects our visual understanding in this world in the context of the thing itself. In this version Gerhard Richter’s work at the High Museum is examined. What makes his work communicate on so many wavelengths and so many levels of understanding? “Look Dad, I’m 3d,” a 4 year old exclaimed while looking through the eleven paned installation. What have you said?

Showing Seeing | gerhard richter from graymatters on Vimeo.

Diane Borsato. You Go to My Head. Video. Toronto. Fall 2009.

Images are worth talking about. They stimulate conversation. We discover our companions by listening to their interpretations. We grow in our own understanding of representation through our discourse with each other. Let us discuss.

Diane Borsato is an artist who works mainly in interactions, studying the effects that art plays in our society. In this particular piece she has a couple sing together “You Go To My Head” by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie. They use the breath from the other person to fill their lungs. As the act progresses, both partners experience wildly varying physical and emotional responses. However trying the act becomes, they both are determined to see it through. As Borsato states, “[It] amplifies the gestures of attentiveness, trust, and dependence.”

Full video can be found here: http://dianeborsato.net/projects/you-go-to-my-head/#

If you would like to contribute an image to discuss please contact graymatters through any of the writers or by attending a meeting.

What do you take away from this image?
Does this image remind you of any other images or references?
Why do you think Borsato staged the couple in this particular site?

The Awareness Project (T.A.P) at Tech was carried out through installations by senior undergraduate students at the College of Architecture at Tech under the supervision of their instructor, Ruth Dusseault.

As mentioned in an earlier post, the projects were scattered around campus in interior spaces or exterior spaces. An interactive website with a map that illustrates where all the projects were located and information on the project was created to aid in the publicizing of the projects.

In addition to the images from the website, a few of the students from the group created videos to document their installation experience, process, and construction. View the Seeing Is Believing video by Eliza Fu, who designed and created the  installation.

Recently, a classmate explained his ideas on how his portfolio would look. He claimed he would strip the original context of each project in his undergraduate career and re-contextualize them to refer to each other. While he is entitled to do just that, I realized the importance of keeping the original context intact.

What each of our designs is, ultimately, a solution to a problem, and an answer to a question. The difficulty is not only in designing the solution and answer, but also in expressing the problem in the final design. The “simplest” method would be in a strong design that follows a strict diagrammatic process. Many architecture students should know that this process isn’t simple as it seems, and requires clarity and effort.

Our portfolios should also appeal to each audience for which it is intended. For example, a graduate school will most likely want to see something different than a firm. Even those can differ. For example, HOK would expect something different than OMA. MIT and U. Penn. are also an example of dichotomous outlooks. Like any building or installation we design, our portfolio should serve a purpose. There is an intrinsic difficulty in this purpose, that the purpose is us; we have to be calculative and methodical in what we invest so much in—physically, mentally, and emotionally.

A portfolio, it seems, should have no less the pedagogical objectives we are used to, and we should follow the same rules we learn in the studio environment. Most importantly, a portfolio is something that reflects our work. It’s something we can learn from, and something that can tell us where we might go next. We are not often asked to categorize and coalesce all that we have learned in a semester. With a portfolio, we can do just that, but with our entire collegiate experience.

Thus far, of course.

Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

Stage 4

Stage 5

Stage 6

Stage 7

Stage 8

To follow their experiments and findings through out the semester visit their studio space on the second floor of the Architecture West building behind the stairs and directly above the library.

Of course, much has changed in the past year. In formerly free-spending Dubai the tallest building in the world is now is named after the president of Abu Dhabi after he stepped in with last minute debt financing. In cities across the United States housing prices have nose-dived and freshly scraped lots sit ready for redevelopment that likely won’t take place now for another decade. Similar stories are not hard to find in many other places. Architecture firms that swelled in the flush days are slimming down on crash diets, jettisoning employees at a startling rate. The waves of capital and credit that recently crashed on shores around the world are now at a low tide not seen in decades.

And so what will come next? How will the discipline and practice of architecture respond? Is this a moment for self-reflexive architectural inquiry in light of the present moment of economic instability (and its attendant social and political consequences)? Or should we cling, more in fear than in faith, to the fading memories of the fat times of the near past? What sorts of programs (new or alterations of existing ones) might emerge from this moment? How might our thinking about materiality change when scarcity rather than opulence is the operative norm? What becomes of our tendency towards technological fetishism? Around which uses and causes will we develop new monumental forms? What should emerge from the ashes: a faith in grand, formally elaborate projects enacted by a cadre of elite designers or a tenacious re-engagement in the revolutionary potential of small acts that emerge from the grit of everyday life?

If the crumbling of gilded ages in the past afforded architecture a moment of self-reflection, then we should now ask just what architecture could be in this present age of uncertainty.

Image: Steven Lasron Painting

What are you looking at?
What does site context mean to you?

I’d like to explore what site context means in design, what constitutes site context, and how we engage it in observation (photography, sketching, psychogeography, derive, google earth ftw), analysis, and application. Of course, our perception of site changes as projects, problems, stances, clients, and sites vary. But let’s share the thoughts we have about context as it spans all our efforts in design and experience of architecture. And not only from you, but from other architects and architecture that you admire or even those you don’t.

We’ve all stood out there. Please leave a comment.

3  post-video questions.

3 projects. (more info)

City of Words, 1977 Vito Acconci

This week’s search for great things to share with you all began with that six degrees of separation. This is that fun phenomenon I’m sure most of us are familiar with that consists of bouncing from one wildly interesting article to another. What makes it so enjoyable is that it wonderfully suggests that all things are linked to one another in someway.

This all however took place not on wikipedia, but on a blog community called Space Collective. Their creed: Where forward thinking terrestrials exchange ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction today. The thing is, I was going to write about these 32 new planets that have been recently discovered. It would have been a piece about how my thoughts of scale and notion of the general position I and other humans hold in this universe had been somehow shifted.  At the very last minute however, I stumbled across something at least as equally interesting, enough to change my mind.

Today I am writing about a man named Vito Acconci. His story is one of an amazing transformation of a writer that used words to create architecture.

Vito Acconci started out as as writer, earning his M.F.A.  in literature in poetry from the University of Iowa in the 1960’s. His utilization of the written word extended past accounts of fictions, storytelling or journalistic works. His interest was in how the page set up a frame of physical space that the reader could navigate. These words, as writer Shelly Jackson put it in her interview with Acconci, ” were not representational. Maybe you could call them presentational: this is a word, this is a sentence, you are reading…the page was a space around which the reader navigated. Words were obstacles, lures, street signs, prompts. Instead of describing the actions of a fictional character, they provoked the actions of a real one: the reader.”

Here is one of his poems that brings to mind the passage between rooms or volumes.

Acconci’s work did not remain confined to the frame of the page. He soon was bringing actual letters and words into public spaces by splaying them across tabletops to prompt movement and readings. This in turn led to him actually performing himself what he would have before left to the work or words on a page. In over 200 meticulously constructed works, he began to engage the public streets of New York City. In Following Piece, he spent an entire month following strangers found walking the streets of the city, tailing them until one entered a private space or building. These secret encounters and journeys would then be compiled at the end of each day. Other installation works such as Seed Bed were psychologically intricate and highly controversial, evoking a sense of confrontation to the viewer, much like one could feel confronted or put on edge by architectural works of spaces or buildings.

Eventually these performances developed into proto-architectural representations of space that brought written and spoken word even further into the realm of physical spaces and then later into built architecture. His built projects such as ‘Mur’ Island, in an Austrian municipal pond, can be almost ‘read’ as easily as his poems that physically engaged the reader. Both implicitly involve movement, and the creation ofchangeable and flowing spaces.

‘Mur’ Island, 2003 Graz, Austria Courtesy Acconci Studio © Vito Acconci.

What I found immensely fascinating is how one makes the transition from writer to architect. I know that writing and architecture are in close relationship with one another from my work as a student of architecture, as well as feeling that one huge component of this GrayMatters is exploring the links between the two fields. I suppose I just never imagined writing as a starting place that would later develop into a built environment. Is it my education thus far at Georgia Tech that frames what I perceive as conventional or unconventional approaches to architecture? I myself am extremely inspired by the journey of Vito Acconci. Much like how one begins writing about a writer/ architect after thinking about extra solar planets, or how one makes architecture out of words, investigations in the connections between these ideas seem to yield interesting results.

Terrance Carter; The First Beam from graymatters on Vimeo.

Take a break and watch this light-hearted presentation about a washed up beam “weightlifter” that falls from grace. You may notice a couple cameos from our faculty!