Playing Cards

[Image property of Richard Smith]

Plato-Aristotle Aces.

David Field Photography

Beautiful photography + painting + model technique by David Field.


++Website++

Peripetics by ZEITGUISED

Peripetics by ZEITGUISED from NotForPaper on Vimeo.

Thanks to Max for sharing this video.

Keith Loutit

I found these videos through Boing Boing a few weeks back, and can't help but share them. Keith Loutit's Time-Lapse videos:



Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.


Bathtub III from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

After watching these scale-model-esque videos, I tried experimenting with a couple of my own images in photoshop. Here's a doctored up version of one of my pictures from Genova's roofline.


And Lisboa:

They could use a bit of polishing, but it's a fun start.

Governor General "Art Matters Forum"

[Image from the Governor General's website]

Yesterday, the Pit was transformed to host the Governor General Michelle Jean and panelists David Hughes, president and CEO of Habitat for Humanity Canada, Jean-Claude Marsan, architect and urban planner (U of Montréal), and Sheryl Boyle, assistant professor from Azrieli School of Architecture (Carleton), for a discussion of sustainability: "How do we sustain buildings? How do buildings sustain us?". I encourage you to read the framework for last night's discussion on the Rideau Hall blog. You can also watch the entire podcast of the event from the website.

Shenkman Sculpture Competition

We didn't win the Shenkman project. I'm pretty bummed about that. I really did think we walked in with a tight project. Our panel turned out well, we had material samples, and questions during the formal presentation were all sorted out. Our project was also under budget so I'd be hopeful in thinking that funds weren't an issue...I really don't know what happened to sway the decision. I guess in these situations, it tends to ride on the jury's taste. Here's a condensed version of the panel we presented to the jury:

We also had a physical model to go along with the panel which I built over a couple of days leading up to the presentation. It got broken in transit which annoyed me...just a little.

Our concept was to create a torch -- an elevated sculptural light that would bend to the sky, lifting those seated with it. The piece would provide bench seating in the main public space outside of the theatre. Function is important to Jennifer -- sculpture that can seat, illuminate, or cool its viewers. Though the torch itself would be illuminated, so would the benches from inside the frame. All together, the whole space would be lit up at night (to Martin Convoy's specifications), providing a lively public gathering place outside of the theatre. One of the benches would be suspended by a tension-stressed pipe and both lit from underneath.

+Orleans Star Weekly: article of the public viewing including some of the competing teams' proposals

Wellington Street West Art Competition Winners

Marcus Kucey Jones and Ryan Lotecki are the winners of the Wellington Street sculpture competition. Eighteen 5ft-tall fire hydrants will be carved out of marble imported from Italy. The hydrants will each have a theme reflecting a part of the neighbourhood, like an onion that denotes groceries, or a book for...library. According to the Ottawa Citizen article, "the pair chose the fire hydrant as a sculptural form because of its interesting shape and for the uncelebrated, but very necessary, role it plays in the urban landscape." Congrats to the two of them. You will see these sculptures installed by 2010.
...Your thoughts? Criticism?

+Miss Vicky's Offhand Remarks
+Hintonburg News
+Ottawa Citizen

Fort Beauséjour | Fort Cumberland

:::SITE SELECTION:::
I've selected a site for my thesis, pending Marco's approval. Each thesis proposal requires a site as a starting point for a theory and a building design. A site selection can change as often as one is willing to start from scratch, but ideally should be the enduring focus of one's thesis. Though some advisers don't push for an initial site selection, Marco has emphasized this is the most important task at first, as well as a building type for the proposed site.


I've chosen Fort Beauséjour (aka Fort Cumberland), a French stone fort built in 1751-55 located on the west bank of the Missaguash River near Sackville, New Brunswick. The site overlooks the desolate Tantramar Marshes and the Bay of Fundy. It was originally built as a counter to the British occupied Fort Lawrence near Amherst. Upon partial completion, the fort was captured by British forces and New England volunteers; commander Louis Du Pont Duchambon de Vergor capitulated within two weeks. The fort was renamed Fort Cumberland and strengthened for use in the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary War.

The attack on Fort Beauséjour was the start of what became known as the Great Upheaval (le Grand Dérangement) of Acadians in the Maritimes. Fort Beauséjour was a much greater facility than Fort Lawrence, and so the British chose to abandon Fort Lawrence and permanently occupy Fort Beau.


At first, I'm amazed to find grown-over ruins in rural maritime Canada. On top of this, I'm excited to investigate the micro-histories of the site and through it, conceive of architecture from the site's FRAGMENTS. I'm really interested in studying fragments or the idea of fragmentation in architecture -- lately I've been researching physical and metaphysical fragments. Physical fragments are like what you see in Michael Reynold's architecture from Garbage Warrior -- pieces of refuse re-utilized or re-invented as something new and surprising, like glass bottle walls for example. With Metaphysical fragmentation, this is a whole realm of theory that is extremely diverse in opinion and literary stance, but a by-product of post-modernist thinking in architecture. I won't get into it now... At the heart of things is a drive to use fragments for storytelling, sustainability, and memory.

I'm interested in the Fort, but also Acadian buildings, which, according to Marco are the hardest to locate, not because they were destroyed in the Great Upheaval, but because they additive buildings. When searching for an Acadian building, one might find it within a Victorian home, and before that, a French Canadian home, but at the heart is the Acadian building. Like in Rome, you can find a building that has layers upon layers dating back centuries. The building's legacy is told through its evolution of pieces. In selecting Fort Beauséjour, I'm targeting a moment where this thought process was cut off, and proposing to continue that tradition, which goes against many preservation laws by desanctifying the building and renewing it with purpose.

Here's a recent collage I've whipped up in anticipation of this weekend. I found a journal in the library of John Thomas and Louis de Courville in Fort Beauséjour which inspired me a little:


From Friday till next Tuesday I'll be visiting the site.

Shenkman Theatre Sculpture Competition

Jennifer and I have moved on to a new art competition. We are now designing a sculpture for the main entrance of the Orléans Arts Centre which is currently under construction. The building which includes a 500-seat theatre is being designed by Ottawa firm and Carleton alumni Lalande + Doyle Architects (website under construction). The centre is budgeted at around $37 million and features an intricate curving glass wall composed of hundreds of specially cut glass panels. The arts centre is part of a three-phase project that includes housing, office space, athletic facilities, and retirement homes in a $220 million development of the Orleans suburban centrum area. The space approaching the main pedestrian entrance will be landmarked by an artist's sculpture.



Not to give too much away, but here are some digital sketches of our work so far. No real peeks until the competition jury makes their decision... for now it's a SECRET!!!
(I promise to provide more information on what I'm talking about once the artist has been selected). However, I do want to mention that we are also working in collaboration with Martin Conboy, a very accomplished lighting artist originally from Ireland, but working in Ottawa. I recommend a quick look through his web folio. Here's a fairly big sample of his high-profile jobs:


To my surprise, his website also includes a whole section of renderings or light studies which are in large part done by our own Prof. Yvan Cazabon!


+++CBC 2006 Article
+++Orléans Online Article
+++Carleton Magazine Article on Lalande + Doyle Architects
+++Martin Conboy website

Wellington Street Art Competition 2

[image property of Richard Smith, of Jennifer Macklem + Kip Jones artists]

This past Wednesday Kip and Jennifer presented our art proposal to a jury of about a dozen multi-disciplinary critics at the Routhier Community Centre on Guigues Avenue. I played a low-profile role at the presentation, mainly to show supplementary views of our proposed sculptures. Both Kip and Jennifer did a great job presenting our ideas to the jury. Most of the questions were pragmatic in nature; none of those were directed at our conceptual position which is a long leap from my usual pedagogic critiques.
Will there be sharp edges? [no]
Can the etchings be aged? [yes]
Are those the actual plinths you envision? [in some cases, yes]
What material are they? [reinforced concrete plinth, aluminium + bronze sculpture]
What sort of longevity does it have? [1000 years]
Have you considered spotlighting? [for some, yes]
Have you done this before? [yes]
All these questions were expected by Jennifer and Kip and they answered each one with some persuasive flair (elaborations of the above yes/no answers). We walked out feeling good about the presentation. The results came back a couple days later however and we didn't win the project unfortunately.

TRACES:: We started with Jennifer's mock ups which involved translating them into FormZ on my computer:
Some of these mock-up schemes were abandoned because of major constructional issues. To form aluminum or bronze casts for sculptures as complex as these, there's a high chance of error in forming hard bends and curves. Even though the process of solid casting is over 5000 years old, a construction of this sort is by no means a quick process.

[image property of Richard Smith, of Jennifer Macklem + Kip Jones artists]

This initial development created numerous "sheddings" which formed a sort of junkyard of types which we were able to work with in FormZ:

[image property of Richard Smith, of Jennifer Macklem + Kip Jones artists]

With these pieces, we eventually evolved the project into a system of deforming a language of serial types which we had modeled out of our central idea of "weaving". Points, lines, and planes were shaped in an aesthetic way that eventually reached contextual sensitivity:


These surviving models were favoured for both their aesthetic quality, and their ability to be constructed. Different methods include water-jet cutting the aluminum, solid casting either aluminium or bronze alloy, or bending the solid planes of aluminum over a roller. All of the etchings would be done with a hand-held etching tool, and Jennifer had considered using public designs as a means of initial community involvement in the project.

Wellington Street Art Competition

Since the end of studio, a job literally landed in my hands which I've been fully immersed in for the past couple weeks. I've been doing digital renderings of sculptures for an art competition with Jennifer Macklem + Kip Jones. The project coincides with a broader 20 year plan to redevelop Wellington street. The city of Ottawa plans to rezone certain parts of the street for new land development as well as fairly substantial improvements to public space and the streetscape and road improvements. That includes widened sidewalks, new landscaping, and artwork. Art pieces are to occupy a number of sites stretching from Bayswater to Western. The budget for the art commission is around $260,000.


After Thursday, which happens to be the jury decision date, I'll have some images posted of the work we did.

Jennifer Macklem and Kip Jones' website with past projects.
Wellington Street Reconstruction Project at the City of Ottawa website.
An article about the Arts Quad in Hintonberg.

Recto Verso

Recto Verso is an architectural concept that depends on the three-dimensional two-sidedness of paper. While this seems obvious, in contemporary architectural drawing, this idea is quickly forgotten because of a dominant computer-based drawing medium that mainly facilitates a two-dimensional experience on-screen. In the traditional sense, recto verso drawings emerged firsthand out of necessity — the conservation of valuable drawing material by using both sides of the paper. However, over time the ancients developed a refined technique of representation that could incorporate elevation on the recto aligned with section on the verso, for example. The effect of this technique alters and heightens one’s consciousness of the space that is observed, creating a total front-to-back understanding of the space in the observer. This three-dimensional spatial sense — looking forward and backward simultaneously — is the essence of recto verso thinking and can be analogized with the mythological characteristics of Janus, Roman god of gates and doors, beginnings and endings whose two faces look into the past and future simultaneously.

Janusian thinking (same as recto verso thinking) is a more widely known concept that can be attributed to many creative fields, particularly architecture. It is especially important for the architect who uses this mode of thinking to visualize complex spaces. However, the drawing technique is mainly forgotten, a result of paper in plenty. To quote Marco Frascari, from his blog Zibaldone:

In architectural drawing the verso/recto approach usher us into different realms from which we are to take back mysteries to our particular realm. The magic of a recto verso conceiving is to alter someone's consciousness. The alterity of the recto verso architectural conjuring up is essential for the making of a proper architecture responding to the unknown other.

Contemporary examples of recto verso drawings are hard to come by, as this technique has long since evolved from its simple origin. Current practices naturally require more sophisticated methods of representing a building and its components than simply imitating its sectional form on the verso. Applications of the idea however are expressed in many surprising ways. The best example is not under architecture at all, but of photography and the work of Robert Heinecken.

From Heinecken's website: "The Recto/Verso photograms were made without the use of camera or film. A single page from a mass-circulation magazine was placed in direct contact with color photographic paper and exposed to light. The resulting image superimposes the visual and verbal information from the front and back of the magazine page. No collage, manipulation, or other handwork was employed."

[image: Robert Heinecken]

[image: Robert Heinecken]

[image: Robert Heinecken]

[image: Robert Heinecken]

[image: Robert Heinecken]

Robert Heinecken's portfolio of twelve photograms.