Subject/Matter (original) (raw)

Scale as the Representation of an Idea, the Dream of Architecturemand the Unravelling of a Surface

Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts

Architectural drawings are considered as a medium of thought and can be understood as a primary clue to thought processes and ideas. The drawn is a tangible speculation that experiments with scale as the labour of the hand and eye attempts to bring dreams into the built world. A drawn detail can be at a miniscule scale or at 1:1, the dimensions of a future building. Focusing on a single object may change the sense of scale and require imaginative scale shifting to show the relationship between the drawn and its link to ideas.

The Aesthetics of Scale: Weaving Mathematical Understandings

2015

The use of visual arts applications to illustrate mathematical concepts is an old idea. Most instances, however, involve the observation and analysis of finished works and artefacts, rather than focusing on the making of them. We propose the idea of making with rigour, which incorporates the deliberate attending to mathematical structures into the process of making artefacts using specifically selected techniques. In this workshop, we suggest that there are additional insights to be gained by learners through the making process. Further, working in the same medium and technique at multiple scales can develop mathematical sensitivities. This enhances understanding by exposing mathematically essential properties that remain constant across multiple scales, yet are observed through the diverse perspectives afforded by the differing scales. The workshop will bring these ideas to light through participant experience and subsequent discussion.

Size matters: virtual scale and bodily imagination in architectural drawing

arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 2005

This small reflection on scale begins with remembering Jorge Luis Borges's tale of a certain seventeenth-century Spanish treatise describing a place where 'the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection' that a map of the Empire was made: 'whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars […]'. 1 Borges's full-sized map enveloping its territory helps us to understand the delirious condition of scale drawing gone awry that occurs in cad where buildings are represented at 'full scale'. After thousands of years of developing architectural drawing in scale, it behoves our thoughtful study, as scale is not merely a technical issue, but a question of the nature of architectural conception. A scale drawing is more than a miniature; it has a consistent specific ratio to its object. The scale of an architectural drawing consists of equal parts measure and proportion where a unit of measurement is chosen and a ratio established between actual and apparent size. 2 Eighteenthcentury surveyor Samuel Wyld defined scale as 'the true and exact Figure of the Plott, tho' of another Bigness'. 3 Scale is a stair providing means for ascending and descending between the great and the small or in music between the high and the low. 4 'Scale' is simultaneously an instrument for the hand to make drawings and for the mind to imagine buildings. 5 Scale's presence in architecture is so enormous that it is almost invisible and has been used for at least several thousand years. 6 From the middle of the second millennium BCE, a statue of Gudea, leader of the City State of Lagash in presentday Iraq, is seated with a building floor plan resting on his lap. Also on the tablet are a stylus and a scale rule, showing fine divisions of the finger measure. 7 Representing scale Modern architectural scale drawing begins early in the Renaissance with the widespread use of paper and the separation of the architect from the construction site, so that early illustrated history arq. vol 9. nos 3/4. 2005 227 history The rich, long history of scale as the imaginative inhabitation of a drawing provides a critique of the seductive but illusory exactness of 'full scale' representations in CAD.

Three in/visibilised surfaces outside CIEs: Shaping matter through minor architectural tactics

Lo Squaderno, 2018

Let’s observe three surfaces that can be found in the outskirts of any city. The first is a concrete wall covered with yellow paint; each hole is covered with a perforated steel plate painted in blue. The second is a white wallpaper that covers the whole surface of a small room. The third one is a thick layer of navy blue paint coating the furniture of another small room, similar to the previous one. Apparently, none of them is remarkable; the walls are completely ordinary. But, the urban pieces to which they belong are not ordinary at all: they are architectures made invisible from many perspectives – not only urban and architectural, but also legal and normative. We will see however how three minor actions carried out on the flesh of certain urban enclaves can turn the situation around. Minor architectural tactics, precarious and temporary, dispel the opacity of surfaces and bring to light a dark interior. They show both the architectural interior and the spatial conditions of the bodies therein enclosed; they offer three different ways of reading, operating and forming new surfaces to connect an in-visibilised interior with a carefully withdrawn further interior.

Surface production: The replication and display of objects

2012

Surface Production: The Replication and Display of Objects is a photo-sculptural installation comprised of trans-mounted photographs, polyurethane plastic forms, midnineteenth century French furniture, construction paper and various other materials. This thesis project explores the topic of object display and addresses the privileging of visual surfaces in contemporary media-saturated, screen-based cultures. Through integrating photographic media into the structural components of sculpturelayering and reconfiguring a variety of materials-the relationship between objects becomes more complicated and slows down the reception of information by the viewer. The strategy of temporal realignment in the space of the gallery, counters the trivialization and simplification of our daily semiotic encounters. As a result, the viewing experience is characterized by a suspension of conclusive thinking regarding individual components of the work and their subject matter. The installation thus emphasizes the relationships formed between this constellation of objects and the associational relations of meaning that emerge.