3rd Year Final Presentaions

We were ask to attend third year final presentaions on monday and they have been focusing on the idea that all thing eventuallly come back around to where you start. They showed us two project they have been working on.

 The first was taking a old delapadated building in durham on West Parish St. and transforming it into a split use facility a wine bar and wine retail store and the top two levels as apartments.  Many groups decided to make the loft spaces a place for cuples who were ready to start there life and this made the design more focused.

My favorite presentation was The Buddest Peacock.

The idea behind this design was that the peacock tends to eat really harmful things that would kill any other animal but instead the peacock grows stronger and more beautiful with every bite.  The buddest people think of the peacock as a boddhisttia who is a creature that takes hard paths towards liberation and thru eating the plants the peacock signifies this idea.  This realted to the building because the building had once been a crack house and a brathel and from that poisen was going to rise a strong design and a strong building.

These are two pictures of what the upstairs lofts will look like and they were inspired by the colores of the peacocks tail bothe bright but also relaxing and conforting.  This groups project showed my how a idea can translate into a overall design plan and i was very impressed by the groups research into the buddhist culture and beliefs in order to make there inspiration translate into their design.

The second design persentation was to design the Central Reigional Hospital Child and Adolescent  PCU.

One presentation focused on the ecosystem as her inspiration for the project and the three parts the sky, the land, and the water. The female unit was the sky and the crane which symbolized wisdom and is a token of hope and healing in challenging times. The male unit was the land and the elephant which represents strength and honor and posseses the ability to deal with obsticles he is face with. The childrens unit and the koi fish whish stands for courage and endurance and it is the only fish that swims against the current of the stream and up waterfalls. The designer ment for the koi fish to stand as a metaphore that will show the children they font have to follow the flow of everyone else and helps them to have the strength to make it through anything. These three concepts grounded the idea behind the units and allowed the designer to create a colorful enviroment.

Through the space the design inspiration translated but creating spaces that made the children feel at home and safe because the suroundings were things they had seen before. This presentation by Kalani Gonzalez inspired me to think about more involven inspieations and how research on my inspirations can better inspire my future projects rather than having one base inspiration and just staying with that concept i will now research my inspiration better so it can help me come up with well rounded ideas with a better background in what i was acually inspired by.

Luminear Project Board

During our luminear project we were ask to take a piece of dark canson paper and create a plan, section, elevationa view of our light project and a visual reprentation of our light effect. This was hard to do because i am normally use to drawing on light paper and creating the shadow were we had to create the light.  Throuhout the process we were instructed to use high levels of contrast to make our boards look better and that is why my second version is only useing white and black pencils to create the light. after i had a idea of my layout i started to organize my board and draw all my images on the paper.  I chose to make the 3 views of my project smaller and overlap them with my light effect to create a diffrent type of layout instead of the mormal ideas of presentation boards.

On My final board i tried to make the tree stump itself fade into the background and the light shine throuh all my drawings since that was the focus of the project and after all my drawings were done i added a title to fill the space in the upper left corner of the project.  In the end i created a layout that showed my project off and demonstrated my light effect to the best of my ability. 

Luminear Project

For our final Studio project we were assigned to take a picture of a light effect and create a laminar to portray this effect.  My light effect was a picture of light filtered through clouds and i knew off the bat i didn't want to focus on the projected light as much as a over all glow of light like the clouds produce. 

I started off this project by looking at tons of images of lighting and diffrent ways to create difrent effects and atsmophears to a room. Many of the images i looked at were so refined and i knew i would have to create a well polished piece if i wanted it to look perfessional instead of a school project. I was inspired by pictures of a side tables made from raw wood like a tree stump  and branches and adopted that idea to use in my design process.

http://www.designspongeonline.com/

  So I choose to use a tree stump to shield most of the light and as a base of sorts and striped the bark and cleaned out the inside so it would look clean.  Also i drilled a hole in the back of the tree stump to recess my light fixture and wired the light myself into my tree stump, to turn on the light i wired a swich that pertrudes throught the back of my tree stump for easy acessability.

 To create the layered effect of light i used many layers of plexi glass which are held in by the natural cracks in the stump and the tension created by bending them.

First i used frosted spray paint to cloud the glass but the frosting was not blocking the light enough and i could not figure out how to create a even layer of the spray so it ended up looking uneven and not finished. So i started to play around with different ways of making the glass cloudy.  I tried to sand the glass, i tried to glue different types of paper to the glass but finally decided to use white paint and the brush strokes created by the paint brush added even more of a layered light effect.

 To demonstrate my effect more by leaving the top and bottom and side opened and unfiltered to show the strong unfiltered light through cracks in the clouds.

I was very happy with my final project and think it demonstrates my light effect how i planed for it to.  This project took  tons of research on light fixtures and just sitting around thinking about what i wanted to create it also took many hours of work in the woodshop and many hours of trying to get things to work but i finally finished and i am very pleased with its turnout.

Progress on Luminaire Project

So far on my project i have a giant tree stump and a light bulb and thousands of glass bulbs. Now all i have to do is put them together and recreate my light affect of layers of light, which will be a challenge since i only have 3 tree stumps to practice on.  However i know already that my light affect is focused on a wall and on the ceiling. I'm also planing to work with alcove lighting.

Light Project - Phase 2

At the beginning of this project i started out wanting to create something with a organic natural shape but over time and after working with the tools in the wood shop i realized i wanted to create a very straight and clean system. My first attempt i used a saw that created splinters and after talking to Tommy i thought i was focusing on the splintering of the wood. and them started to work on the joinery and found that it would work well if i used the idea of a square pole in circle holes and made the joints concentrate where the splinters happened most.

After my first model i felt like it wasn't important to focus on the splinters and decided to create extremely clean lines so the wood grain would be shown off better since i found wood that had darker grain.  And it was sorta a mistake but the half of a X created when i cut the side out made a detail that i liked so i left it.  then when i was putting the piece together i started to notice the grain of the wood was not continuous and if i was focusing on the grain then it needed to be so i remade the project.

After i started to cut the wood i figured the little X that i had thought was interesting earlier distracted from the grain pattern so i did my best to make the cut exact so that would not happen, but i could not do it so the grad student in the wood shop taught me how to make my cut exact. Then i figured it would help my project read better if the pieces had a mathematical reason to their size progression and i tried increasing it by half, a forth, three fourths, until i just doubled  the size.  So i ended up with this final project that was really clean and rectangular and the grain on each side is continuous and the pieces also double in size from the top to the bottom.

After i had my project built i wondered if i stained the outside rods the darkest color in the wood grain if it would frame my work but it just ended up looking slightly off so i did not use the stain idea.



Tadao Ando- light artist

LIGHT...

 something we tend to overlook throughout our loves but some artist decide to use this light to create and highlight things around us. dictionary.com defines light as the state of being visible, exposed to view, or revealed to public notice or knowledge, this is evident in the art work of Tadao Ando.

Modern Art Museum
at Fort Worth, Texas



Church of the Light,
in Osaka, Japan

Tadao Ando is a architect and light artist who was born in Osaka Japan, in 1941.  At a young age he started to experiment with creating things out of wood and this helped to influence his artistic style. At age 28 Ando opened his own studio and has been a visiting professor at Tokyo University, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia.  When ask about his designing style Ando said "walls are the most basic elements of architecture, and in all my works, light is an important factor. the primary reason is to create a place for the individual,  a zone for oneself within society." At first looking at his architecture you notice the large walls materiality which sets a limit for the design. However, the walls seem soft to touch and admit light.  Lastly the buildings surround the visitor with light and nothing else creating a feeling of emptiness. Ando's work involves the visitor in a almost mueseam like display of light art.

Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery
New York, New York

Similar to Ando's style  which emerses the viewer in the art architect Lebbeus Woods and artist Kiki Smith created the above piece which shows a overhead illumation that cast a subtle dark blue object floting in the center of the room.

"I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars."

We just finished the first phase in our study of light and so far i have started to pay more attention to the effect light has on things but i have also noticed that its also the effect that the absence of light has on the world that creates the most intrest.  Light allows us to clearly see objects full illumanated but its not untill you add shadow to that same object that you start to see all the little deatails and variations in that object.



"It is not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form."

Lately i have been noticing all the color in the world around me and i'm inspired by that...color just brightens my day no matter what is going on, even tho i'm a strong believer in the quote that says "paint some one in color you paint their clothes but if you paint someone im black and white you paint their soul". However i do LOVE COLOR and i believe that it has an effect on people that nothing else can also i believe it highlights objects around us and draws our eye to things that if it was white would have just blended in.

....so here's a few pictures i've took this weekend or color.

Seeing the Light- Phase One

 Here are a few pictures that inspired my Light Project.

After i took all of these pictures i then photoshopped then into two diffrent pictures and then combined them.  Combining the two sets of pictures contract the light coming thru the layers of clouds and the time of day shows the light affect.

Picture on the left was taken at 9 am and the
 picture on the left was taken at 3 pm that same day.

This was my final presentation board for my light phenomenon of light coming through layers of clouds at different times of the day. To make my board look more uniform i decided to use photo shop an illustrator to create the look of a finalized board.

A Box for 12 Twigs

At the beggening of the project i searched and searched for twigs to inspire me.  then i walked downstairs and found rolled up bark under a tree and decided to stretch the rules a little and use the bark instead.  

After trying to decide on the perfect 12 twigs to use i finally decided on these.

After picking our 12 twigs we were ask to create a parti.....well i had no clue what this was but i then was informed that a parti is a method used as a visual expression of your initial idea.  Once i knew what a parti was i could make one but i had to settle on one single idea and i choose to featuse the twigs by placing them at different elevations.   

This was my second attempt at creating diffrent elevations my first was making the bases clear so you could see all of the twigs but the Mod Podge NEVER dried and has yet to acually dry. So i decided to use foam board an cut thru the first layer of the paper an hide my glued end there. 

Before i created my full scale model for all 12 twigs i wanted to expirement with juxtaposing the texture of the natural twigs with the glossed twigs. But once i acually did it i didn't like how much it changed the color and took away from the natural texture of the twigs.

This is my first attempt at making my project and found out that with out weight in the base the twigs cause the structure to fall over so i had to hide loose change in the base between the layers in the foam board to make it stand.

This is the back to my first model which is compleatly opened in the back to drw the eye backwards toward the twigs bases.

After talking to Tommy about my project i knew i had to make the craft on the base much better and thought i was going to make the base out of one solid piece instead many little pieces but working with foam board i found out that it never looks well crafted so i went to adams and discovered art board and scored one side and used folds an scoring to create the base from one piece. 

The levels on the base are symmetrical to contrast the diffrences of the twigs. However the flat squares are not symmetrical to highlight the diffrences.

The back of the "box" is still opened to show the bases of the twigs and for the final project the twigs go all the way thru the base so they are not just on display on the levels but a part of the structure.

Right Side

Left Side