3.09.2007

Collage

The pieces of paper (those vehicles of colour) which Le Corbusier pasted to sheets of drawing paper have an essential function for this artist who chose building as his vocation: they structure space…The symbolic presence of these luminous blocks, solidly moored to the margins of the page or else distributed over the picture surface with a lively feeling for formal rhythms and chromatic reverberation, enables Le Corbusier to shift from one plane to another, to capture the mobility of the external world and bring it into the picture. From the tectonic tension animating the image, restraining extemporaneous impulses without altogether suppressing them, there arise certain of the fundamental architectural principles which Le Corbusier strove to concretize: the idea of contrasting solid and transparent walls, the notion of free circulation within a constructed space, unobstructed passage from up to down, front to back – as free as the way the eye slides from one point on the horizon to another”[1]

Collage is a way of making space. From the beginning, collage has played a critical role in the development of this thesis project. Early on in the process, the relationship between my collages and the projected design work was ambiguous and disjointed. I wanted to maintain the independence of these two modes of creation and did not want to force the design to develop out of my decidedly arbitrary and automatic art-making or to put my art into the service of a more straightforward architectural design. I still maintain that in terms of practice, architecture does not equal art, and that this thesis is a design project in the service of art and artists rather than a work of art in itself. However, while the collages are still meant to stand on their own as individual works of art, the notion of collage as a process of making space that I have derived from this work can now be applied to the design conception and process. The building’s relationship to collage is based on process rather than representation. It is not a collage in itself, it becomes a collage through its inhabitation.
The radical program of this thesis calls for a flexible environment for making, a participatory structure that liberates young artists from the constraints of the classroom by allowing them to continually reshape the individual and collective spaces of the facility.
The architecture remains latent until the participant artists of the program activate it through artistic production, social interaction and architectural reconfiguration. Moveable walls and operable environmental controls are a key component of this design, yet in themselves they do not comprise a truly flexible architecture. Sanford Kwinter describes Toyo Ito’s design process for the Sendai Mediatheque “not as a system of actions committed upon matter but rather of actions that take place within it.”
[2] While Ito’s projects deals with the ethereal world of digital media rather than the decidedly material world of art practice,the architecture of Artists for Humanity similarly exists to support the actions and interactions of its youth and mentor artists. Through production, aggregation and reconfiguration, a constantly transforming three dimensional collage will be generated, in which few of the pieces are ever glued down, where changing social dynamics, lighting conditions and stages of artistic incompleteness will compose the space.
Thus I am not suggesting that the architectural proposal will come to resemble one of the collages that I have displayed alongside my design drawings. The architecture of this thesis is more akin to the 12”x16” sheets of Arches Watercolor paper on which I have drawn a squared grid before painting and collaging found images onto its surfaces. Collage is a process of establishing relationships between diverse media. As I cut out complimentary images and add lines and zones of color, the composition is constantly registered against the rectangular constraints of the paper and the grid. “The grid is a skeleton waiting to be fleshed out. It is about hierarchy, the permanent frame is something upon which more mutable things are hung.”
[3]The 8’x 8’ grid of this project provides for a systematic approach to structure, daylighting, services and flexibility. It is a baseline against which the action of the space can be registered. Its accommodation of these systems within horizontal layers allows for complete freedom in between. Within this framework, my personal approach to collage can be reintroduced as a method of imagining the various permutations of inhabitation. By focusing on the process of space-making through collage, a truly free and flexible architecture can be developed that is both shaped by and in service of artistic practice.
[1] Rodari, Florian. Collage: Pasted, Cut and Torn Papers. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. 1988. p. 126-127
[2] Kwinter, Sanford. The Sendai Solid. CASE: Toyo Ito – Sendai Mediatheque. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2002. p. 29
[3] Fontein, Lucie. Reading Structure through the Frame. Perspecta 31. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. p. 52

1 Comments:

Blogger Anthony Dubovsky said...

Dan--This collage really holds up. who was the Dan who did it? Stay in touch with him!

10:03 AM  

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