1.26.2007

jack londinium


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1.25.2007

fun


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1.24.2007

Shuijing in Studio



To all: Nice to be back amongst and amidst you...

It was one of those moments, talking with Shuijing, here in graduate school from the capital of China . Always a sense of the distant place she comes from, even as she makes such an earnest effort to communicate. (To make things objective, share in common.) Late afternoon, ninth floor of Wurster Hall, wide bank of windows to the south, looking out over misty winter rooftops of Berkeley and Oakland, backlit by the sun. Beautiful light. Desks still unsettled--not yet inhabited--it's just the beginning of the term. A rucksack, computer gear, pile of books and notes. Shadow opening on concrete wall--the new seismic pour--a burnished gray expanse, maybe four-feet thick, heavily reinforced... and within, another shadow, someone you almost know...

We were sitting and talking about her project in Beijing--to bring old forms into a world made entirely new... Raking light on wall just beyond, and the one curious non-Bauhaus arch... Pulled out my cell-phone camera, another kind of eye--like the story by the assistant of Joseph Cornell--riding with him on a bus once, somewhere in Queens, he noticed Cornell looking out the window and up into the sky--broad daylight, but the moon, quite visible, high above...

Malakoff Diggins Section


Hundreds of millions of years ago, a massive chunk of earth, submerged under the sea, was thrust upward as another piece rammed under it. Water was unwittingly trapped in this process, heated to extremes under the intense pressure of the earth. During this process, all sorts of minerals were dissolved into the water: chlorine, fluorine, boron, sulphur, tellurium, silica, and gold. When there was a fissure between the two plates, the pressurized water would be released from the earth, leaving behind a crystallized vein of quartz, marbled with gold, as the minerals were released. Over time, the ancestors of our modern rivers eroded these veins, carrying with them the gold deposits along their riverbeds.
Eventually, immigrants discovered this eroded gold in the streambeds of these ancient river’s descendants—the modern Yuba and American Rivers. A few years later and hundreds of thousands of people more, all this placer gold (or gold deposited in streams by erosion) had been removed from the stream beds using a simple pan or Long Tom. When things stopped “panning out”, the new immigrants turned to more complex sources; they began to seek “pay dirt” in the quartz veins of the mother lode itself as well as the buried, ancient streambeds of the ancestral rivers. To efficiently mine these buried riverbeds, a new mining technique had to be invented: hydraulic mining. Channeling the water of the existing rivers, the immigrants used pressurized monitors to remove the silt of the ancestral rivers. As the silt and gravel was washed away, mercury was added to remove the tiny particles of gold, transforming the earth into toxic mine tailings. These tailings were washed back into the present river systems, chocking the natural flow of water. The short-term removal of millions of years of sedimentation left devastating ecological consequence; little could grow in the newly exposed gravel, and what could grow was forced to exist in toxic levels of mercury.
Between its inception in 1853 and it cessation in 1883, hydraulic mining removed 1.25 billion cubic yards of earth—more than eight times that of the Panama Canal. At Malakoff Diggins alone, around 50 million yards were washed downstream, chocking the Yuba River and creating devastating floods and mercury contamination downstream. This section shows the geological composition of the site. Before hydraulic mining, the ground was over 400’ higher; what you see here is an enormous pit.

Hydraulic Mining on the Ancestral Yuba River

1.22.2007

http://berkeley-2007-branner.blogspot.com/

Folks--I've got a blog up based on our glorious forum and it's linked up with Yuki and Ivan, if you want to keep tabs. Hope things are going well. I'm enjoying my time truly madly deeply.

Dispersion: Family, Identity, and the Delocalized Home

Where’s home? Usually an innocuous question, to some it is cause for consternation. To ease confusion, the question can be rephrased. Where do you live? Universally less ambiguous, this question can be answered with little hesitation. But why should there be a distinction between the two inquiries?
Home connotes a single geographical space. City, region, and country are often called upon to describe the condition of Home. Associations tied to place are privileged and often dominate meanings of Home. Furthermore, the idea of Home is coupled with the idea of family. Home is the territory where family is defined.
The geographic fragmentation of family is a common contemporary condition. The dispersed family often requires a reinterpretation of Home. Thus, my thesis proposes to investigate the meaning of Home as the territory in which the shared identity of the geographically dispersed family is constructed.
In this investigation, I will draw upon personal ideas of Home and family. Although personally relevant, conditions of fragmentation, asynchronicity, plurality, and dispersion are also representative of a general postmodern reality. In assessing an alternate nature of Home, I will consider globalizing trends including increased personal mobility and electronic communication, multiple sites of habitation, and wider social and infrastructural networks. As local spatial conditions dissolve or become blurred, temporal coordinates are elevated to emphasize and anchor the meaning of Home.
In trying to reformulate the idea of Home, I will be examining my own family and the ways we negotiate family identity despite geographic separation. I will characterize how we communicate, forms of interaction, and our routines. As an alternative to place-centered definitions of Home, I have begun to envision Home as a kind of geographically dispersed infrastructure facilitating familial interactions, traditions, and rituals usually carried out in a typical home. In doing so, I will be exploring Home not through the redesign of a house, but through multiple (probably small-scale) architectural interventions that will involve existing infrastructure, institutions, and networks.
In envisioning Home as an infrastructure for the negotiation of family identity, I will begin by considering the synthesis of the supermarket and the automobile. Providing, respectively, for the modern necessities of sustenance and commuting, they represent a link to domesticity. As a context for daily life, these institutions are ubiquitous locally, nationally, and internationally. By considering these institutions as a departure point, I emphasize the prosaic aspects of domesticity in the construction and negotiation of family identity.

Making Space (Dan)

The life and work of the artist is intricately tied to the space in which he or she practices. Understanding the space of the artist at multiple levels of experience is essential to the development of the program and the architecture of this thesis. The studio is a personal and private space, organized and continually reconfigured to suit the individual artist’s needs. Yet while the individual artist has the right and perhaps the duty to express themselves as such, the work of the artist is most meaningful when it is part of the shaping of a collective spirit or vision amongst these diverse individuals. Thus the studio is understood not as a site of isolation but of community. Communities of artists can in turn use their vision to participate in and possibly transform the culture of the city in which they practice. Many artists communities thrive in the Bay Area, but for high school students in urban schools who often feel disenfranchised and voiceless within the confines of classroom and who might have limited opportunities to make art, the provision of a space in which they can be themselves, learning and making in an environment where they feel comfortable, can be life-changing.
My thesis project will define educational, operational and spatial program for a distinctive arts program tentatively called the Bay Area Youth Artists for Humanity (BayAFH). Developed in collaboration with an existing program in Boston which began in 1991, it will bring together Bay Area high school students and practicing artists to produce artwork for practice, exhibition and sale. I will propose a visionary design to house BayAFH on a group open lots at 4th and Washington Streets in the Jack London District of Oakland. The design will reflect the philosophy and long-term goals of the program rather than a smaller, more realistic, approach to providing space for BayAFH in the immediate future. It will promote a positive, dynamic relationship between the individual participants, between the working artist and the youthful artist in the process of becoming; between BayAFH artists and the immediate community; and between all of these players and the larger cultural life of the city. My thesis tries to establish a model for a community art center whose programs and physical assets could establish it as a permanent feature of a reviving neighborhood, protecting it from being pushed aside in the gentrification process, and instead embracing and leading the coming change. A new model for community based art education is needed to insure relevance, accessibility and viability. In order to empower Oakland’s youth through art, they must be able to express themselves through both physical artifacts and a social involvement with each other, their mentors, and the community.
This is an architecture at the service of artists, and the design aims to establish a more dynamic and reciprocal relationship between architectural and art practice, education and exhibition. Rather than designing the building as a finished product, it will be a framework that the inhabitants can transform and augment as they see fit. The design process will unfold through the investigation of four principle criteria of flexibility, sustainability, light and fun.

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