FALLEN TREE:

Through the process of documenting our studio's transect, we discovered a large, fallen tree in our path. The dead tree had collapsed over a preexisting depression in the earth, and acted as a bridge across the space. It became a landmark for us as we traversed the landscape, and also became an indicator of a particular place.

The installation served as a way for us to come to terms with the idiosyncratic qualities of this place, through understanding the spatial complexities created by the natural condition. By analyzing the sectional properties of the tree and its surrounding environment, we intended to revive the isolated location through reinvestigating the space, tracing the relationships between volumes and voids, the various scales of influence the tree and other objects have on the creation of a space, and understanding the transition of textures that make up the site of the installation.

If a tree falls with no one there to hear it, it might not make a sound, but here, it makes a space.

Project completed with E. Bruner, P. Chu, R. Cole, S. Harkins, and D. Rapoport. For 48-300, under Professor J. Gallagher and Coordinator C. Mondor.

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PROJECT PLY:

The only real design guidelines of this project were to design and build a ten foot tall, ten foot long arch, spanning 12 feet, entirely out of plywood. Our group's goal, though, was to create an assembly system that allowed us to construct, and then disassemble, the entire arch in less than an hour, once all the parts had been cut. With the exception of lateral supports, which used metal components to stabilize the perpendicular beams, all connections utilized traditional woodworking technologies, held together by friction and gravity, with glue used only secondarily to secure friction joints.

The arch quickly took on a life of its own, though.

In the beginning, there was a forest of plywood. The trees blew freely in the wind, bending and twisting wildly. The depths of winter made its mark hard on the forest, bitter chills cracking and rupturing the resilient elasticity that once ruled over the land. By spring, the trees were dead. But something grew out of the destruction. A phoenix rising from the woodchip splinters, the creature was unsightly and miss-proportioned. Its skin was a taut festering surface of peeling membrane - still laying in the wood shards, it was indistinguishable from its environment. As it emerged from its hole in the forest grave, naked legs were revealed. Thin and a little unstable, they wobbled around until they finally straightened for the first time. The creature tripped, bowed, its gangly limbs dancing lightly over the surface of the debris.

Its dry, crackling skin was draped over a gnarled set of bones, which occasionally protruded beyond its covering. And it was ugly. It continued to walk, meandering aimlessly from its birthplace. The dead forest became a bog, and the creature was stuck in the mud. The long legs pulled and pulled, to no avail. It was not until a strong wind came through, lifting the creature up by its hairy armpits. The wind pulled so hard that the joints corkscrewed outwards, the creature filling with air and light. Suddenly shedding its scaly skin, the creature was petrified by its own sublimity, fossilized forever as an empty skeleton of the grotesque, layers of struggle embedded into the grain.

In the end, folding became joining and pli became ply.

Project completed with E. Bruner, C. Buehler, W. Cheng, S. Harkins, B. Howe, I. Kwon, R. Peterkin, D. Rapoport, M. Singh, Z. Weimer, and K. Wiedjaja. For 48-215, under Professor D. Clifford.

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LIGHT WEB:

Our initial intent was to use our light transformer to mimic the experience of sitting under and looking up through layers of a tree. But during the course of the final week before our deadline, we became increasingly interested in looking at how light could be dragged across a space, and discovered that one way to do this was to objectify the light, to allow it to become possessed by something more tangible than the light itself.

This idea developed out of our attempts to represent light and shadow in sketches, photomontages, etc. - we found we were not drawing the light, but the surfaces on which it settled. Light can only be seen in contrast to darkness; in the words of Lou Kahn, "Even a room which must be dark must have at least a crack of light to know how dark it is." It is a property that exists only in a comparison, darkness emerging from behind the rays of illumination or surrounding the lit surfaces.

And so, the fishing line serves to embody the light as it works to draw the light from the single window across and through the rest of the room. This installation was only a brief physical exploration of this idea, created and destroyed over the course of a day, to temporarily analyze the direction of indirect sunlight into a single space.

Project completed with J. Douenias. For 48-200, under Professor J. Lucchino and Coordinator K. Gutschow.

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FRAGMENTED FIST:

Project completed with R. Cole. For 48-125, under Professor J. Ficca.

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AQUATIC PARASITE:

Project completed with S. Parker. For 48-105, under Professors ML. Arscott & C. Brill and Coordinator P. Garcia.

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SUPERFICIAL SURFACE:

For 48-125, under Professor J. Ficca.

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L-FACTOR:

For 48-100, under Professors S. Drake & J. King and Coordinator G. Damiani, and under the woodshop direction of S. Smith.

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