MIRACLES

House 2 from a 3-house series is a work in progress. More info coming soon.

House 3 from a 3-house series is a work in progress. More info coming soon.

Under construction. Images and other information coming soon…

OVERLY reveals and interrogates latent visual structures in current architectural drawing procedures by using layers and transparencies as method of translating information form the digital to the real.

Compositionally, OVERLY registers various positions of primitive geometries that are suspended strategically at particular areas depending on privacy needs. The line-drawing component of the project is equal parts an exercise in graphics and the activation of such graphics through lighting; the piece reads differently when viewed from the inside and the outside, and also when the lights are on or off. 

Team: Katie Shipman, Megan Pettner

Photography by: Philip Arnold

Aleatory Form is a proposal for a temporary exterior installation (6’ at its highest point) that is free and open to the Rice community and the general public. From a design standpoint, this installation explores the interaction of architectural forms (3D geometric studies) and flat, digitally-generated graphics. This project interrogates the visual effects offered by flatbed-printed graphics on rigid panels that can be used to clad buildings. In this sense, the exploration can be understood as a proto-architectural proposal for full-scale building projects.

My creative and pedagogical approach maintains that design-theory must assimilate graphic conditions (visual), animation logics (formal), and pseudo-ecological conditions (cultural) – modes usually relegated to other, peripherally related fields – and that geometric formal problems, digital process, and vibrant materialisms, must be understood as analogous visual languages in conversation. Aleatory Form proposes a large-scale material and perceptual study that can act as a form-generation agent that can push against and motivate the character of architectural forms.

Architectural aesthetic theory has been slow to catch up with a contemporary culture saturated with digital imagery that embraces artifice. Aleatory Form is invested in pushing visual studies in the field forward through material experiments in the overlaying of digitally-generated images of ecological matter, real and fictitious geological artifacts, structural components, and the study of transformation logics of three-dimensional volumes.

Work in Progress Rice University Campus, Houston, TX

Team: Stacy Su, Shree Kale, Rita Zhaorui Xiong

Our installation takes its title from a term used by ecologists to describe plant life growing on, and just above the forest floor. While privileging the understorey of any environment betrays an anthropocentric worldview, it also focuses our attention to sites of encounter. In this liminal zone nested beneath the architectural canopy of Eero Saarinen’s North Christian Church, and the natural umbrella of Dan Kiley’s landscape design, our pavilion will serve as a layered stack of mineral, biological, technological, and cultural assemblages.

The pavilion as a design category is biased towards site-less, discrete exercises in geometric and material virtuosity. Our installation, by contrast, looks to the political philosopher Jane Bennett’s composite models of human and non-human aggregations of things and potentialities. Through Bennett’s lens, our design renders North Christian’s context as an animate field, replete with pre-existing material composites. The pavilion co-opts greenhouse tectonics, prefabricated agricultural materials, and artificial lighting, and recasts them as a sculptural gesture on the stage framed by Kiley’s plan of grids and allées.

The design’s formal game is one of folded surfaces, atmospheric colorfields, and structure conceived as so many three dimensional lines in space. Inside of the pavilion, an open-air plan employs a scatter of wild, local flora, mineral life, soil types, bacteria and industrial matter (glass, concrete, pavement, and cinder blocks are ground into an aggregate that supports weeds and fungi).

While our installation is concerned with highlighting the agency of visible and invisible material networks, we believe that environmental and disciplinary engagement are not mutually exclusive. Our proposal is modest – an ecological education center staged as a site of social and material exchange. Our ambition however, is to pursue an architecture of vibrant materialism (as defined by Bennett) that eschews aesthetic defaults and clichés native to environmentally-conscious design.

Design Team: Hannah Daugherty, David Alcala, Lisa Kuhn, Aaron Payne

Fabrication Team: Taylor Boes, Zach Schumacher

Installation and Assembly: Megan Pettner, Becca Schalip

Transfers is a large, vertically oriented, proto-architectural sculptural installation. This will be the second iteration of the project, which was first installed in downtown Los Angeles at the A+D Museum from March through May 2018. In this second iteration installed at Art Omi: Architecture, Transfers has been be stripped down to its aluminum scaffolding, and re-clad with a set of custom CNC-cut Dupont Corian solid surface panels. Each panel has been printed with an abstracted image responding to the Art Omi: Architecture “Shelters” theme (curated by Warren James), and the concept of vertical and sculpturally formed dwellings using a modern material.

Thank you to our fantastic research team:

Colleen Fellows, Lisa Kuhn, Linda Lee, Kyle Reich, Kimball Kaiser & David Alcala

http://artomi.org/exhibitions/viola-ago-hans-tursack-transfers

Poppy Red employs a serial working methodology exhibited in drawings, experimental models, animation, and one large sculptural work. The series interrogates the medium of architectural drawing and modeling; compositions of line clusters and volumetric transformations. 

Borrowing processes from graphic and industrial design (slick, high-finish, commercial processes like hydro-dipping films, flatbed printing, and vinyl applications), the line drawing component of Poppy Red takes on a graphic role which sometimes aligns with the formal transformations of the volumes in a coherent way, but at other moments challenges the sculptural qualities of those forms in favor of graphic figures. 

At a time when the conventional architectural drawing stands on contested grounds, this form-graphic interplay attempts to forge new relationships between the aesthetic language of line drawings and three dimensional volumes. This new relationship exists in the very short and sudden moment when the drawing-as-graphic blankets its formal host. 

September 21 - October 31, 2019

Pinkcomma Gallery, Boston

Student Team: Katie Shipman,  Megan Pettner, Kyle Reich, Colleen Fellows, Aaron Payne, Faris Ahmed.

Special Thanks to: Knowlton School of Architecture, MacDowell Colony, Rice University School of Architecture,

"Thick Skin" with Hans Tursack on view at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles until June 14th on the A+D’s “Island” and “Nook” spaces. The project was sponsored by Dupont - Corian Solid Surface, 3M Materials, Brilliant Graphics, Alro Steel, Taubman College and the University of Michigan.

Project Team: Colleen Fellows, Lisa Kuhn, Linda Lee, Kyle Reich, David Alcala, Kimball Kaiser

The basic premise of the project is for it to read like a scatter of proto-architectural massing studies, with a blanket of graphics that gracefully fall from an abstract plane that hovers above the forms. There are two primary sources of inspiration for the project: volumetric, almost stereotomic clusters being pulled from the ground, and contextualizing linear and color fill graphics from a 2D picture plane onto 3D forms. From a formal perspective, the aim of the project was to reconcile a crystalline, faceted, geometric massing study, with a graphic wrapper. In the form you can read the influence of Michael Heizer and Tony Smith. The graphic was inspired by Agnes Martin’s systemic-compositions of line drawings and solid fills. The project attempts to answer a question of contextualizing pictorial and geometric effects in the landscape.

It should be noted that the planar composition of the scattered pieces on the field is choreographed such that they seem like they have risen from the ground, with the possibility of more of them blooming in a similar manner. This choreography is meant to service the outdoor theater space during performances, and activate the site by encouraging social interaction during less active times. The geometric clusters should read like a small rock formation from far away, and like friendly furniture pieces from up close.

Project Team: Faris Ahmed, Aaron Payne, Megan Pettner, Katie Shipman.

Pirating the art installation as a format, this piece explores the collapse of graphic and tectonic modes of architectural expression. As a formal proposition, the work renders painterly problems in an architectonic guise. One could cite Michael Fried’s reading of Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons is an analogous condition where graphic elements are understood in competition with the literal shape of the canvas. Likewise The Mark pits flat, planar moments against the sculptural gestalt of a dominant three-dimensional form. The work also engages the space of the room, spilling out, or unraveling onto the wall and floor of the venue; a discrete object undone. Economic in its expression, and somewhere between sculpture, object, painting and installation, The Mark asks the viewer elemental questions about the perception of form, shape and space at a moment when material intelligence is a dubious disciplinary anchor-point.

Platescape was part of the Succulent Group Exhibition, curated by Joachim Perez and Germane Barnes, Bakehouse Art Complex, Art Week Miami, December 2019.

Platescape is an ocular exercise meant to appeal to the eye through revealing aspects of itself in various stages. Riffing off of themes of plated designs in dining culture, Platescape wants to be visually experienced from a side view first (a dish would be observed in elevation as it approaches a table during dinner service), and from a top view afterwards (a dish would be seen from above when placed on a tabletop for consumption).

Serving the role of an entrée (the third item on a seven course meal), Platescape acts as a gateway to the main, culminating moment of a dining experience. In this way, Platescape tends to be rich but in very small, and unexpected doses in an attempt to awaken the senses for what is to come next. The edible elements of the course take the form of three small, self-similar, textureless, architectural follies. The follies are embedded within the intricate planar-oriented design that although overt, its only purpose is that of a structural support. Overall, Platescape attempts to delay its consumption by offering the user multiple layers of visual content and legibility depending on vantage points, lighting conditions, and proximity.

Models Are Drawings That Believed In Miracles is an exhibition of work that explores conventions of orthogonal projection in architecture. The project reveals and interrogates latent visual structures in architectural drawing procedures; specifically, the tectonics of the line.

A cross-section of drawing objects and models reveal physical, material, and translations of digital information. The objects, produced in series, challenge linear processes of design; a mindset that privileges a one-way movement between conception (immaterial) and production (material). Instead, the work advocates methods of making that are embedded in, and inextricably wedded to, a dynamic design process with no fixed endpoint within a serial attitude.

The relationship between image, support and viewer is problematized in the printed matter. The drawings borrow conventions from painting, but are meant to be viewed from above as a horizontal plane. The models, on the other hand, are framed as vertical images on the wall. In both cases, the re-orientation of the picture plane challenges given notions of exhibition-culture (pinned-up drawings and pedestalled models).

Conceptually, the project explores diachronic notions of form-generation and aesthetically, the work approaches “novelty” as a matter of difference, banality and variety within strict geometric exercises. Procedurally, these experiments exploit methods of parallel projection drawing, and printing processes, to discover a timelier definition of “line”. Collectively, this series is meant to be viewed as the beginnings of an investigation, not so much beautiful or technically adept as interesting and “on its way there”.

Special thanks to Jeff Halstead

Project Team: Colleen Fellows, Max Neiswander, Megan Mohney, Scott Deisher, and Kay Zhu.

This drawing is process based. It is neither an abstraction nor a representation, but rather situated in an approach that places its desire on the slowness of the emergence of figure from field. The boundary of the figure is intentionally ambiguous so that the emergence of the figure from the field flickers as you get closer or further away from the picture plane. To be specific, the picture plane is the design agent in the compositional logics of the figure.

The lines, conceptually of annotative nature, register every possible state during the process of the drawing. Typically, an architectural geometry drawing will display the information of the final product. Here, the discrete line network further reinforces the notion of time in generating the drawing and delay in the reading of the drawing.

The input/output operation, very familiar to digital design, in this case functions as an apparatus that distances the authorship between user and drawing; that is between instruction and execution. It is in this space, between instruction and execution that there exists an area of indeterminate figure.

Of Process, Mark and Figure does not privilege any meaning beyond what it is, it rather questions the possibilities of what else it could become in terms of process based drawing and authorship. 

In collaboration with Anass Benhachmi, Talin Ebrahimi and Peter Vikar

INSTRUCTOR: Devyn Wiser with Brandon Kruysman and Jonathan Proto