Deep Histories & Strong Figures
Course: 501 Design Studio | Instructor: Andrew Saunders
Semester: Fall 2019 | Studio Rep.: Benjamin Hergert
The following images were selected for Pressing Matters - the official publication of the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania - and were produced by the students in the design studios I have assisted with over the course of each semester.
Students: Elizabeth Lindsay Anderson, Zhongming Fang, Bingyu Guo, Benjamin Hergert, Shiyue Liu, Yulun Liu, Yiyi Luo, Elisabeth Agatha Machielse, Miguel Eliecer Matos, Jamaica Reese-Julien, Yifan Shi, Madison Tousaw
The studio takes its cue from George Kubler and Robert Smithson, key figures of the land art movement sought to break free of the confines of the Museum as an institution by developing epic projects that explored and alluded to larger scales and scopes of time and history including terraforming and archeological swaths. As contemporary designers operating in the current post-digital paradigm of 2019 (one defined by a fatigue of purely digital innovation - characterizing a majority of the last thirty years of progressive architecture) we re-examine the land art movement and their similar reaction to the aesthetic fatigue of the Avant -garde obsession with abstract expressionism in the late 1960’s. Students were tasked with scanning artifacts from the PennMuseum and looking at factors of scale, geometry, and texture that characterize their innate qualities. Containers are used as a design device that reacts to the artifacts posture, patina and edge conditions as it breaks it or becomes contained. Due to the disciplined Euclidean principles that guided the construction of the new volumetric figures echoing the signature profiles of the artifacts they contain; each surface of the figure is developable (able to be unrolled to a planar surface). In teams of four, students then create a Cabinet for their group of arifacts employing sartorial techniques of a tailor, each surface of the Curious Cabinets is templated two-dimensionally from planar wood veneer and re-rolled to constitute the full three-dimensional figure. Beginning exterior to the museum within the Stoner Courtyard, the Curious Cabinets act as analog studies for the final project, an extension of the Penn Museum archives. The expanded scale and scope of the land art movement offers compelling tactics to compete with the rapid monumental growth of the surrounding Penn Museum context currently consuming its physical presence.
Jamaica Reese-Julien | ENTWINED TANGENTS
