Objective

This exercise will introduce students to the speculative and iterative nature of the design process—conceptualizing and testing ideas in progressive succession. Our method will aim to foster the creativity and freedom of each individual while underscoring the significance and positive impact of shared, collective discourse. Each student will formulate their work in a way which promotes the uniqueness of their individual interests and abilities, while simultaneously reinforcing the studio’s shared conceptual and intellectual frameworks.

In this first exercise, we ask students to engage with a work of art, and one word. Both will act as modes of reference and interpretation for the design of an interior space within two connected spaces.

The word will act as a conceptual driver for students to achieve a desired experience while circulating throughout the space. The work of art will act as a visual and formalistic reference which will be translated into an interior spatial configuration through the reimagination of the two dimensional into three dimensional space.

Students are be guided by two questions: how does one move between portal-X and portal-Y, and what is the intended experience of that movement. The former, a pragmatic connection between two spaces, requires consideration of measure and configuration in both the horizontal and vertical dimensions: functional circulation. The latter, asks students to consider the emotive and poetic implications of occupying and traversing space. They should be encouraged to harness the duality of these requirements—the practical and the ethereal—as a source of inspiration for invention. The process will mediate between the abstract and the architectural as categories which organize and integrate form, concept, and body.

Students are encouraged to remain objective by critically evaluating their own work and by remaining open to criticism by the instructors and their peers.

Process

The design process will consist of three main components to be superimposed: (1) the given context of the Tall Room and the Long Room; (2) a painting by the Hungarian artist Laslo Maholy-Nagy, chosen by each student out of the array of images provided (thumbnails on right); and (3) a word from the following list:

openness; intensity; calm; longing; curiosity; disorientation; lucidity; anxiety; prolonged; delayed; directed; balanced; connected; disturbed; accelerate; repose; emerge; reveal; conceal

Maholy Nagy’s works are highly articulated sets of two dimensional geometries which students will use to generate plan compositions. These abstract, planimetric figurations will be brought into three dimensions under the guidance of studio instructors using techniques of projection and extrusion. This process of spatialization--from 2D to 3D--is informed by: the relationship of Portal X to Portal Y; the limit and proportions of the Long Room and the Tall Room; and the experience of space as prescribed by the students’ chosen word

Context

The context of the project is two defined rooms—the Long Room and the Tall Room—that share a common wall and are displaced from one another in section. The site for the project is limited to the defined shell of the Tall Room. Students are asked to devise a way of moving between portal-X (connection to the exterior) and portal-Y (connection between the two rooms). While their interventions will be limited to manipulation of architectural elements within the confines of the Tall Room, their design should be responsive to both rooms: a physical and intellectual connection between two spaces. The mode of spatial manipulation will be achieved by the superimposition of the MN drawing onto the plan of the given rooms. The compositional elements within the drawings will be translated by the students into means of circulation, where users are expected to navigate within, through and around abstract elements within space. The interaction and placement of the elements will be based on the “cropping”, positioning, and scaling of the drawing in relation to the given plan. Variations on the design will be judged according to their reflection of the students’ intents, which are informed by their assigned word

Program

Students will be designing a form of horizontal and vertical circulation that connects portal-X to portal-Y and should include at least two types of elements: stairs, ramps, bridges, catwalks, landings, platforms, etc. The “program” as such will remain as a pristine space of circulation. It is the interaction with form and concept which will guide this exercise.

Narrative

To initiate the design process, students will write a paragraph which elaborates the experience within the space, based on the word given to them. This narrative will be used as a conceptual lens to judge the nature of the work and the choices they make throughout the design process.

This process encourages a process whereby the desired intentions will inform the design of the interior space, which could then help crystallize initial intentions, which then inform design, etc.

Examples of authors that operate with expertise through spatial narrative are Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf, and Italo Calvino. A few examples are provided here, but it is encouraged that students engage these authors more at length in order to fully comprehend the richness in spatiality of these authors’ texts.

If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell you how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed. This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants. Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will only last so long.

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

At home the hay waves over the meadows. My father leans upon the stile, smoking. In the house one door bangs and then another, as the summer air puffs along the empty passages. Some old picture perhaps swings on the wall. A petal drops from the rose in the jar. The farm wagons strew the hedges with tufts of hay. All this I see, I always see, as I pass the looking-glass on the landing, with Jinny in front and Rhoda lagging behind. Jinny dances. Jinny always dances in the hall on the ugly, the encaustic tiles; she turns cartwheels in the playground; she picks some flower forbiddenly, and sticks it behind her ear so that Miss Perry’s dark eyes smoulder with admiration, for Jinny, not me. Miss Perry loves Jinny; and I could have loved her, but now love no one, except my father, my doves and the squirrel whom I left in the cage at home for the boy to look after.’

-Virigina Woolf, Waves

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one’s fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite ... Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant. Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.

-Jose Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

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