Here's something from Freddy, unit H-er from last year, who kindly showed us his portfolio yesterday.
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I saw this post this week about film and staging by the director Steven Soderbergh and thought it might be of interest for the Unit H's, maybe in terms of how they think about staging their videos, filming models and cutting them together. Watching the film without the soundtrack and replaced with a minimalist piece really changes how you view and experience it. Hopefully its of interest!
Yesterday we mentioned Georges Perec whilst discussing the possibility of drawing everything that happened in the square during the whole of Cinema Paradiso or the lifetime of the space... Perec has written some wonderful texts in which he tries to capture absolutely everything that happens in a space over a huge expanse of time...
Check out "Life a Users Manual"
"In this ingenious book Perec creates an entire microcosm in a Paris apartment block. Serge Valene wants to make an elaborate painting of the building he has made his home for the last sixty years. As he plans his picture, he contemplates the lives of all the people he has ever known there. Chapter by chapter, the narrative moves around the building revealing a marvellously diverse cast of characters in a series of every more unlikely tales, which range from an avenging murderer to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime..."
The magic of the moment: the power of the individual
to transform a space and create an event
We will begin the year with a study of a scene taken from Cinema Paradiso. In the scene Alfredo, the projectionist, moves a glass frame to reflect the projected image from inside the cinema into the square outside the cinema, where a crowd has gathered. In doing this he transforms the square, he creates a special moment in an everyday space.
Draw the magic of the scene, capture the action, the movement of the projection and the transformation of the spaces.
You will have to watch the scene over and over again. Take stills, collage them to recreate the spaces. Draw the physical spaces and their relationships to scale. Use your own judgment, your surroundings and places you know to estimate and draw a measured survey of the scene to scale. Draw your impressions, analyse abstractly.
You could document and explore: the camera movement / the relationship between interior and exterior spaces / the projected light / light and darkness / the movement of the projection / the 3 dimensionality of the projected light / the surfaces touched by the projection beam / trace the ‘positive’ and the ‘negative’ of actual and perceived space / the movement of the protagonists and the crowd / time and space.
Express your understanding of layers, time, and expressions in the scene. Experiment, study and test techniques to represent your observations through drawing and or model making. Allow your working lines, proportional rules, measurements & geometry to be included in the final drawings as an integral part of them.
Capture the magic of the moment in your drawings. Make it a beautiful and a comprehensive piece of work, which clearly demonstrates a creative and individual approach to drawing. Pay attention to line weights and study good draftsman ship. Challenge yourself, test, experiment and set the tone for the year.
...welcome all unit H students to the unit Blog. Treat this blog as a key resource for the Unit. We will update and add briefs, precedents, images, texts, films and other resources, so do visit regularly! You are welcome to comment, add work and images and get involved...
The building type that combines dwelling and workplace has existed in a multitude of different forms for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But, strangely, very little has been written about it. It seems to have resisted collection and classification.
The following website is a research platform by a PhD student at London Metropolitan University.
Use it as a resource - it is informative and will enrich any projects looking at live/work spaces. Pay particular attention to the pattern book which should shed some light on useful spatial considerations.
A fantastic film, focusing on the work of Jan Gehl and Gehl Architects and the role is making cities happier places to live in.
It would be worth grabbing a copy and screening it in the studio. It is good fuel for our work in Earl's court…. video url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BxywJRJVzJs
The Process of Making One Hundred Chairs by Martino Gamper
"I didn’t make one hundred chairs just for myself or even in an effort to rescue a few hundred unwanted chairs from the streets. The motivation was the methodology: the process of making, of producing and absolutely not striving for the perfect one. This kind of making was very much about restrictions rather than freedom. The restrictions were key: the material, the style or the design of the found chairs and the time available — just a 100 days. Each new chair had to be unique, that’s what kept me working toward the elusive one-hundredth chair.
I collected discarded chairs from London streets (or more frequently, friends’ homes) over a period of about two years. My intention was to investigate the potential of creating useful new chairs by blending together the stylistic and structural elements of the found ones. The process produced something like a three-dimensional sketchbook, a collection of possibilities. I wanted to question the idea of there being an innate superiority in the one-off and used this hybrid technique to demonstrate the difficulty of any one design being objectively judged The Best. I also hope my chairs illustrate — and celebrate — the geographical, historical and human resonance of design: what can they tell us about their place of origin or their previous sociological context and even their previous owners? For me, the stories behind the chairs are as important as their style or even their function.
I wanted the project to stimulate a new form of design-thinking and to provoke debate about the value, functionality and the appropriateness of style for certain types of chair. What happens to the status and potential of a plastic garden chair when it is upholstered with luxurious yellow suede? The approach is elastic, highlighting the importance of contextual origin and enabling the creative potential of random individual elements spontaneously thrown together. The process of personal action that leads towards making rather than hesitating." Taken from the book 100 Chairs in 100 Days
"The map of Paris has been cut up in different areas that are experienced by some people as distinct unties (neighbourhoods). The mentally felt distance between these areas are visualized by spreading out the pieces of the cut up map. By wandering, letting onself float or drift (dériver is the French word used) each person can discover his or her own ambient unities of a specific city. The red arrows indicate the most frequent used crossings between the islands of the urban archipel (seperated by flows of motorized traffic). "
You will not be surprised to learn that the net curtain is a British, or, specifically, English device, as it allows examination of the outside world without permitting introspection.
The net spread with the rising urban middle classes, who began to worry that their betters might sneer at their interiors and their inferiors might steal from them.
Originally made of lace, the introduction of light polyester nets increased opportunities for hidden observing, and the net assumed its role as a cipher for suburbia and its supposed narrowness and nosiness. Now it is rarely met without its default adjective, "twitching", emphasising that it's seen mostly as a means of prying rather than protecting.
Its more organised consequence, Neighbourhood Watch, hasn't attracted the same opprobrium. The upper classes prefer shutters. Continentals, who largely operate an open-curtain policy, are puzzled by all this obscurantism. But then they, palpably, are not British.
Further to our presentation last week regarding the three minute movie we would like you to being collating for your portfolios, please refer to the film references below:
At this stage of the year we ask you to use film as a way of recording and interrogating your work; allow the camera to reveal and present new ways of viewing your work.
We will be expecting to see you all use film in this way throughout the year and ask that you bring in snippets along to tutorials, be it films of processes of making, drawing or just light dancing across a room.
As we progress through term one we will begin to explore film editing software and discuss the role the films could take in our portfolios/crits etc...
For clarity the premise of the 3 minute movie is to alleviate the restriction on the number of portfolio sheets and models you are permitted to submit. As such we envisage that the 3 minute movie is intended to act as a supplement to the portfolio.
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