Architectural Projections is part of the first year core curriculum in the Architecture Department at RISD. It is designed to explore systems of drawing from direct experience and computational operation. Throughout the course, seeing is framed as a primary operation that is translated through various forms of representation and making.

 

To begin, a variety of vessels of different sizes and materiality are collected. Using these vessels, a simple still life is arranged on a sheet of plexiglass.

 

The spatial and visual phenomena of the still are observed from two fixed, distinctly different points of view. Tonal drawings are developed using a single medium, marking form, shadows, reflections, refractions and other phenomena.

 

Charcoal on paper - 22 x 28 inches. 

 

The two-dimensional drawings are transferred back onto the assemblage of arranged objects - guided by the recorded phenomena of the drawings for each point of view. The new marks on the still life create a syntax through the consistent articulation of the full range of observed phenomena.

 

Mixed media, including acrylic paint, charcoal, oil pastel and pencil.

 

A new system of marks is developed to capture the still life’s attributes in a succint, measurable way. These marks are then used to create a digital model of the still life using the Rhinoceros platform.

 

Using a system of incrementally sized cubes (0.5” - 1” - 2” - 4”) each of the objects is carefully measured. The process becomes reductive, using smaller and smaller cubes to define the edges more finely.

The measuring process yielded a complete model of the still life in Rhinoceros. Here, the model is shown in a shaded view, yielding a solid feeling of an opaque, stacked mass, and in a wireframe view, allowing the layers of cubes to take on a linear quality that plays with degrees of openness and transparency.

 

The “core sample” is created using 1” wooden cubes which replicate the 0.5” cubes in the model at double scale. Each block becomes an amalgam of the smallest unit (i.e. the 1” cube is comprised of eight 0.5” cubes), yielding a pixelated construction. The resulting object exists as a single mass of nested pixels and highlights the natural degree of error inherent within the measuring process. In this way, the parts of the core sample which are “cut away” - the voids - call attention to the outlines and forms of the objects themselves.

 

1" wooden cubes

30 inches x 48 inches

 

The final representation for the project explores the analog system of pen plotting as a medium located in the interstice between drawing and digital representation. Using a Python script to transform Rhino files into HPGL files, the pen plotter prints by moving a felt-tip pen across the surface of a 22” x 34” piece of paper. The plotter makes complex line drawings that come together slowly but mechanicaly in relation to the movement of the pen. Thus, the drawings read as the hatching of close, regular lines. In dense areas, the ink collects over and over again in the same place on the page, leaving the residue of its making.

 

These drawings explore layering effects and line density using a single pen, first in a perspective view and then in an axonometric view.

This set of drawings explores the effect of multiple (three) pens with different colored inks. Each pen corresponds to a different variation in the lens length of the camera in a set perspective view of Rhino, effectively using the capability of the multiple pens to articulate difference.

These drawings use fifteen pens to record the construction process of the Rhino model. Each pen corresponds to a construction layer in the Rhino model. These construction layers slowly accumulated as the model grew and allowed various points of access “into” the model by turning them on and off throughout the measuring process.