The Wall

Architectonics

Ian Baldwin

Wintersession 2013-2014

Our assignment was to design any kind of "wall" and place it on a site. My site was a park overlooking a canal. I started with the thought of making as simple as possible a wall but only playing with the wall's placement.

Phase 1 - Wall Design

ian baldwin Architectonics Student work risd Kevin Hong

Wall design iteration 1

Design Iteration 2

Wall design iteration 2a

Wall design iteration 2b

Wall design iteration 2c

The spirit of this design was to create a wall that played with the dynamics of the viewer and the city. Before one reaches the edge of the deck on the site facing the canal, one is unconsciously bombarded with the ambient noise of the city. The wall, which would be over eight feet tall and sunk into the wooden plank deck and would leave room for the viewer who would move into the thin, 3-foot-wide walkway between the wall and the deck railing. The wall would be monolithic and solid stone, and isolate a viewer from the city immediately behind it both aurally and visually. Meanwhile, the viewer is forced to look across the canal to see a more distant part of Providence.

The overall effect is of distorting space. By walking into small, meditative zone created by the wall, a viewer is forced from a relation of extreme proximity to "the city" as one of its inhabitants to a relation of distant and strained observation, as the immediate city is completely blocked out by the proximity of the wall to the viewer as well as its huge mass.

Design Iteration 3

Wall design iteration 3a

Wall design iteration 3b

Wall design iteration 3c

The spirit of this design was in manifesting into physical reality an invisible force: namely, the natural barrier and obstacle to movement presented by the canal (and the unnatural presented by the railing of the deck). The wall is cantilevered off supports below the deck to give the wall the appearance of it floating over the river. It extends four and a half feet from the walkway, just barely out of the reach of any person on the walkway. It serves as a frustratingly intangible (and thus, experientially nonphysical) yet visual manifestation of a message - "You are not free."

The two designs on which I have commented became fused together in the final design. The outer wings of the wall are of Design Iteration 3 and the inner part of the wall is of Design Iteration 2.

Wall design iteration 2: scale model (1in = 16ft)

Phase 2 - Surface Design

Primary interest in surface design began in discovering how to model the texture of rusticated, striated stone using chipboard. The translations of the stones' striations developed into experimenting with screen, with the property of variable transparency - dependent on one's distance to the screen. The screen and varying distances became incorporated in the wall design; changing the primary experience of the installation from residing in a meditative but distorted space in which one can see clearly into the distance, into an experience of moving towards and surpassing a theshold: for the screen reveals more and more as you get closer, until you move through its boundary, and then it reveals simultaneously everything beyond it and nothing at all of you had just come.