Article Mash-up and Concepts of Power

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In this experiment, we are dealing with dynamic architecture that relates to our clients' concepts of power. Each is powerful in a unique way; Barack Obama wields political and social power, Madonna has entertainment and consumer power, and Muiccia Prada has fashion and image power. To represent the combination of these three concepts in a building, the ideas of the clients first need to be related, and the following mash-up does this by combining a news article about each.

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I wanted to avoid just stringing sentences together and combining the article just for the sake of combining it. I tried to incorporate Madonna and Prada as figures in the political dicussion of Obama's article, so that the worlds of fashion and music seem to be subsets of politics, and so there's a bit of a story that makes sense (not too much sense) and reads believably (not too believably).

One-point perspectives... OR, how to best extract innuendo from drawing and design. i.e. LOOK AT ALL THE F's I HAD THIS WEEK!

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Experiment 3 deals with dynamic, moving architecture, and ideas of power. Each of our clients is powerful in a different way, and we will design for them business offices and a meeting space to reflect this. The moving architecture is represented by elevators in the Unreal Tournament videogame environment, and our first task was to imagine the pathways for these elevators. We did this by drawing different relationships of three 'F'-shaped blocks, from a one-point perspective (where points and sides continue backwards towards a vanishing point). We did six drawings, then reproduced each twice more from a different view.

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Also, the word under each image connects both the view and the design to a concept of power, so that the pathways relate to potential schemes for our clients' business.

Three Clients...

Final map link!

Here is the final map, linked to a Filefront download.

http://files.filefront.com/FINALMAPut2/;13706918;/fileinfo.html

COMPLETED ARCHITECTURE!

These screenshots show the completed map in Unreal Tournament, with spaces, ramps and textures.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau's laboratory is spacious, open and soaring above the spaces and city below, a direct expression of the freedom of his ideas. The texture used almost evokes a feeling of enjoyment and freedom.

The meeting place combines the ideas of Cousteau and Campbell, like the Electroliquid Aggregation. It is geometric and ordered, while remaining open and easily habitable. The texture used is very geometric and repetitive, but is balanced out by the glass walls that take in the view of the encompassing sky and allow it to be a non-restrictive meeting place for sharing knowledge and inquiry.

Campbell's laboratory is behind the vertical surface, almost underground. It is cave-like, and lacks embellishment. It exists as a rational, natural space for Campbell's scientific needs and self-directed enquiry.

Custom Textures

These are the 36 custom textures developed for my Unreal model. They represent, in rows of six from top to bottom, gradual progression from light to dark.

Instead of creating six light textures then making each progressively darker when looking down the columns, I chose 36 unique designs. While still related to each other, I tried to make them darker variations of the idea before, instead of just darker copies.

Electroliquid Aggregation

(Or, two supportive constituent parts... here, the combination of the two client's quotes, so as to express a unified idea for their combined architectures)


I just want to know, buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction - up, down, sideways - by merely flipping his hand, and how, underwater, man becomes an archangel, and everything works.

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Keith Campbell and Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Week 2 Parallel Projection Map

The piece of architecture begins to take shape. In this experiment, we are creating a laboratory for each client based on the idea expressed in their quote, a meeting place based on an amalgamation of the two quotes, and two ramps connecting their laboratories to the meeting place. Here is the meeting place, combining an axonometric from each client, and below is the parallel projection drawing it was based on.