Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 14 - Open City 2

More about Open City of Amereida: https://youtu.be/3cafU80anPE

More about my Fulbright Global Scholar Award to Germany, Chile and Hong Kong
More about the Fulbright Global Scholar Award in general

Fulbright Global Scholar Award in Chile: Day 06 - PUCV Architecture

A visit to PUCV’s architecture program with PUCV Professor Peter Kroeger Claussen.
https://www.ead.pucv.cl/
Their Open City program was given a grant from Graham Foundation this year.

Workshop and Digital Fabrication Space (Laser cutter, CNC machine, 3D printer)

Exam exhibition

Patio overlooking the Pacific

Travel to build temporary structures and experiments outside of Valparaiso. 

First-year class experiments coming out of their travesia

Rain in the region caused them to rethink the way they touched the ground.

The class was led by Michèle Wilkomirsky.

More about my Fulbright Global Scholar Award to Germany, Chile and Hong Kong

More about the Fulbright Global Scholar Award in general

100 Days on a Fulbright: Day 60: Blender’s Grease Pencil

Image source: Blender Sushi blogspot under section titled Voronoi Fracture Using Grease Pencil

Eager to learn Blender grease pencil. Imagine that it will feel more intuitive. Loosen up the models.

Some related links:

• Beginner: Using The Grease Pencil from Blender Sensei, https://youtu.be/3lIX10qcPWk
• Add On: [Addon] Align Selection to Grease Pencil, https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?332160-Addon-Align-Selection-to-Grease-Pencil
• Advanced: http://blendersushi.blogspot.de/2012/07/vfx-voronoi-cage.html

100 Days on a Fulbright: Day 59: Buildings in Blender

Image source: Blender Architecture 2 Visualisation DXF Modeling @ Roland Mayer

Still learning how to make buildings in architectures. Amazed again by the power of arrays. Shouei Shouei (slowly slowly)

100 Days on a Fulbright: Day 56: Exhibition Catalog Research

Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective (Writing Architecture) 
by Massimo Scolari et al. The MIT Press. 2015. http://a.co/eGawgmF

As Owen and I oscillate between 2D, 2.5D and 3D spaces in our game experiments, how refreshing to stumble upon Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective by Massimo Scolari, who was a visiting professor at Yale University until 2012...not sure what he's up to now. Today was spent looking up such books for own library and an exhibition catalog review assignment that I will give my students in the fall. List coming soon.

100 Days on a Fulbright: Day 52: Grand Urban Rules

All images from the author's website about the book: http://www.plansandpolitics.com/publications/grand-urban-rules/ 

Another studio production day in Blender, but bookmarking this text as a possible influence.

Lehnerer, Alex. Grand Urban Rules. Rotterdam, Netherlands: nai010 publishers, 2014.

Link: http://a.co/d0nU925
Author’s website on the book: http://www.plansandpolitics.com/publications/grand-urban-rules/

Related links:

The author’s website: http://www.alexlehnerer.com/
His page as Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at ETH ZÜRICH  (currently ranked as 5th best university in the world for the subject of engineering and technology in the QS World University Rankings by Subject): http://www.plansandpolitics.com/

Alex Lehnerer | October 20, 2014 | UIC School of Architecture
UIC School of Architecture
https://youtu.be/2I3U9p5ctCI

German Pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale 2014
Interview with Alex Lehnerer and Savvas Ciriacidis
Questions discussed:
- How is architecture used as a means of communication? How do we productively complicate easy meanings of architecture (i.e. glass equals transparency?)
- How do architects get into a productive relationship with the past?
https://vimeo.com/98869906

Alex Lehnerer - Architecture’s Present Perfect
Lecture date: 2015-03-12
AA School of Architecture
- Insisting on importance of urban planning
https://youtu.be/q7h8ggvwqMc

17 Volcanoes: Presentation by curators Alex Lehnerer and Philip Ursprung
CCAchannel, Talk at CCA's Octagonal gallery, October 6, 2016
Support from National Research Foundation in Singapore
https://youtu.be/jQ0Q7LQ4xTs

City planning with rules as index, spread example 1

City planning with rules as index, spread example 2

100 Days on a Fulbright: Day 38: Bernhard Siegert

On vacation at another ocean-lined country Portugal so only a quick note for further research: Bernhard Siegert's recent April 2017 lecture at Princeton titled Architectures of the Ocean. https://soa.princeton.edu/content/lecture-series%3A-bernhard-siegert  I'd also like to see what this produced http://german.princeton.edu/ssms/2016/12/09/challenges-of-media-anthropology-princeton-weimar-summer-school-for-media-studies-2017/

100 Days on a Fulbright: Day 24: Speicherstadt

Today we went to the Speicherstadt Museum, and I discovered Speicherstadt, the board game! A throw back to another era of trade. More about game play here: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/66505/speicherstadt  A review here: https://www.forthewincafe.com/blogs/news/ftw-staff-picks-the-speicherstadt 

100 Days on a Fulbright: Day 23: Altstadt

Detail of a 1790s map of Hamburg By Gustav Adolf von Varendorf - Gustav Adolf von Varendorf, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6753836

100 Days on a Fulbright: Day 22: Abstract Video

Gabrielle Jennings. Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art. 2015. 

During my Fulbright, I’m catching up on potential readings for my class Art and Electronic Media. I’m especially enjoying the book Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art by another UCSD alumni Gabrielle Jennings. As Owen and I continue our game experiments, clever ways of incorporating abstraction feel important and refreshing, not only for the sake of processing speeds but also as respite from our image/word saturated social media landscape. Having had countless students approach me about making detail-rich concept art, now is an ideal time to renew debates about abstraction and representation.

An excerpt from Jenning’s book (http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520282483), as she describes her work at UCSD’s University Art Gallery:

The first was an exhibition by New York School poet and artist Joe Brainard. Through this exhibition, I was introduced to the poet John Ashbery. Even then, I had a fascination with the empty spaces in his writing, with the ways he used typography and allusion for powerful ends. Looking back, my interest in and use of blankness both in my studio work and in my master’s thesis, “Stillness and Simultaneity,” was influenced by Ashbery’s work. Later I would work closely with the painter and writer Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, whose writing appears in this volume and whose work has also been a profound influence on my thinking about art. In his 1997 article Blankness as a Signifier, he wrote, “Where [blankness] once marked the absence of the sign by being a sign for absence, it is now the sign of an invisible and ubiquitous technological presence.” This volume teases out this presence: an indefinable, murky space, foggy and immaterial like a Turner painting; an abstraction that appears in the moment of a frame and then disappears only to be replaced by another.

Gabrielle Jennings teaches at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA.
http://blogs.artcenter.edu/dottedline/2015/08/20/qa-grad-art-faculty-member-alum-gabrielle-jennings-new-book-abstract-video-moving-image-contemporary-art/#more-26090

Gabrielle Jennings. Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art (Kindle Location 227). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

100 Days on a Fulbright: Day 21: Blender!

Finally some progress in Blender. A quickly made, simple mockup of the Speicherstadt, Hamburg.

100 Days on a Fulbright: Day 21: Love of Bldgblog

Image from Geoff Manaugh. The Washington Bridge Apartments, New York; via Google Maps.

Too eager to get to studio today so keeping this short. Back to Chilehaus tomorrow, but in the meantime, I quick nod to http://www.bldgblog.com/, one of my favorite blogs by Geoff Manaugh.

Linking directly to his post about the "constructed interior, as exotic as the savannah" at http://www.bldgblog.com/2017/04/corporate-gardens-of-the-anthropocene/. He always points out lesser noticed spaces in innovative ways. Hoping to take that approach to the Chilehaus, surrounding buildings and the city at large.

100 Days on a Fulbright: Day 20: Chilehaus

My proposal for my 3-country Fulbright to Germany, Chile and Hong Kong connects early 20th century buildings and their PR materials across national boundaries. Sometimes my process involves leafing through old magazines and newspapers. Other times, giving tours of the buildings and their surroundings. And on ideal days, like today, studio production, inspired by this research.

So to refocus before a studio day, a little bit more about the Chilehaus, my main muse (along with the port) here in Hamburg. Below is an excerpt from my proposal, explaining the connection.

Placed on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites in 2015, the Chilehaus is a compelling, early example of infrastructure born out of the profits from international trade. Designed in the shape of a ship, the building cost a small fortune during Germany’s period of hyperinflation in the 1920s. Funded by shipping magnate Henry B. Sloman, Chilehaus developed from Sloman’s wealth amassed through his trading of potassium nitrate mined in Chile, hence the name Chile House. The Global Flex will allow me to investigate related public relation posters on both ends of the exchange, through examination of promotional materials about the Chilehaus at the University of Hamburg and the mining of potassium nitrate in Chile at the National Archive of Chile. The posters from both locations during this era display a national boosterism common in artwork from the Soviet Socialist Realist era.

Willy Dzubas. Deutschland : das Chilehaus in Hamburg. Published by Berlin : Hollebraum und Schmidt, [1919-1945]. 

Collection University of Ghent. 

And later in my proposal:

Since my recent artwork remixes color and architecture as ways to manufacture desire, this research on posters will be combined with investigations into the history of urban planning in Hamburg. The warping architecture in my artwork from the last ten years connects to both Chilehaus’ location in the Speicherstadt and Kontorhaus District, with its series of complex tunnels, canals, and warehouses, and the Chilehaus itself, with its sharp peak at its front that mimics a ship’s prow. These oblique structures, evident in Höger’s 1924 building and often celebrated in contemporary, computational architecture, mimic the both the intentionally obtuse structures of contemporary networked systems and the structure of the sea itself. Geographer Phil Steinberg writes that linear, descriptive narratives are inadequate for portraying trade, which is a process of betweeness even as it incorporates tangible objects, actors, and power dynamics. Furthermore, he argues that linear narratives are unable to capture either the social or the geophysical power of the ocean, which has a depth and dynamism that defies representation, or of the ports that exist in constant interchange between ideals of solid land and liquid sea. In keeping with this critique, I seek to produce artworks with structures that reflects this liminal state—between representation and abstraction, male and female, analog and digital—through paintings that suggest movement and short animations in motion.

100 Days on a Fulbright: Day 16

Model made in Blender. From http://architectureblender.weebly.com/ 

Starting to play with Blender. Prepping assets for Unity.

100 Days on a Fulbright: Day 15

Vito Acconci inside one of his modules for “Project for Klapper Hall,” from 1993-95.Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times

Sad to hear of Vito Acconci's passing. Much of his work resonates with me, including his unexpected turn to public art that plays with our expectations for architecture. Two quotes from the New York Times review about his life:

1) In reference to his "Following Piece" from 1969:

“It was sort of a way to get myself off the writer’s desk and into the city,” he once told the musician Thurston Moore. “It was like I was praying for people to take me somewhere I didn’t know how to go myself.”

How I feel about my class at HFBK. It structures my research and forces me out of the studio to meet locals and see the city.

2) His career turn:

That ambition took hold fully in the mid-1970s, when, in a radical career turn, he abandoned the gallery world and remade himself as a highly unorthodox architect and designer, creating works like public parks, airport rest areas and even an artificial island on a river in Austria. 

The move confused his peers and caused his profile in the art world to recede, to the point where many younger artists who were indirectly influenced by his work had little idea who had created it. In his later years, Mr. Acconci sometimes agonized over this situation, but he said he had no choice but to follow his interests where they took him — which was no less than an ambition to change the way people lived.

3) His approach to architecture:

“I wish we could make buildings that could constantly explode and come back in different ways,” he said in one interview. “The idea of a changing environment suggests that if your environment changes all the time, then maybe your ideas will change all the time. I think architecture should have loose ends. This might be another problem with Modernism — it’s too complete within itself.”

Why I'm studying the Chilehaus, but more about that in another post.

“Murinsel,” a floating platform in Austria designed by Mr. Acconci. DeAgostini/Getty Images

CrediDeAgostini/Getty Images