agents

Our final review will be Monday, December 12 at 3:30pm in the Salon.

You will be pinning up your final 22×30 analytique, as well as your best hybrid, mapping and photomontage work.

You will also need to turn in your journals.

The final analytique should be accompanied by a revised project statement: this statement is similar to what you would see accompanying a work of art in a museum – it speaks to the conceptual content of the project, drawing upon a body of knowledge [ie the readings], articulating a thesis rather than describing the details of the materials and construction of the final image, or your process.

The analytique should integrate the methods of representation that have been tested this semester, including mapping, analytical drawing/diagramming, and photomontage. The choice of method for a given portion of your analytique should be intentional, as there are benefits and limitations to each method. By definition, an analytique must demonstrate your concept at multiple [3 or more] scales.

You should also consider the substrate: hot press paper is very dense and smooth, with a matte finish; photo paper from the plotter will give you crisp images with a shiny finish, but less of a tactile quality; hybridizing analogue and digital methods could allow you to cut out photographs and apply them to another substrate, to be drafted over,…there are a variety of approaches here, but they should be thoughtfully considered.

We will be available next week if you have questions.

For your reference, here is today’s lecture on the Analytique.

In preparation for your writing on the analytique, please read the following essays from Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Thinking Hand. Don’t forget to take notes on these readings in your journal, which will be collected at the end of the semester.

Chapter 3: Eye-Hand-Mind Fusion

Chapter 5: Embodied Thinking

The analytique reinforces the concepts we’ve been discussing this semester, including the importance of an investigation at multiple scales, the human scale and experience, and the value of abstraction. The final project is a conceptual synthesis of the work you’ve produced this semester, and a hybridization of methods of representation.

There are three primary steps in the production of the final analytique:

[1] Diagram – critical to abstraction.

[2] Write – critical to articulation of concept.

[3] Draw – critical to synthesis.

Due BEFORE THANKSGIVING [Thursday, 24 November]

Articulation: 500 word analytique concept posted to blog.

Discuss your observations and interpretations of an aspect of the city that you have discovered through the process of mapping and photomontaging Charlotte. What do these specific observations mean to how we understand cities in general? To how we design and build in cities? Relevant diagrams should be included [include your own, or redraw others’ diagrams].

Taylor Milner

Charlotte Whitlock

Remember the Course Concepts:

What is the role of abstraction in the analysis of a site or city?

Abstraction serves to identify critical spatial, material, and perceptual conditions and relationships that would be impossible to observe amidst the inherent complexity of a site or city.

What is the purpose of testing different methods of representation?

Methods of representation yield a variety of results: each method has benefits and limitations, and abstracts the chosen data set in a different way, revealing a variety of interpretations.

What does a graphic investigation of a site or city offer?

A graphic investigation offers new readings of a site or city, generating biased and speculative potential futures. The interpretation of the site/city is the seed from which a design ultimately grows – although the interpretation can be a productive and worthwhile end in and of itself.

Over the course of the semester, I have questioned and analyzed the nature of the city through the eyes of the individual and the individual’s experience. The experience of the city is of critical importance, as it is the mediation between the human and urban, the past and present that brings richness to the city environment. Through my analysis, I have considered plan as the vehicle for understanding organization and mapping. It has allowed me to deepen my analysis objectively of the place that humans inhabit. Section has been the primary medium for my analysis, as it responds to the human scale, experience, and spatial qualities of the urban environment. Perspective has also been used over the semester as an extraction from section and plan to create three-dimensional space that looks at the finer detail of experience and the relationships between section and plan. We experience the world in perspective, therefore I see it as being just as important and section and plan.

The derive was the starting point of the semester when I began to conceptualize experience linearly and sequentially through a series of sections. The derive was the key element for me and inspired my analysis throughout the semester, incorporating experience into the following assignments of the verso-recto and hybrid drawing. These allowed me to deepen the derive into a historical layering between past and present, and how the human experience responds to both. Thus, the linearity of my derive was given depth in another axis of history. Through mapping, my derive was grounded by analyzing the relationship between the subjective derive and objective urban layers. Photomontage as the final layer of the derive gave the chance to intentionally look at the derive at multiple scales.

In my analytique, I plan to combine all that I have done so far into a synthesis of the relationship between the human and urban scale experientially, spatially, and organizationally. To bring out the importance of human experience in the understanding of the urban environment and to honor the derive and the intuitive qualities of its analysis. The analytique will peel away the façade of the urban environment and look at the city as it really is through all of the aforementioned methods. The analytique will use the derive as the foundation, as the urban environment is something that cannot be fully expressed objectively; experience although difficult to record, is the way in which we interact with the world. The analytique will work backwards from the subjective towards the objective. The subjective creates the framework for the objective, and this uncovers the city intuitively. Rather than arbitrarily working towards an understanding of experience, the analytique will work towards the analysis, deepening contrast the further along in the process. While working, layers of history will be incorporated such as in my hybrid drawing, as the analytique will not only focus on present day experience, but also on the past and how the past affects and will affect the urban environment.

My initial investigation of downtown Charlotte began with the surrounding infrastructure. The dialogue between the center city and the outskirts revolved around the light-rail. In some instances, the relationship was strengthened by the railroads and in other instances it was weakened. In typical cities, the transportation infrastructure is essential to the cities’ success. In other interpretations, it is not the infrastructure that makes the city but rather the hidden cultural signifiers that do. Infrastructure is essentially all the same. Overall it is a standardized modular system that could be implanted regardless of site. This made me realize that the light-rail had less to do with Charlotte and more to do with the idea of a city as a whole. In future iterations the light-rail and all modes of infrastructure will be portrayed as objective variables that are less specific to Charlotte. These objective pieces of information will be removed of all color and abstracted to dilute specific details. Portraying the infrastructure in black and white, or all black as a mass will present more opportunities to incorporate orthographics more fluidly in the composition.
In my latest composition, I stumbled upon a deteriorating concrete wall full of graffiti. The unique discovery only occurred in the outskirts of the Charlotte, in the grit of infrastructure. I wandered off the standard system of roads, sidewalks, and paths underneath a large bridge out of sight from the normalcy of everyday stark and bland Charlotte. I believe this mode of discovery is the only way to research and truly unearth what makes up a city. A city can’t be fully represented by something standardized you see on a map or look up on the internet. The hidden gem graffiti wall I found is truly subjective because I experienced and adapted the area first hand. No signs or maps pointed me in the gem’s direction. If we pay less attention to the busyness of the city that attempts to make us feel modern we will eventually find a way to culturally portray Charlotte.
I want my final analytique to represent the city through the mask of a hidden gem. This gem has yet to be found, but that is the whole point. Sectional qualities of the space will act as the foundation for the piece while plans will serve as connecting or separating members. The overall composition will ultimately be dictated by the quality of the gem. In the wall of graffiti composition I attempted to portray the wall of graffiti as a singular graffiti tag in itself by peeling away the background and foreground and adding secondary gestures that were in the same style. The final iteration will be orchestrated in this same manner, by allowing the focal point to represent itself in itself once more. Abstracting the wall of graffiti as a graffiti tag allowed a level of separation that disconnects the objective information from the subjective. This disconnection will occur as a datum in my composition so that the personal and objective pieces are clearly defined.

“A creative insight in architecture is rarely an instantaneous intellectual discovery, […] most often the process begins with an initial idea that is developed for a while, but soon the concept branches out to new paths, and this pattern of criss-crossing trajectories grows ever denser through the process of design itself.” (Pallasma, 107). To align my set of work in Pallasma’s phrases, the “initial idea” and the beginning inspiration was the growth of transportation in a city. After developing this idea, the focus shifted more specifically towards the growth of the Great Wagon Road into Tryon Street: two important arteries to the city and the region that belong two different times, occupying one physical location. “Criss-crossing trajectories” branched out to explore differences over time in material, scale, and modes of transportation.

Through mapping and photomontage exercises, I questioned the time-driven transition from simplicity to complexity (in material, in scale, and in modes of transportation). Although tall buildings sprouted along the immediate edges, the axis remained relatively unchanged; the diagram still exists in plan, but changes and transforms in section. In analytique format, the axis can be emphasized as the void that is between the edges of trade and Tryon.

Based on my cumulative set of studies, a new reading of the city is one of peeling back layers to reveal where the city grew from and why. The way design has grown from this area remains true to the old road. A central axis (with a thickness) serves as a set of bounding lines dividing main modes of transportation. From fast to slow, the axis breaks down into vehicular traffic, bicycle traffic, and pedestrian traffic. In the past, it was solely wagon traffic. These bounding lines are the borders from which the buildings grow – all differently, but all within the guides. When the Great Wagon Road existed, it too served as a set of guiding lines for growth to sprout up on either side. However, this growth was limited in numbers and in height. The main characteristics and properties of the dirt road still exist although they have been manipulated and covered over through the years.

My analytique will focus on peeling back certain layers to reveal the past while maintaining an essence of the present state of this area. My reading of the city has taken on a temporal curiosity, where I will try to convey the contrasting differences and muted similarities between the point of passing through in1850 and the destination of 2011. The road is a method of projection, moving people through the city. The city itself is a manifestation of the people who have been pulled through, growing and developing to a new reality. In turn, the road transforms, but the physical location and the layers below it are there, just buried and suppressed. My goal is to incorporate the essence of the past in plan, the reality of the present in section, and their delicate relationship in perspective. Together this will depict a fundamental relationship of solid, void, and axis on an area that has a dramatic presence and a rich history.

Throughout the process of analyzing the center city of Charlotte, I have come to see the city as several different diagrams or abstractions, each of these at different scales. I would like to combine all these ideas/interpretations of the city into my final analytique, in order to generate a cohesive and intertwined understanding of the city as a collective whole compromised of many indissociable, participating parts. To do this I want to emphasize one condition of the city, the cemetery, and use it as a foil to compare to the rest of the cities experiences and characteristics.

I want to bring back into my study one of the first moments of the city that really caught my attention: the cemetery. I stumbled upon this old dilapidated cemetery while roaming around the city during my dérive, and it immediately inspired me because it seemed like it was the only historical remnant of the past Charlotte. Nevertheless my focus shifted throughout the semester and gradually it was no longer part of my analysis of the city.

I feel that I need, and want, to deepen my study of the ground condition of the cemetery and the implications it carries as an activator of the ground. Therefore I really wish to reevaluate my other investigations and ideas while trying to establish the connection between the cemetery and the other characteristics and moments of the city. I definitely see how it could compliment my study of the horizontal expansion of Charlotte relative to the vertical growth of the center city over time. I want to explore the abstraction possibilities of time as a scale and I believe I could use the cemetery as a sort of reference to compare and contrast the changes occurring in the city.
In addition, the experiential quality of the cemetery is also very intriguing to me because, while I was walking around the cemetery grounds, I barely even noticed the city and the towering buildings around it. My focus was completely oriented towards the immediate environment. I attempted to portray this with the photomontage series and I want to iterate this condition in my analytique as well. So I think I can use this as one of the examples of the human scale and how the city is perceived from that scale. And I could continue on and compare and contrast the investigations of the human scales with the investigations of the building scale and urban scale.

The urban scale will also be an important part of this final investigation. During a considerable part of the semester I focused on the cities sectional qualities at an urban scale. My overall conclusion brought me to understanding the city as a blip in the landscape because of the abrupt rise and fall of the downtown area’s high-rise buildings. The lack of a gradual progression in the average height of the surrounding buildings is what pushed me to forward my diagramming of this condition.

All in all I want to bring my focus back towards the cemetery and its particular conditions. I intend to use the focus on the cemetery to call out the particularities of the city through contrast since the cemetery is such an outstanding and inverse condition compared to the overall city.

The focus of my photomontage and previous mapping exercises was primarily based on the light rail interactions within the city.  The interaction of the light rail with the city (urban) scale, building scale, and pedestrian scale brings about new ways to view the city of charlotte.  Articulating diagrams and photomontages at different scales provides a better understanding of how each element relates back to a whole.

The first study in photomontage was set at the individual scale, which consisted of materials, textures, and emotional interactions.  Trying to capture the individuals feeling of approaching the light rail and interacting with the surrounding structure and how it connects back eventually to the building and urban scales.  The intricate connections at the individual scale can change dramatically from one scale to another, while maintaining the overall connection.  Another interesting aspect to the individual is the emotional connection one may have with the light rail.  The light rail is elevated at the site, giving it a sense of grandness, where the other forms of public transportation are beneath it.  This seems to cause a feeling of importance when one proceeds “up” to the light rail stop.

The second study in photomontage was based on the building scale.  At this scale the connection to the building from the light rail was diagramed along with how the light rail touched the street as it passed over.  The diagram was based mainly on the geometric patterns that were discovered through the photography of the site.  The Epicenter’s connection to the light rail is singular and creates a very strong pathway / axis into the building.  This connection continues as it changes to the individual scale.

The third study was based on the urban scale, which was composed of the main transit hub located under and beside the Epicenter.  This structure was chosen due to its importance with the over all urban connection it represents.  The light rail is still considered in this montage however it only makes up a part of the whole in terms of urban connection.  The photomontage again abstracts the geometric patterns found, and manipulates them creating a diagram that focuses on the interior as well as the exterior.

The analytique will focus on a seamless connection that brings each scale together through a continuous form of geometry.  Using the information from the previous exercises, I will begin to progressively define each scale while simultaneously keep a geometric form connecting each scale as it increases.  Using mainly photomontage and mapping diagrams this analytique multiple components of plan, section, and perspective, illustrating how I personally view the city and the light rail.