DRAWING WATER | Experiments | Brian Davis

Water Table Experiments

The water table does not recreate real world conditions. Only after careful observation and representation through models, animations, and drawings can this device become a useful design tool.

The table is a place to simulate and play with the natural processes of sediment deposition, erosion, wave action, and delta formation. To communicate the aesthetic potential of these forces, we used rotoscoping, photogrammetry, and overlay to represent phenomena in novel yet still descriptive ways.

The table allows us to test formal ideas, like ditch patterning shown above, against the unpredictable dynamics of moving water. Because the final striations of sediment were produced by our constraints, we see these psuedo-landscapes as a loose kind of descriptive drawing.

Point Bars

Point bars are sediment deposits at the bends of rivers. While evident when simulated in the table, these formations take years to morph and grow, invisible to human perception. The drawing on the right is a palimpsest of the channel’s wavering thalweg and the accumulating landmass on the inside bend.

Untitled, 2021 graphite, ink on trace

The Ulm Stool

Max Bill was broke when he started the Ulm School of Design. Not even enough money for chairs. Thus his students’ first assign ment was to build their own portable stools. Its made of three boards connected by 34 box joints and a broom handle dowel for shear strength. Today, the stool is prohibitively expensive, but I still wanted one.

Over 100 days, I replicated and iterated on this simple design. Dialing in the jig was simple if not tedious. The challenge was finding wood. Within the school there is no shortage of awkward wood scraps and waste. The simple construction allowed me to use whatever I could find. Each of the 25 stools keeps the charac ter of the scrap that it came from.

Rubbings from a real Ulm stool, found at the German Pavilion in Venice (right)

This proposed addition to the University of Virginia supplements the Miller Center and its Democracy Initiative which pushes for an interdisciplinary study of the theory, implementation, and evolution of democratic systems. To understand how the architecture accomplishes this goal, it is first important to realize that this democracy center is not the center of democracy. It is not where world leaders, make, and execute decisions. It is, rather, a place for those who write, theorize, and implement democracy at both the official and civilian level to learn, debate, and challenge their practices in the hopes of finding a better way forward.

Oil and Water

Overshadowed by more glamourous identities, it is easy to forget that Los Angeles is also an oil city. Since the early 20th century, over 30,000 oil rigs have embedded themselves in the city. Despite the destruction of communities and ecologies, the oil industry persisted and expanded.

With the end of active oil drilling an environmental necessity, this thesis strives to find a purpose for these disparate sites. Inspired by the ways in which the spatial logic of the city accepts and sometimes benefits from the presence of oil infrastructures, this thesis speculates what an infrastructure water collection and purification looks like when subjected to the same game-like spatial logic of the city.

The Ballona Wetlands, the terminus of a bygone network of wet meadows, vernal pools, and fresh and salt marshes around Baldwin Hills, is now bound by highways, channels, and natural gas infrastructure. It is an ideal test site, allowing the project to wrangle this forgotten California ecology back into the logic of urban property that defines Los Angeles’ urban structure.

The 1x1 mile grid creates a framework to analyze and speculate the concieved and emergent consequences of these new infrastructures.

In two weeks, designed and prototyped a modular steel privacy screen for a ski resort in Vail, CO. The design takes inspiration from the criss crossing ski trails and the Tyrolean ornamentation found on older ski lodges in the area. The tightly spaced perforations afford privacy, camouflaging the adjacent rooms amongst the aspen forest.

Test Collages challenges and benefits of planting in certain areas. It also shows how planting can coincide with better pedestrian infrastructure. The selected spreads

Summer research assistantship with Felipe Correa and Devin Dobrowolski analyzing the contemporary impact of the US Rectangular Survey System which dates back to the country’s founding. The work spans from large scale visualizations of the country and its history to a close analysis of each of the 50 states and their infrastructure’s adherence and adaptations to the Jeffersonian Grid. This exercise in rigorous cartography emphasizes how the simple layering and processing of publicly accessible datasets can weave a powerful story of our nation’s history of land acquisition and management.