step into the frame thesis thoughts . Beau Johnson . 2012
measuring Corbu’ Carpenter Center, Cambridge 2012
“defend(ing) the dignified art of architecture against the cultural and mental erosion of value and meaning which constantly threatens architecture in our surreally materialistic, self-centered and quasi-rational culture.� - Juhani Pallasmaa
Architects (...) transform reality. -Alvaro Siza Design principles
Fall 2010 . Beau Johnson
ร lvaro Siza
Swimming Pool - Leรงa da Palmeira, Portugal
The frame... not a visual isolation. The the the the the the the the the the the the the the the
sheet, edge, lens, site, scope, work, window, stairwell, context, culture, people, history, past, present, future...
+(2)/-(3)
Winter 2012 . Beau Johnson
+(3)/-(2)
Winter 2012 . Beau Johnson
It’s about perception. It’s using light as a material to influence or affect the medium of perception. We live within this reality we create, and we’re quite unaware of how we create the reality. So the work is often a general koan into how we go about forming this world in which we live, in particular with seeing. - James Turrell
While architecture is taught, practiced and evaluated today as an instrumental, rational and aesthetic practice, a profound architect(ure) is bound to approach his work in existential term - in other words, to regard his or her building as a mediation between the world, the cultural domain and the human mind. - Juhani Pallasmaa
Casa Poli
Pezo von Ellrichshausen
(of his time within Casa Poli) I felt that I was occupying a metaphysical instrument, a mediation object, which activated and reorganized my relationship with the world. It made the world at once familiar and mysterious, intimate and sublime. - Juhani Pallasmaa
“(to) explore the secret powers of basic geometric configurations and archetypal images: “We were extending our research on ‘spatial structures’; an attempt to identify these elementary mental figures that we occupy to depict spatial relations and the way in which we can translate those figures into architectural representations.” - Mauricio Pezo Pezo von Ellrichshausen
exploring the grid
Winter 2012 . Beau Johnson
Cien House
Pezo von Ellrichshausen
How to physically inhabit the frame?
exploring the grid
Winter 2012 . Beau Johnson
the space in which we occupy, defines the way in which we occupy it.
Highline
New York City, New York
try walking up these steps straight.
it just feels wrong. it’s why everyone moves across them diagonally.
Widener Library Harvard University
The stair(s) exists as an architectural artifact which mediates experience at human scale. It facilitates circulation vertically through space while engaging our physical reality and mental interiority.
framing our reality
Unlike the traditional fixed sterescope, this optical device requires a physical engagement in order to locate the frame. The experience is specific to our person, located at human scale, not solely visual. The stereoscope is a device which seeks tolerance (measurable), mediating resistance between the world and the human mind.
Degree project probe board Fall 2012 . Beau Johnson
The probe is to make physical the depth of our human condition, locating the distance between ourselves and the perception of our external world. This distance is a relationship dependent upon its reciprocal; balanced within duality. (thesis statement)
Urban eden
Winter 2012 . Beau Johnson
Locating the depth between self... and the past of our nation, people and communities.
(potential) site. Omaha, Nebraska ‘middle America’ long dense line of foliage with a single tower. the speed of the tree line, speed of the tracks, the interstate. the pace yet their silence, still. the importance of railroad, the dropoff. it’s a lookout, forever, over the train, the command center, brain of a past existance.
now a guardian, relic of a storied, silent and unknown, forgotten present. off limits. no trespassing the threat of the trains the fear of raw power, unknown. those windows. could someone still be watching. exposed. yet forever unknown.
notes made on-site . summer 2012
what once was
what will be
step into the past. the present. the future.
Peter Zumthor Shelters for Roman Archaeological Site Chur, Switzerland
“The Hallucinatory effect derives from the extraordinary clarity and not from mystery or mist. Nothing is more fantastic ultimately than precision.� - Alain Robbe-Grillet
(the site)
step into the frame...