ON PRECEDENT: This semester involved an extended precedent study on the Shingle Style. In this study, we worked directly with Vincent Scully’s analysis of he Shingle Style both when he writes in 1955, with The Shingle Style and the Stick Style, and in 1974, with The Shingle Style Today, in which he reflects back on his work in relation to what’s being built (and painted) in the late 1960s and 1970s, when he’s writing. Thus, he constructs this history, this lineage which stretches back to the pattern books of Andrew Jackson Downing in the 1840s to Tuxedo Park in 1885 to early Wright and all the way to Franz Kline and the abstract expressionists, and on to the work of Venturi, Eisenman, and Meier. In working with Scully, we have to look at precedent through his contextual interpretation, a sort of added layer of precedent. It is interesting to think about it in this way, because the Shingle Style is itself a product of a sort of grappling with precedent. The style, by Scully’s estimation, comes out of this late 19th century conflict between European revivalism and an assertion of the nebulous American vernacular. So, again, we are not just thinking about the Shingle Style cottage, but about layers of precedent in this study. This requires reflection, contextualization, and a sort of temporal transience. This is inherent in the kind of presentation documented here, in which I reflect on and situate my own project, constructing the history, as Scully does.
This project considers architecture – of the home, the gallery, and the water feature – as a technology of vision, which activates a direct relationship between space, location, and the visual experience of the user. The house enables and is itself composed of fragments of the panorama, with heightened access at nodal points, cross-sections of what are, essentially, enclosed, spatial sight-lines. Taking from the existing house, Bruce Price’s Tuxedo Park Cottage, the location and orientation of its openings as architectural fact, I spatialized a network of projected apertures. So what was a diagrammatic expression of vision essentially becomes new space, literally carved out by multiple perforations of the view. The gallery is the obverse of the house in terms of vision. In this case, the view is inverted toward an object of interior space: the painting. Here, the openings only emit light, and the geometry of the aperture occludes any real engagement with what lies outside. The relationship between these opposite views (of the landscape and of the painting) is reinforced by nature of the displayed work: Jackson Pollock’s Number IA, which was painted on a horizontal canvas (a creative landscape literally tread upon by this abstract expressionist) and turned upright, an object appropriated for the view. The constructions, in relation to the site, also attempt to engage with their precedent, the Shingle Style home and its particular situation within the landscape. Contrary to 19th century American architecture’s preoccupation with the picturesque, in which the house is an object within the landscape, the contemporary picturesque is employed as an interior condition. Alternatively, from the exterior, the house acts as an apparatus through which the landscape is framed, where limited apertures provide a direct line of site from the road to the oceanfront behind the house. My approach throughout the project has been consciously diagrammatic, where physicalized sightlines interject in the landscape, providing a physical, perceptual, and navigable datum against which the landscape is recognized.
Bruce Price: William Kent Cottage, 1885
panoramic nodes at intersections of aperture projections
enclosed projections focus the gaze and enable a singular experience of the vista
first house study
second house study
roof plan first floor, site plan
second floor
living (ground) floor
The overall manipulation of the site is marked not by the moving of ground, but by the visual/physical intervention of the raised boardwalks and their many, slender columns. Here, though, the natural ground plane is interrupted to immediately occlude the view of the gallery visitor (the public user), dropping her into an excavated pathway, which gradually opens up as she approaches the beach.
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Jackson Pollock: Number 1A, 1948
June, 12 noon
March/September, 9 am
December, 3 pm
june, 6 am
june, 9 am
june, 12 noon
june, 3 pm
june, 6 pm
view approaching the entrance
original pool statement: With this model, I considered a perceptual interaction with the urban landscape. Using both Main Street and the horizon as datum lines parallel to the orientation of the window, I extended the actual cross streets behind Main to establish an imagined map, the angle of those extended streets creating otherwise impossible intersections. Situated at the height of the horizon line, everything below is occluded, so that what exists is only the imagined landscape, its termination (both at the window and the horizon), and the reflection of that represented map back into the newly-perceived space.
beginning at the end Both the first and final products of this semester dealt with perceptual relationships with the landscape. Here, the architecture reflects and locates one in an imagined landscape, an extended mapping of the site. In the final model of the house and site, the architecture gives the user access to the landscape at specific locations, particularly at the nodal points of physicalized sightlines which recall the intersections of the map-made-architecture shown below.
process
week 1 -------------------> --------------------------> --------------------------> -----------------> week 14