Fundamentals of Architectural Design II Fall 2004 Critic: Margaret Ikeda
Project 1: Installation using Farenheit 451 as material
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Space of a Book Margaret Ikeda
The program for this project was to use the book Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury as material for an installation in Wurster Hall, home of the Architecture Department at UC Berkeley. I analyzed the novel and reading experience as a physical act. I mapped the process of extracting the story from the book, outlining the figure of the text within the space of each page. The result was a diagram of the novel as a physical vessel containing the story. As I read the book, I became aware of my mental process of reading the print, understanding it, and absorbing it into memory. Quickly, most of the language of the novel faded, and I was left with small fragments, in a repackaged form, of the important parts of the narrative. I mapped and diagrammed this process within the physical space of the book.
The final step was to physically separate the intellectual content of the novel from the container of the bound pages, creating a physical analogy to the mental process of reading. On each oddnumbered page, I carefully cut out the figure of the text with an exacto knife against paperboard, using the same paperboard for the entire book. I kept the pages in meticulous order as I went, creating simultaneously an empty container, the figure of the novel as a solid mass, and an artifact which documented the process of extraction. For my presentation, I showed the physical results of my work: the book/container, literary mass, and the heavily-grooved tool used in the process. Rather than adapting the book into an installation piece addressing only its physical properties, I focused on the spatial qualities of the intellectual content within the book itself.
The separated elements: The book itself, now hollow, the cut-out text of the novel, and the board against which the sheets were cut, showing the deep grooving of the repetitive act.
Elevation and section drawing of the project. The varying figure of the type on the page defines the positive space of the now-void book. Hand-drafted in graphite on watercolor paper.
Detail of diagram sheet. The outline of the text is drafted on the page. I used drafting and collage to represent the space of the selective memory process of reading the book within the physical book itself. I thought about ‘repackaging’ the information of the novel as spatially recongifuring the remembered parts of text from the page into useable portions of memory, and then realigned to create a fragmented sequence of remembered portions of the story.
The finished project. The figure of the text of each page is removed to leave the bound volume as a vessel of the novel.