5th Year Fall 2011 Work by Scott Archer

FALL2011

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TABLEofcontents

color study i-iv reflections 03 quilt study 09 group work 11 student work site | lamar & amite 37 site | court & west 63 final quilt 89

Beginnings are often found in endings. It has been a practice of the School of Architecture’s Fifth Year Program to challenge students’ complacency by working through and across divergent forms of investigation; these typically range from constructing fundamental color studies to mapping both hidden and overt patterns of the city to designing essential but often prosaic aspects of buildings, such as doors or scuppers. It is our belief that learning occurs in the interstitial spaces between such activities. In April 2011, renowned textile artist and longtime Jackson resident Gwendolyn Magee passed away. At her memorial service, held in the entry hall of the Mississippi Museum of Art, hung several of her largest works. These ranged from pieces of pure geometrical abstraction to representational and symbolic narratives on race and race relations. As a host of noted figures – both local and national – spoke of the diverse impacts Gwen’s work had engendered, my mind shifted to the studio, to students, and the possibilities embedded in pieces of cloth, in simple shifts of color and pattern, to effect the lives of those who see them. Mississippi, like many states in the deep south, has a tremendous history of arts and crafts making. World-class folk art is just out of view in almost every small town. However, it was not the history of those forms that motivated the work of the Fall 2011 studio, but rather the studio took the practices themselves as the underlying agenda. Working in place, with materials at hand, students were asked to investigate the world they found and propose new objects that were at once both part of and compliment to the rich fabric that is Jackson. Jassen Callender faculty

PATTERN - things worthy of imitation, model or plan used in making things, a regular way of acting or doing to make a ground; to initiate movement; to create value in repetition In the moment of pattern there are increments of movement on a forward path mixed with returns to previous moments. Like going into the world for new experiences and returning home to verify the value of the new and the old. It is a cycling between what can be known and what is already known and familiar. These moments are like figures always searching, weaving, and constructing a ground. Architects rely on pattern as much as any other discipline to verify what is possible in materials and space and what might be possible in qualities. Architects, like artist, spend their lives making figures and elements and trying to locate them in a composition that will let the figure hold its identity and also be a part of the overall ground at the same time; difference and similarity both maintained in the present. How do many differences make a common ground? Qualities are like figures of experience and thus worth imitating. The aspects of shape, color, surface, texture, and all conditions of direct visual experience become tools. Architects have to make these qualities into a larger ground so our buildings will be a part of a larger pattern in the city. Students took simple pieces and scraps of fabric and constructed large patterns that were observed from the repetition and aspects of several urban sites in Jackson. The large quilts constructed by the students gave a life to the studio that was larger than the quilts themselves. They became inspirations for urban walls in the city, lobby walls, and the distribution of materials on the ground in the city. In the end, there is a simple and humble quilt with color and pattern that fills a room with things to see, patterns to absorb, and things to daydream about. Its value is larger than what is simply seen and yet it is simply a beautiful thing to appreciate. Mark Vaughan faculty

Our education, thus far, had exclusively presented Mississippi’s vernacular architecture to be of didactic value. However, when it comes to taking lessons from the work of other disciplines, the architectural education too often maintained its focus on the fine arts. This semester, we were presented with the regionally-specific art of quilt making, and because the idea of art-of-themasters is a geographically foreign concept to us as students in Mississippi, the local fixture of the state’s folk art and its accessible qualities particularly resonated with us. Tasked with reinterpreting patterns observed in the city as patterns in a constructed quilt, we began to correlate the complexity of the quilts’ assembly to the complexity of conditions within the urban fabric. Simultaneous development of an urban-scaled building’s façade began to also draw comparisons to the multifaceted patterning of the quilts and the city. While the layering of creative construction scales and the pursuit of diagrammatic conditional studies was most likely the strategy behind this moment in our education, the metaphorical observations, made during the making, probably reinforced the approach most. Feeling the texture of folded pieces of fabric and over-lapping stitches likened to the hidden tactile complexity of building construction. Piecing together the current and future facades of the city’s buildings likened to the complexity of the inherent relationships of patterns and adjacencies in the design of a quilt. Composing the image of a building’s face of multiple textures and materials likened to quilted fabric of the city. Via an embedded cultural vehicle, our architectural education was continued and strengthened by intersecting carousels of metaphorical thought regarding our quilts, our buildings, and our city. Audrey Bardwell student

QUILTstudy

GROUPwork

left | quilt

robertFEATHERSTON & chrisHOAL