Studio Scuola Installation Collaboration Revitalization

After meeting with Wade, we had a jumpstart in the installation model making charette. Breaking up into four groups, we focused on different areas of the space such as: overhead plane, special places and spaces ( nooks), centralization, and a specialized wall.

Group Ask "Ksa"

As a way of starting to look at our own studio environment, our professor had us each draw a card from a stack that. Each of these cards had on them a single idea based around: Learning, Looking, Trying and Asking. From this we were to choose on card under each category and from that apply that idea to the environment in a way that we saw fit. My group was based around the card Ask, where we were to create a visual representation of ideas and thoughts we have about the space. We took photos of the learning environment and then looked up words that would explain our feelings and actions about the space.



The image above is a collage of images of our studio space and some ideas and thoughts that we have had about how professors/teachers can best reach their students. So that everyone in the class may learn and pull the most out of that they are being taught. Some of the ideas are: weaving, branching, as well as an importance placed on color. Especially when so many schools today are being thrown up in such a rush so that they facilities can be put into use. How the occupants use and think about their built environment in not taken into consideration until the last moments if at all. These images have been compiled in such a way so that they speak to the human need to communication and learn from each other as well as the need to branch off and have time to think and find our own path. Allowing us all to make our own nitch in the world were we can each live and thrive happily.

The Architecture of Happiness

Analysis by Jackie, Rachel P., Jovana, Gabe and Emily

This book documents the role of architecture as a profession over centuries in shaping our environment and the rationale behind the decisions they have made.  I do not think any architect purposefully sets out to create an ugly structure.  Sometimes the best intentions do not pan out.

 We should acknowledge that the question of what is beautiful is both impossible to elucidate and shameful and even more undemocratic to mention.  The Architecture of Happiness (hereinafter Architecture), pg. 71 

Who is to say what is beautiful and what is not?  People respond to architecture in different ways based on prior experience.  A person might not like a gothic building because it makes them feel small.  I believe a building to be desirable or offensive on the basis of what it talks to us about.” Architecture, page 73. It seems reasonable to support that people will possess some of the qualities of the buildings they are drawn to. Architecture, page 18.  For centuries, classical architecture went unchallenged because it made sense to the user.   There was symmetry, order and beauty.  Symmetry makes sense to human beings because we, in fact, are symmetrical in form.  Architecture styles have come into being because we, as humans, allow exterior forces, such as religion, to shape our environments.  We are sometimes drawn to architecture that makes us feel better about ourselves or want to be better people.  After WWI, Modernism emerged because we wanted to make sense of a world gone mad.  We surrounded ourselves with function and order.  Ornament became a thing of the past. 

The properties of a room can directly affect the emotions of the people within.  An ugly room can coagulate any loose suspicions as to the incompleteness of life, while a sun-lit one set with honey-colored limestone tiles can lend support to whatever is most hopeful within us. Architecture, ppgs. 12-13.   Botton connects sadness with the ability to truly appreciate beauty.  He believes that someone who has experienced profound sadness will react more strongly to architecture.  It is with a dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Architecture, page 25. 

Our love of home is in turn an acknowledgement of the degree to which our identity is not self-determined.  Architecture, page 108   According to the author, we allow culture to define who we are and what our surroundings should look like.  How our neighborhoods and cities should look goes unquestioned because we allow culture to dictate to us.  The greatest changes in architecture came from revolutionaries that were both artistic and practical.  This book can be applied to the rapid growth in green design taking place today.  Architecture needs to respond to the practical and emergent problems that need to be addressed in order for our planet to survive.

Poetics of Space chapters10 Phenomenology of Roundness

"He had been told that life was beautiful. No! Life is round." Van Gogh
Life is a continuum made up of natural cycles. Bachelard uses the example of a bird on page 237. The bird takes branches, twigs, and moss to create its home,, molding them into a spherical shape which becomes its nest. It is this encompassing nest that protects the round offspring. The birds then give back by reseeding the earth to complete the cycle in which they first started. “One can neither see, nor even imagine, a higher degree of unity.” P.237 Bachelard also speaks of the world as a whole. “The round cry of round being makes the sky round like a cupola . And in the rounded landscape, everything seems to be in repose.” He puts forth the idea that roundness encompasses our daydreams. “For a painter, a tree is composed in its roundness.” P.239 “The world is round around the round being.”p.240 This idea relates to a permanence by illustrating our existence. The circle is a never ending process that either allows us to change our environment or for our environment to change us. By talking about these processes in the natural sense Bachelard alludes to humanities role in our built environment, and how the architecture of that environment affects the universe as a whole.

The Poetics of Space Chapter 9 Dialectics of Outside and Inside

“But what a spiral a man’s being represents!  And what a number of invertible dynamisms there are in this spiral!  One no longer knows right away whether one is running toward the center or escaping.”  (p. 214)  A person does not always know where they are in themselves, they are not completely exposed on the outside and are not totally at center within themselves.  They are constantly in a spiral going back and forth and never completely still in their emotions and intimacy.  “Being does not see itself.  Perhaps it listens to itself.” (p. 215)  The person who is always changing and running to and from the outside world can not physically see where the center is and know where they stand.  One must take what they know and feel within themselves and decide where they are in life.  When a person begins to realize this they can start to figure out where they are in the spiral of inside vs. outside.

As we study ourselves and our surroundings -

“Intimate space loses its clarity, while exterior space loses its void, void being the raw material of possibility of being.  We are banished from the realm of possibility.”  (p. 218)  Intimate space, though small and personal does not ensure complete understanding of self and its universal placement. It is commonly more beneficial to explore situations and spaces in their entirety, encompassing surrounding elements and structures that would trigger internal growth. If we limit ourselves to intimacy and do not embark on elements that could assist in our learning and development, as a result we could then become the exterior that is void.

Poetics of Space Review Ch8 Intimate Immensity:

(once upon a time….)_

“Immensity and the intimate domain of intensity, and intensity of being, the intensity of a being evolving in a vast perspective of intimate immensity.” Pg. 193

 “As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere. We are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed immensity is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming.” Pg. 184. In our everyday life we focus on the micro aspects and when we are daydreaming we are putting down the magnifying glass and allowing ourselves to loose control in the larger picture and the vastness of the world. Bachelard speaks to this in reference to the immensity of a forest, which is a limitless world, there are no seeing boundaries and there is the want and the desire to go deeper and deeper within this limitless space. Within the forest you don’t know where you’re going, there is no right or left, but there still that inquisitiveness that keeps pushing you forward in the space. An example of this is when Bachelard uses this quote:  “If we do not know where we are going, we no longer know where we are.” (Pg. 185).

“The word vast is a metaphysical argument of which the vast world and vast thoughts are united.“ pg. 192.  Bachelard explains that this quote would best be used in the realm of intimate space, however, you can create an intimate space within the vast realm you are in. Going back to the forest, there truly are intimate spaces within; when standing between two trees, one is truly experiencing intimate immensity. 

The Courage to Teach by Parker J. PALMER

"Knowing is how we make community with the unavailable other with realities that would allude us without the connective tissue of knowledge. Knowing is a human way to seek relationship and, in the process, to have encounters and exchanges that will inevitably alter us. At its deepest reaches knowing is always communal." (p. 54)

Knowing is synonymous with learning, as we grow as a community, we understand cooperative group interaction. Palmer guides individuals to understand their integrity and identity, and how these elements apply to the aspect of community overall. The Courage to Teach breaks down the successes and failures of procedure and practice, while providing ground notes for physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual spatial requirements.

The literature is successful in its approach because it shows Palmer's ability to be a "...good teacher, not limited to technique..." (p.10) Through his exploration of teaching styles and accommodating various learning abilities, Palmer's search for a "mentor", inspired his thought to become a mentor, inevitably progressing towards the publication of such a learning tool. A learning tool that gives voice to both students and professionals, assisting with the understanding and enactment of positive group interaction. Following the basis for group dynamics, Palmer suggests to maintain boundaries of space, keeping the floor open to all participants, and deal with conflict creatively.

Applying the overall concepts obtained from the text read, helps our studio to practice and initiate beneficial interaction, in return we will flourish into professionals capable of pro-active listening, intimate teaching, and most importantly the ability to combine the two by "...hearing people to speech..." (p.47 ) The most prominent example of these qualities in action would be our meeting with the first year students earlier this semester. The experience overall displayed our ability to teach through action, and express our past experiences through the learning of others. "...As we learn more about who we are, we can learn techniques that reveal rather than conceal the personhood from which good teaching comes." (p. 25)