This week, the AVATAR students at the Bartlett School of Architecture have been working under the guidance of visiting lecturer Perry Kulper (University of Michigan). Perry’s work investigates the potential of methodology in the working process, aiming not to create buildings, but rather to progress the cultural effectiveness and agency of architecture. Whilst working in the field of architecture and architectural education, he often eliminates buildings as an outcome, and has produced hundreds of provocative, rich and intensively laboured drawings. Spending four days under his tuition was a privilege, and the general consensus from the year group is overwhelmingly positive.
Through his academic career, Perry has identified 14 different methods that can be used within architecture, independently or interdependently. On our short dive into this esoteric pool, we studied four of these methods and worked intensively for three-and-a-half days on one of them.
The brief was to work on a motel using an Edward Burtynsky photograph as a site plan, using one of four of Perry’s methods.
Kim Walker and I worked together, and investigated gestural translation. Gestural translation, to explain in one sentence, is a process by which a gesture is translated into an architecture. The gesture can be as meaningful or meaningless as you wish, and it is generally the way in which it is translated that creates the interest.
We chose this photograph of a fragment of a ship being broken down as our site:
The process then underwent four stages:
1. The gesture
Our chosen gesture was bursting a balloon filled with water. This action took place over a scale of milliseconds and was captured using high-speed photography and video.
Finding commonalities
We found commonalities in the site, the gesture and the motel through changing state of being over time:
3. The interpretation
The ship
The ship’s line was derived by tracing the outline of the ship and the inversed outline of the ship from the Burtynsky photograph.
The motel
The motel’s line was derived by tracing the outline of one of the waves that were created from the balloon explosion.
The balloon
The balloon bursting line was derived from a tangent graph.
4. Reinterpretation
We placed all elements onto the same sheet using a variable scale.
We then plotted the intersections of the graph. The circles drawn around the loci of the intersections were structured according to the intensity of the collision; where the balloon (a ‘small’ scale) met the motel (a ‘medium’) scale, the circle was small; where the ship (a ‘large’ scale) met the motel (a ‘medium’ scale) the circle was larger.
The motel is thus represented in a transient state, similar to the three transient states it is derived from. The outcome is not necessarily a finished building, but represented through the geometric logic that has driven its creation.
The final image was printed and manipulated with paint, charcoal and wax. Click here to download a high-resolution version. Click here for the flickr image pool from the critique.
I somehow stumbled onto your page. It’s remarkable what you guys achieved in a few short days.
I was in Perry’s studio at sciarc and it was an amazing experience, although I can’t say the same for the works produced in our studio.
I’m also thinking of applying to the AVATAR program.
…continue the good work.
[...] photographs / inspirational landscapes. We used Burtynsky as part of Perry Kulper’s workshop at the Bartlett earlier this [...]
Amazing work – Any chance you can wrangle up some of the other work your studio mates did?
Perry is an amazing teacher. Incredibly insightful and saturating. Mixed with Bartlett students is almost unfair.
If this is the same Vo from SCIArc you’ll need to grow some hair because it’s cold in London – Sorry Vo – Everyone on the internet needs a little anonymity.
I don’t have arecord of all of the work, but here are some photos of the crit session. Perry was superb, and a ral head-opener for the rest of the Bartlett – it’s a shame I didn’t have a chance to photograph all of the work.
http://bit.ly/35nhcj