-Big Day-

The PRINT SHOP for a few of these images is finally up! Stop by, feel free to fall in love with one. The shop will be a web pop-up shop of sorts; only 3 prints of each will be available until May 29th. Thanks again-
XOAWF.

Things to share/ A Print Project.

-Click the photograph to see what's up-
There will be a print shop opening very soon (May 15th!), over HERE! Only three prints will ever be made of these film photographs, and the shop will be open for only two weeks. If you'd like one, get it soon! (Otherwise I'm keeping them all to my greedy self.)

Your patience has meant everything to me.

Explorations go on.




The most difficult part of this project hasn't actually been the production. Sitting quietly for hours, watching these delicate, hand-built forms take shape is an wonderfully meditative process. They are built through intuition and patience; no rulers, no pulling measurements from AUTOCAD, no actual measuring at all. It is a process of creating problems for oneself; you begin by cutting two arbitrary shapes from a paperboard sheet and fastening them together at one edge. From there, all measurements are made by dropping the shape on to more paperboard, dotting the end points with a tiny mark. Then you cut another arbitrary shape from those two marks, creating more problems for yourself. But what results from this playful little exercise is these hyper-digital forms!
I was frustrated by how arbitrary the design process can afford to be through technology, so, in effect, I decided to poke fun at it.







This all started because I wanted to see how irrational a three-dimension object could be before the eye stopped believing it, interpreting it instead as planes of color. In our era of digital manipulation, it turns out, the boundary is pretty porous. Exposing the same sheet of film multiple times should allow the expression of the form in its entirety; similar to the way an architectural drafting will feature a south elevation, a west elevation, and so on. But these structures reject this sort of presentation; rotate the thing along one edge and it just wanders into some new unrelated position, rather than allowing the continued recognition of some distinguishing datum line or significant plane.

There's a bit of restlessness in this project. Some images are a simply a photograph of a single sheet of A4 paper (the second from the top). Some are an exploration of the blue-to-white-to-orange shift in sunlight over the course of the day (below). Everything comes back to this exploration of structure, though. Real things in real daylight. Corbusier's "play of masses in light."








Thanks for coming back to look. I promise I've been working hard. Got the scraps to prove it.

arbitrary structures/weird folk.

In 1922, Hugh Ferriss made a series of drawings depicting the maximum building envelope permissible under Manhattan's (then) relatively-new zoning restrictions. Rendered entirely in charcoal--a dusty, bulky tool more associated with heavy-handed, expressionistic strokes-- they are crisply radiant; linear, planar images at odds with their medium. And to generations, they appeared freakish and futuristic. The first time I saw them, thumbing through Delirious New York some night in college when I should have been working on my own drawings, they were merely...how shall we say... appropriate.

Technology presents this unique problem, through the innumerable advantages it presents the creator. Speed. Ease of alteration. Hind-saving mistake corrections. Automation. Data distillation. It's hard to argue with the benefits.

But there's something that has been irreversibly altered in our perception of how the world functions, particularly in relation to structure. Once the realm of visionary architects, the arbitrary or impossible structure is now a relative piece of cake. Download SketchUp. Tear wildly at a cube. Done.

As a cheeky response to this phenomenon, I've been doing something slow, painstaking, and analog.
It is a sort of exploration- the speed and nonchalance of computer drafting, especially in the architectural design process, allows us to make any number of arbitrary decisions- but what if our design tools had always followed the line of logic laid out by CAD software? You grab any point on a 3D model and drag it, and the adjoining sides fold automatically. It is a small action, but its automation informs the results. No joke.

Would these (new, arbitrary) sorts of forms have existed far before now, had we been following the same steps we now follow with our computers? What if we'd always had this elastic medium, been able to tug at forms defined by stupid, geometric interpolations? What if we'd had the option to make forms that ignored the sun and wind and splotchy microclimates that defined architecture for centuries? What if we'd had these design tools that broke to our will while we made arbitrary, playful decisions?








As it turns out, it is really quite fun to turn that process on its ear. These paper models are a series of flippant design decisions with very real, (very time-consuming) consequences. Every bit of these images is "real"; that is, they are film photographs of three dimensional objects shot in sunlight-- arbitrary structures that still acknowledge the design shoulders we stand on. Each is imbedded with hours of care. More examples, and more photos, very soon. Until then, know that you could be part of this project: I'm launching a PRINT SHOP on May 15th, and will have a limited number of prints for sale.

More soon.

New Name, New Project.

Same spot.





Off a few increasingly small roads twisting along the St. George peninsula is the single dusty parking spot for visitors to Clark Island. You have to walk in to the island interior, passing through a lobsterman's front yard early on, and at the far end of the island is a brackish quarry fed from below by a rift in the seawall. It took a long time to figure out exactly what it was that was so captivating about this place, and finally I noticed it; the stark play between the abandoned cut granite and the frenzy of nature surrounding it, these immense, irregular but still severe geometries playing off the wilderness. Planes of light in the dark lattice of conifers.

It is easy to just look around and have your brain encode the idea of rocks/boulders/stone until you pause and realize how entirely unnatural the forms are. You might recognize the second photograph from last summer; it is still my favorite image to date, and I couldn't figure out why until recently. It is the hushed culmination of what I'd been photographing since the first moment I picked up a camera, turning to the remnants left by activity. A glass of water, half finished in the sun. A pair of glasses left behind during a summer swim. The still-charged traces of life.
It's what I see in these heaps of granite. Hard generations of families carving and blasting at the earth. The velocity and muscle of industrialization, the durable ghost trail which it has left behind.


In short, I've been a little obsessed with the place lately; the recognition of what makes it so wonderful has got me working on a new project, the first evidence of which is in the earlier post. More soon.

An Object.

Funny trial.

Early test for a project of arbitrary structures. This attempt was interrupted by the sudden onset of a sea-borne snowstorm. (I try to keep that medium format camera out of the blizzards when i can.)

Colloquially, Area 51.

Toshiko Mori is putting up a new structure on North Haven.







One great simplified vernacular mass with two massive windows in each gable end. Black shingles. Rough hewn timbers in the stark white interior. A showstopper, if you will.

Summer Sail.

Temporalist architecture, hear hear.

Back in October, I spent a week in Iceland.







Above and beyond being a breathtaking country, the place is a perfect case study in the effects of industrialization on architecture. Iceland was little more than a series of isolated fishing villages until the 1940s. No real roads connected them, it being easier to transport goods by boat than drag them over the rocky landscape, and the only form of commerce came in the shape of a fish, a sheep, or a rotting shark (which is, despite what the locals say, unequivocally not delicious.)




Until the turn of the 20th century, and in some cases well into the 1970s, much of the housing in the rural areas took the shape of the turf house, an ingenious use of a dearth of materials, and a structure which, while inside it, subjects its inhabitants to the most powerful, exquisite silence.


There is something truly wonderful about being in the earth itself, feeling the great heft of it below your feet, as if nothing more than the cool tamped floor protected you from the violence at the core of the planet.
I've always had a bit of a sound-to-touch synesthesia, this mixed blessing of an aural-haptic crossover, and this silence is an absolute dream. A dense, cottony womb. It is a medium. It just presses in on you from all sides while you stand in the darkness. A few feet away, and framed by a dusty little ground-level window, tawny grasses outside noiselessly catch the wind.





The countryside is dotted with a few turf houses that have stood, impassive to the brutal horizontal winter sleet and capricious freeze and thaw of the weird arctic weather systems, for hundreds of years. What strikes one as wonderful about these houses is the simple fact that they-like us- are very mortal structures.








Though built with care, (note the herringbone pattern of turf blocks in the gable ends), they are little more than driftwood and dirt, and once abandoned, simply return to the earth. The only thing that preserves them is use— a pattern I’ve noticed again and again in Nice Things. Here on the coast of Maine you’ll often see a wooden boat that’s been handed down through the generations. Sure, a cracked plank or rotten rib may have been replaced along the way, but the real thing that keeps these boats from just moldering is the simple process of use, the transaction of energy that comes with a new generation of summer-bleached kids dragging the poor old thing across the rocks and subjecting it to a little Atlantic refreshment.















Contrast that sort of sentiment with the ways in which the building industry changed in the country in less than fifty years. The Skuggahverfi condos in Reykjavik are as arrogant as the old farms are sensitive and ingenious. The latest towers, now ten years behind schedule because of the financial upsets in the country, are bullishly ignorant of their climatic context. Built, rather foolishly, in the "shadow district" of the city, they do indeed cast a shadow: across a parking lot, four median strips, six lanes of traffic, a bike and foot path, and a rocky outcropping before spilling out into the ocean beyond. Iceland's marvelous slanted light, a result of the high latitude, is no friend of the high rise.




"Those buildings", says one of Reykjavik's brightest architects during our lunch date, chuckling over his steaming bowl of sheep brains, "make no sense here."

This shadow almost never moves. Time lapsed from an aerial perspective, the thing just barely oscillates over the course of 24 hours like a second hand on a clock that keeps second-guessing itself. Over and over. For months.
There are only a few weeks in the summer when the midnight sun finally swings around the buildings. As a result, it is positively frigid back there, the ground in the shadow frozen solid, covered in frost and ice. Traffic slows as it passes through the shadow. Bicyclists dismount. Pedestrians adopt a funny bow-legged waddle.





We need a more sensitive architecture. Furthermore, we need a mortal one, an idea that is completely left out of the discussion in contemporary practice. The only sustainable architecture is one that subjects itself to time and to decay. Maybe even celebrates these things. In the case that we really desire to save a building, for, oh, another few hundred years, these sorts of close-to-the-earth practices require nothing more than a little human involvement to preserve them.







Vi∂imyri, a little turf church in the north of Iceland, was lucky enough to be spared from the march of time through conservation efforts by the local municipality. How difficult was the process? One can only imagine: think of the effort it would take to renovate one of our contemporary buildings after 200 years of use. But the process of salvaging the chapel couldn’t have been a picture of greater simplicity. To fix what ailed the little church, townsmen carefully peeled the crumbling turf strips from the 180-year-old driftwood frame, and laid fresh ones down in their place.






Good as new.