COMMERCIAL ARTIFACT
fall 2019
Kent CAED | 4A Design Studio
"dirty realism" studio | exercise 01
prof. Jean Jaminet
savanna, georgia
program: apartment building
style: small town America commercial frontage (1860 - 1930)
studio _ With a focus on what Jesus Vasallo calls "Dirty Realism" this studio investigates architecture's relation to the digital image, snd it's lack of restraint in producing disposable cultural imagery. The studio seeks out the "poor" in terms of quality of the image in our built environment, not poor in terms of size or provincial nature, but poor as due to a lack of higher formal or aesthetic intentions. Our task was to seek out the mundane, the banal, the unfinished, the not-quite-right, and reinterpret them, separating them from their context and placing them into a new sphere of associations. Similar to artist Anastasia Savinova's collages of building facade combinations the quality of these facades is an example of "poor image quality" in their disobedience to architectural syntax, yet they still simulate coherence by erasing seams in some instances and creating new ones through new unexpected connections between disparate elements. Utilizing these ideas the studio aimed to investigate historical styles, contemporary architectural photography, and digital image-making. We began the studio with a 4-week project to design an apartment on historic Broughton Street, one of Savanna's major commercial thoroughfares, the facade was then developed through a series of two-dimensional image-making techniques, which were then digitally transferred to 3d.
project _ "commercial artifact" seeks to investigate an architectural typology largely ignored, yet highly prevalent in our built environment. The mid-19th-20th century storefront as typified by every small town in America exhibits an inherent set of rules for their formulation; a syntax that follows from town to town and state to state, there is a misappropriation from place to place that results in slight variances of image between them that ultimately removes them from their original context. Like curated artifacts in a museum, here the mundane facade is plundered for its architectural elements and recontextualized into a residual digital image. An “untrue” yet alluringly realistic image that by nature begins to instill doubt into the viewer as they see elements in complete disobedience to their typical architectural role. By exploiting the subtle associations found between these facades we can generate new typologies through the re-articulation of the differences creating the new image seen at the right. The collage, curated from individual pieces from the photographic series seen here reuses common elements such as cornices, window hoods, iron tie covers, an assortment of window frames, doors, and other elements overlaid with faded signage alluding to the roles of the building in the realm of the commercial. From the photo collage a 3D model was created, using these normal floor plans for the apartment units, ground floor, and roof garden the photo collage | 3d model was augmented creating a conceptual floor plan & sections, again drawing from the individual architectural artifacts to influence formal design within.
