Category: 2019, Semester 1

Ann Hamilton is an American Visual Artist well known for her large multimedia installations. What I love about her work is how its large scale makes it more elegant. Hamilton also with her installations creates a space and atmosphere with such simple yet effective designs. A prominent feature of her work that really interests me is how her installations are very interactive.

This project “the event of a thread” by Hamilton really highlights and emphasises interacting with the piece. What I love about this design is how the textile is altered and manipulated by those who encounter it. Large swings used by the occupants cause the large design to influence and move which changes the experience of those lying beneath it.

This project “habitus” by Hamilton emphasise form and movement and how these influence each other. This design is a series of circular curtains that rotate when initiated by the pulling of the long ropes hanging from the ceiling. What I love about this project is how the form is manipulated by the movement which is a result of the human interaction with the space. This piece really interests me in the idea of occupants being able to influence a space to their liking, giving that freedom.

This project “air for everyone” also investigates the manipulation of form through movement as a result of an uncontrollable factor, nature. What I find interesting about this design is how the sheer, delicate and elegant textile directly contrasts the old, hard, weathered building. Again, I love the manipulation of form through movement and also how this allows a visual representation of movement and air flow.

When further developing my own design I want to consider more how the occupants of my space can influence and interact with the space and design. I also want to look more into how I can design a space that takes a visual record of movement and uses this to manipulate the experience and atmosphere.

This week we began part three of this sleep/wake design project. We began with quick, rough prototypes of possible sleeping platforms for our design. I based these initial designs off the materials and concepts I had used in both Project 1 and Project 2 as I was familiar with them and they created the base of the atmosphere I wanted to create. These are my initial designs.

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This week we presented our Project 2 work. It was really good to present because I was able to explain my work and also get some helpful feedback. I liked how the crit session this time was more relaxed so I was able to enjoy both listening to other peoples presentations more and presenting myself.

What I got from the crit were some ideas on how I could develop my design moving towards Project 3. Some of this feedback included looking more into the materiality of my design and maybe developing my own textile. This is a really cool idea but I know it will challenge me as I haven’t done anything like it before but that is how I’m going to learn and broaden my skillset.

Another point raised in during my presentation was that because my design is quite simplistic so every little detail has an affect on the overall end result. I was also suggested to start looking more into light being an aspect in my design.

Overall, I think my presentation went very well and that I now have some pointers snd ideas for moving forward into Project 3.

Modelling the gallery took time. I have never done any sort of modelling before this year and this was my first time modelling to replicate a space. I id spend a lot of time on it make sure it looked perfect but I am happy with the way that it turned out. I feel that over time my modelling skills will improve and I will become faster at modelling spaces.

While designing the gallery space I thought a lot about the design I was going to put into the space. I originally thought that the whole gallery and Wellesley St entrance was my threshold moment but I struggled with creating a design that could be created in that whole space, that linked to my Project 1 by creating a sense of distortion and uncertainty and one that wouldn’t interrupt the use of the lobby as it is used by hundreds of AUT students a day. This is when I decided that in order to create an effective design that physically represented the threshold between moving from an awake, reality state into a sleeping and dreaming state and vice versa, I would position my threshold design between the lobby and the gallery space.

After some research into her work, I really drew inspiration from Petra Blaisse. Like in my Project 1, I used a thin frosted transparent film and this created the distortion and uncertainty we experience in the threshold between dreaming and being in reality. Her work inspired me to create a design that not only guided movement around a space but also evokes it through the people who move among it.

The film I decided to use created the effect I wanted. I like it how you can’t quite see through it but blurry shapes can made out. Also, the level of distortion of an object depends on its proximity to the sheet. This creates a visual representation of what it is like for me when I’m in between sleeping and awake and my dream morphs into the reality around me.

When deciding the path that these suspended sheets would follow, I really considered the flow of movement in the lobby and gallery space. I wantd to guide people through the front of the gallery, past the windows and then move them deeper into the space as the lighting becomes less prominent. The flowing film allowed me to guide movement within the space and helps to avoid the rigidness that may restrict visitors. This design is heavily based on movement.

I wanted the design to create an experience before even entering the gallery. For my entrance, I removed three sections of the wall between the lobby and the gallery. In order to create some kind of barrier between the awake stage (lobby) and the sleeping stage (gallery), I created a curtain that covered two of the openings and moved away to allow an entrance in the opening closest to Wellesley St. This created the uncertain, flowing and forever changing barrier and threshold between sleeping and awake. It also allows the movement of the lobby to influence the gallery space. There is no defining line between sleep and awake.

To create more flow and freedom in the space, I made the decision to have a break in the curtain. This opened the gallery up more and helped in not creating confined, awkward spaces. I had originally planned to have two separate tracks for the two separate curtains (first track seen below) but decided that it would be more effective o have them on the one track. By having them on the same track, the curtains could be moved around the space creating different configuration, an example of how the threshold between dreaming and reality is never the same and always ever changing. Having the one track also replicated the consistent flow of movement through and into the space.

I also had to decide on a way to suspend the curtain from the track in a way that it allowed it to move freely. After a few different ideas, I decided on my last design (right) because it was the most tidy and elegant, fitting with the ambiance I have been trying to convey. (Left: First attempt, Center: Second attempt, Right: Final design)

Something I found difficult about modelling was the modelling of my threshold design. One of the points that made it difficult was that it was small and fiddly. Another point was that my design is supposed to be suspended from the ceiling but I wanted to be able to view it from above as the shape of the track is so important to my design. Having to suspend my design without a ceiling was difficult but I am really happy with the end result.

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After finalizing my design and modelling it, I found it a lot easier to draw it in my plan and section. For my final document, I needed to change my section as the view into the lobby didn’t express my design the best way possible. On my final I drew my section looking into the gallery space from the East facing wall which described my design a lot more effectively.

For my threshold interpretation of the space I focused mainly on movement and a little bit of light as this was a defining aspect in my design.

Petra Blaisse is a Dutch designer well known for her architectural textile designs. Blaisse often creates large scale curtain like structures with an emphasis on the textile design and effect. I really like how she uses a range of materials to create so many different outcomes and how simple but effectively beautiful the designs are. What amazes me is that eventhough they are so enormous in size, they still have a elegant way about them.

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Blaisse, P. (2008-2011). Chazen Museum of Art, Wisconsin. Madison, Wisconsin, USA

https://www.insideoutside.nl/Chazen-Museum-of-Art-Wisconsin

Looking at my own design project, I think that Blaisse’s work would be a helpful inspiration. I have already been brainstorming some ideas on my threshold design for the St Paul St Gallery Space 3 and I know that I would like to use some of the affects I created in my Project 1 such as the distortion and uncertainty created by the frosted, transparent film I used in my model. I think that if I adapted Blaisse’s concept of having a moving and flowing textile within the space, I could achieve a design that would evolve from aspects of my Project 1, include my research and analysis so far from this project and it would also have the elegance and beauty portrayed in Blaisse’s work that I very much admire.

After exploring the hresholds in the gallery space in my 1:50 plan, I needed to create a threshold design for entering and exit the space. At the beginning of this design process, I considered my threshold to be moving from Wellsley St, up the front entrance of the Te Ara Poutama builing into the lobby, and then into and through the gallery space. Before designing my threshold, I drew my section as to what would best show what I would design so I created a section of the building through the lobby looking at the gallery.

After drawing the section, I explored the threshold points in the lobby and outside underneath the portico on Wellesley St.

I found designing my threshold moment for entering and exiting the gallery space quite difficult. I had a few ideas I explored in sketch but I struggled to visualize these ideas. I became stuck and I couldn’t proceed in my design through sketch. This is when I decided to model the gallery space to a 1:50 scale and explore ideas so I could visualize and see it.

Left: A frosted glass box inserted in the wall between the gallery and lobby. This would be a creative entrance and it would also distort what was on the opposite side of the wall. It also wouldn’t impose on the lobby space.

Center: A split curtain on track suspended from the ceiling. This would be a good idea for an installation within the space but not really sure how it could work as an entrance/exit into/out of the gallery.

Right: A series of transparent film suspended from the ceiling layered throughout the gallery with laser cut designs. This would create the unclarity an distortion I want but much like the center design, it would act more as an installation rather than an entrance/exit.

Our Sea of Islands is a essay by Epeli Hau’ofa in the academic journal “The Contemporary Pacific” (Hau’ofa, E. (1994, Spring). Our Sea of Islands. The Contemporary Pacific, 6(1), 148-161). Written in 1994, the essay talks about the different views of the pacific in relation to size. Hau’ofa highlights the two views of the pacific being either “islands in a far sea” or “a sea of islands” (p.152).

The European view of “islands in a far sea” describes pacific islands and nations as small. The reason for this is that they compare the size of the pacific islands against there own large continental land. The Pacific view of “a sea of islands” talks more about the pacific being unimaginably large. This view comes from the origins of their culture and lifestyle including the legends of the islands. The people of the pacific view the land and sea as one entity and is therefore much greater than anything else.

Reading this essay really opened my eyes to a new way of thinking and made me start to realise that my way of designing and going about anything in life is based off a Western view and that something that may seem so illogical in my mind could be very much the opposite to someone with a different culture and belief system. I never realized how much of what I do is influenced by the culture I have been raised within.

The essay also made me realise that the same space can be viewed in many different ways, it just depends on perception. After reading this, when I design spaces, I want to be able to look at it in different ways and see the different perceptions within the space. I also want to understand the origin behind these views.

After collecting measurements of the gallery, I produced a draft of a 1:50 plan for the space on butter paper. This exercise I found time consuming as I needed to be careful and accurate and because the Te Ara Poutama is such an old building, it had many smaller details to consider. Below is a photo of my draft plan.

From here I started to express the thresholds in the space on my plan. The thresholds I wanted to explore were movement and light and temperature which I explored through colour. My main focus was on movement and how it correlates with the space. I expressed the heavy and consistent traffic that occurs outside the front of the gallery on Wellesley St. I showed the flow of people through the lobby outside of the gallery and then the flow throughout the gallery. Linking to my Project 1, I wanted to show how people entering the space move from a state of awake in the busy streets of Auckland City to sleep in the darker end of the gallery. As a person travels into the space they experience going through the threshold of awake and sleep as they move from a very public and busy street to a quieter and dim lobby space, into the brighter, less public gallery space and then down the gallery towards a darker area.

This week we visited the site and went into the gallery space. We took a series of measurements of the space both inside and out to allow us to create a plan of the gallery. I didn’t enjoy this part of the project as much as I would have liked and I think it was because I found it somewhat grueling and pedantic. I can often be a perfectionist and can focus on the smallest of details which can sometimes be a gift but it can also make my creativity shut down. Because this was at the very beginning of the project, my brain switched into logical thinking and I struggled to switch back to thinking creatively like I had done in Project 1. I was so proud and impressed of myself for jumping into the project with my eyes shut (literally) and seeing the amazing end result I was capable of. This measuring exercise really made me realise how differently I can think and also how I need to learn a way I can make myself switch between logical and creative thinking easily.

Although I may not have enjoyed this particular part of the project, it was good to get some experience in a bit of group work with my Spatial Design peers. A group of us worked together in collecting different measurements from different areas of the site. This allowed me to get a better insight as to the best people to work alongside with.

We not only visited the site to collect measurements, but we also visited to explore the existing thresholds present in the space. I was more focused on collecting all of the measurements I needed than documenting threshold moments in the gallery space but I did take a few photos.

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Visiting the site was crucial in understand and contextualizing where we were going to be designing and what we were going to be designing within. Although I may not have enjoyed this part of the project, I can understand the importance of these skills in any design process.

In studio this week, we brought together our research and chose what best depicted what we wanted to portray as a group in our site map. We focused on the natural aspects of the area surrounding our site, especially the waterflow of the Waihorotiu stream below Auckland City and the waterflow after rainfall on the surface. We used our combined research, maps and diagrams to portray our idea and interpretation of the site. This was our group site map. 

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Creating and presenting the group site maps really helped clarify what I needed to do for my own individual site map and how I was going to go about it. A prominent feature I had noticed in our exploration around the site was the movement and flow of traffic and people and how they moved throughout and worked alongside with the surrounding environment. In a way, the surrounding environment was the riverbanks that guided the moving life throughout the city.  

Another interesting fact I learnt was that there were streams that used to runn above ground through Queen St and surrounding areas and that when the city was being developed, they were preserved and built on top of. This amazed me and me realise that there are many layers of movement and flow in our city, both above and below ground.  

Another interesting fact that I looked more into in my research was the old military tunnels beneath Albert Park. After doing further research into the tunnels I learnt that they were closed after World War II and haven’t been used since. Auckland Council has also talked about for the last year about reopening the tunnels as a public walkway to allow the public to move about our city’s extruded landscape easier and more efficiently. This along with the underground stream, waterflow on the streets of Auckland City and the constant, already existing movement and flow of traffic and people above ground, would help in creating a series of layers of movement to the city, an example of how a city never sleeps. From this research and information, I was able to create a site map that highlighted and depicted the layers of flow and movement in the surrounding area to the St Paul St Gallery Space 3.  

In order to represent the layers of the area, I used both white paper and butter paper. On the base piece of whitepaper, I recreated the underground stream to show the flow beneath the surface and the origin and beginning of the city. I also showed the section view of the Albert Park tunnels to highlight the other possibility for flow and movement that we don’t necessarily consider or see when exploring the above surface world of our city. This page acted as the underlay and base for my site mapping. 

On the top layer of butter paper I drew some sketches of different views of Albert Park and scenes from when we moved towards the site and positioned them out to create the effect of movement from one space to the next. The fountain, a prominent feature in Albert Park, was the beginning point for me. It created the repetition of the water and flowing aspect of my site map. The bridge depicted in this document not only evoked movement but also represented the threshold between the space of Albert Park and the space of St Paul St Gallery 3. Further though the journey of moving from Albert Park to the site depicted in my site mapping, I focus more on the building the site is situated in and its details.

Together, these documents show the layers of movement and flow in and around my site and also highlights the fact that the space we occupy isn’t solely made up of what we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell.