Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Project Two-Design Intentions

A few concepts from Eileen Gray's Tempe a Pailla I explored were the contrasting characters of the light and heavy space, and the process of building on an existing architectural element. 

The site is from the painting Nighthawks; Murley Square, intersection of Seventh Avenue South, Greenwich Avenue, West 11th Street. The transparent cafe entrapping troubled and sorrowful characters I translated as the modernist glass tower, which shares a similar clinical, pseudo-utopian rationalist atmosphere.

The two characters are translated into two spaces. 

Representing the couple, a narrow corridor choreographing the meeting of soul mates. Surrounded by smoke as they are in painting, and also in the blindness of love. An additive transparent space just as the date is out in public and out of place in the sorrowful cafe at night.

The other, for the depressed man thinking about his mother, will be a tumor like growth, in the shape of the womb. Like a personal bubble, the observers from inside the building can see him but not approach him. By day it is lit by a single ray of sunlight, and by night by the fluorescent lights from the interior, so that even tho he escapes the darkness at night, it is the cold and empty artificial light depicted in Edward Hopper's paintings.

Neither space is to have an exit, nor interconnected even tho they occupy the same site. Just as the people in Nighthawks are lost in their own thoughts.

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