Making Cities is Easy!

A wonderful video about architecture and adolescence for all to enjoy.  This video was made last semester and dealt with overlay.  It gets a bit strange towards the end, but strange is such a great thing!  I don't know what this has to offer the elephant in the room (thesis), but . . .

Schoenberg's Patonal Matrix

Schoenberg begins with a tone row, which consists of twelve notes.  They are the twelve notes of a chromatic scale that omits unison or the octave.  This becomes the module of sorts to construct a composition.  These drawings are visual versions of his aural procedure, where a unit value of measurement is assigned to each note value.  Schoenberg's matrix allows for the atonal melody to played up or down the standard scale as well as backwards and inverted.  This grid shows how that looks visually.  The plan is to produce many of these (there are 144 in total!) and seek out the greatest 9x9 grid of intervallic tension.  This will become a module to be used in a future model.  It is sort of improvy, but mostly just strict theory.

Helmholtz Intervallic Model

Helmholtz' breakdown of the interval between all the notes in a scale is Pythagorean (because he got it right) and offers a great deal of proportional information.  If one believes that there is a parallel between the way our ear hears intervallic change and the way our eyes see it, having this tool at my disposal is very useful.  The benefit of proportion to an improvisational architecture is huge, because it can be riffed on (see Mannerism).

Bauhaus Redux

The interiors of the Bauhaus represent the ambitions of painters to redefine color in architecture.  Through the work of Kandinsky, Itten, Moholy-Nagy, and several others within the school, color became a methodical approach to spatial program.  While visiting the school, it made sense to photograph these buildings in an attempt to return them the second dimension.  These prints represent the flattening of 3D space to show the strictly visual effect color can have on the eye.    

Color Wheel of Life

From this wheel, all color flows!  Working through some of the examples that Johannes Itten discusses in his book, The Art of Color, I am beginning to understand the magnitude of which color can affect architectural surfaces.  The variations described, detailing how to create different contrasts, have a special significance to defining how people feel and behave in space.

Color Studies