monticello + fallingwater

each spring, first year students from our program travel to monticello + fallingwater on a single trip with often quite memorable experiences in dining:

[1] way too much fast food in a 48-hour time frame, balanced by the amish-style country breakfast at the castleman inn (grantsville, md);
[2] entertainments with the on-bus movies (avatar, 27 dresses, and some documentary that i couldn't follow with parrot feathers being withdrawn from live animals);
[3] overnight accommodations in a building that i am quite sure doesn't meet building code;
[4] a 9-hour bus ride back through pouring rain, driving winds, and poor bus brakes...


...but those moments don't eclipse the opportunity to see up close thomas jefferson's great amusement on the little mountain and frank lloyd wright's studies on geometries in the forest...

...a terrific time by all.



i've been experimenting with quick sketch grids for visiting historic sites as a means to capture many details, because there's not ample time for overall sketches. i post the one from monticello and three from fallingwater...both accomplished during the respective tours.

roanoke ladder display

at the art museum in roanoke, i saw a ladder happening made from stepping devices gathered from throughout the city. terrific alternative ladders and more traditional step and extension ladders, fastened together with zip ties, made for an interesting installation.

coordinating fashion + design

blakeni, one of the terrific students in my second year studio this semester, sports fashion that echoes color selection in her JEGNA 2.0 unit. who says coral can't be both the color of clothing and of a kit of parts within?

teamwork : anna will climb anywhere

anna (in blue, right), justin + faith gathered as a group in studio this week to marry their JENGA 2.0 schemes into a two story building...the fun continues as students start stacking their work.

who says teamwork can't be fun? cassandra brunson, left, phillip snider, middle, and nikki ware demonstrate the importance of "setting your goals" (the message on phillips' shirt).

the industrial complex

today in hss105, the students and i pushed out of college hill into the industrial area to the south and east of this neighborhood. our steps took us to the wafco mill complex at mcgee and cedar streets, across cedar to fulton and under the overpass onto lee street. the loop closed by crossing back through the tate street overpass to campus. students noticed the lack of care and concern in maintenance along fulton, speculating about both the presence of homeless people here as well as the "behind the scenes" feeling of the place.

on the corner of lee and fulton streets, new apartments have taken over the former industrial sites and, before that single family residences along the street. there is also a sharp contract with the feeling of wafco mills complex, which seems more a part of the fabric of the neighborhood.

lee street feels very different than the neighborhood proper. along this thoroughfare, there seem to be four categories of building:
[1] the residential dwellings dating from the latter nineteenth century into the twentieth
[2] the industrial buildings that largely replaced them and shifted the vision of the landscape
[3] other store front buildings that provided a retail presence along the thoroughfare
[4] larger-scale apartment complexes constructed in the last several years (lee street/fulton = the largest)

america guided by wisdom

http://www.bestpriceart.com/painting/?pid=5391

in hss125 today, i presented "visualizing empire," a presentation that the wonderful kim martin and i did for a conference three years ago. using genre painting, we frmed architecture as a trope within the works to help understand notions of eastern-ness and western-ness in the early republic....with polarities between civilized and wilderness, order and chaos, etc. students seemed most to resonate with thomas cole's "course of empire" series....moving from the "savage state" to the "pastoral or arcadian state" to the "consummation of empire" to "destruction" and finally to "desolation." with each of these works in a series, cole depicts a cyclical view of the world, periodizing history and tending to compartmentalize each state into a discrete phase through which each civilization passes (reference here the later work of frederick jackson turner and the advance of the american frontier). the point of the presentation, though, is the blended landscapes with elements of the two visions of the world...not either/or but both/and.

the mendenhall muddle

the idea of infilling, central to today's (wet + rainy) class, informed our discussion in hss105. as we de-constructed the landscape along mendenhall street, students had the opportunity to use sanborn fire insurance maps to see changes along the thoroughfare in the early twentieth century. here are a couple of images from the handout.
as suggested within the handout, students thought about architectural style, their previous travels along tate street, and some additional ideas about the changing face of the neighborhood over the decades as buildings were built, some demolished, and new ones infilled.

edges

among the most significant edges on campus, the rail line on the south side of the "mini-city" clearly distinguishes us from the properties that face lee street. we were lucky enough that a train came rumbling by to reinforce the sense that sometimes noise is an indicator of where edges and stacks lie, according to clay's terminology. i have to say some of my most favorite moments on campus lie at its edges.

tea party!

in "the tea party," painter henry sargent sets the theatrical scene through light and dramatic color, outfitting the work with greek revival furnishings and fine interior appointments, all a testimony to the burgeoning material culture of the early nineteenth century. in sargent's work, he investigates themes about who is included in and excluded from the social discourse of the party, where he mixes male and female figures in fine dress standing as genteel and fashionable images in the new republic. i posit that we understand the american landscape and its populace as symbolized in the boston interior he depicts. check out the image at the boston museum of fine arts: http://www.mfa.org/collections/search_art.asp?recview=true&id=31744

themes about center + periphery continued the day in hss125, where we investigated a tea cup + a punch bowl, all in the context of "the tea party," a genre painting by henry sargent (boston, 1823). discussion centered around the ideas of space, style, and form in sargent's work, resonating from student forays into jules prown's three-step material culture analysis. themes that this painting gave rise to: worldliness, centrality/periphery, comfort, social discourse...belonging, gentility, refinement, and identity. as hss125 is an investigation of american empires, we elucidated these themes as a way of better illuminating gordon wood's "radicalism" of the post-revolutionary decades.

center + periphery

september 1st brought the realization that school REALLY is underway! in hss105, we walked from the east edge of campus (tate street) to the north side of campus (market street), taking in the architecture along the way and speculating about meanings hidden and not-so-hidden in buildings. following grady clay's method for looking at the city, the students in class searched for fixes, district, fronts, strips, and beats. on thursday, they'll attempt to synthesize all of the efforts at analysis for the uncg campus. you can follow their efforts through the semester by the series of links on the right hand side of the blog. my initial foray is contained here, a page from my sketchbook.

one of the most obvious things about our walk was to understand the center of campus (as it happens...where walker avenue WOULD have crossed college avenue)....a spot between the library and the newer wing of the stone building, marked by the two porticoes of these buildings facing each other across the campus lawn. the specific spot is marked by a circle on college avenue. lots of alignment there....

on the periphery, students saw the "edges" of campus (what clay calls fronts)...and their advancement into the residential college hill neighborhood to the east. on thursday, we continue our exploration of edges....