Tuesday, September 29, 2009

New drawing series- Hypermesh 02


Celebrating and exploring the diverse nature of topographical surveys, these hand drawings use Page Structure Theory to examine ideas of saturation, spatial fragmentation, and new spaceforms based on formal collisions.

Limitations of the media- micron pen instability… aged transfer letters… the fussiness of the page media… were used as informants to the process of the making, the anatomy of the drawing, as it were.

“As the name implies, the agenda of Form:uLA Dimension Laboratory is to explore dimensionality, to see what happens when competing or conflicting modes of representation—graphic vs. sculptural, perspectival vs. axonometric, digital vs. gestural, Cartesian vs. temporal—try to co-exist. In these collisions of contradictory forms and functions, mechudzu emerges as a mutant but highly robust architectural entity.

The motif of Form:uLA’s design language is always the machine—the man-made in its most generic form. At first glance their drawings look like overly fussy mechanical diagrams, the kind you might see in Victorian-era equipment catalogs. But look more closely, and the drawings’ hybrid parts refuse to compose. In Hybridrawing no. 030801, for example, graphic figures (Japanese kanji, planes of binary code, directional arrows) collide and intersect with modeled forms (pipes, tubing, harnesses, levers, pulleys) in a space that oscillates uncomfortably between two and three dimensions. The assembled whole is defiantly abstract: the more you try to read the drawing, the more agitated the unresolved elements become. The overall effect is disorientation, and that is the point.

The drawing is clearly not, as architectural protocol would dictate, a set of building instructions or a depiction of a particular space. It does not obey the architectural mandate to construct a more perfectly-ordered world. Instead, it is an invitation to abandon order. The drawing itself is Form:uLA’s laboratory, a fluid, boundaryless, unpredictable environment in which every idea the two architects have—deliberate or accidental, serious or ridiculous, revolutionary or merely subversive—is let loose to metastasize.”

Ruth Keffer

Loudpaper

Volume 4, issue 3

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