I had brunch with Tropical Visions today. Jealous?
self reflection
Oaxacan melon juice ftw!
Nudies by the pooool!
Fixing ye old banjo-mandolin… 1922 S.S. Stewart
The creative director of the project, Clive Knights, and myself recognized the quality of the work generated by the students and the unique nature of this particular type of site analysis and decided to pursue publication of the body of work. Clive took on the role of editor and I became lead designer and producer of a 220 page, perfect bound paperback that we printed in a limeted run and are now in the process of seeking broader publishing interest.
This image is of several page layout template proposals on the right and of the first full mock-up that I sent to the editor on the left (see all those paper tabs marking errors?!)
These are photographs of the accordion style hand bound collection of graphics and text - the final product of all student work.
Been working on a book project. Here is the preface:
“The book… enters the world and carries out its work of transformation and negation. It, too, is the future of many other things, and not only books: by the projects which it can give rise to, by the undertakings it encourages, by the totality of the world of which it is a modified reflection, it is an infinite source of new realities, and because of these new realities existence will be something it was not before.” (Maurice Blanchot)
This publication is inspired by an accordion-style book, 102 feet long and collectively handmade by fifteen architectural students in January 2009. It represents an engagement with NE Glisan Street, Portland, Oregon, from the Willamette River in the west, to 102nd Avenue in the east. It emerged following multiple wanderings along this urban thoroughfare, each student focusing on a 6-7 block territory, getting to know the streetscape, the inhabitants, the changes over time, the life-world. The street embodies one hundred and two blocks of human intent in pursuit of a good life, of stories waiting to be told, re-told, invented or abandoned. Students were asked to discover some of these stories, learn how the fabric of the city is contributory, implicated, culpable, and then to translate these discoveries into graphics and text.
Clive Knights, June 2009
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The speedy photo sequence above illustrates a fleeting perception of all 102 blocks of Glisan as walked in a single afternoon. Along the walk I took some 500 photographs of anything and everything that was remotely interesting - that captured some kind of identity of the setting. After having walked six miles of relatively homogenistic terrain my perception of qualities unique to each individual block seemed to become fuzzy and coalesce into one gestalt whole. Similar to the way in which we might pause along a walk to take a closer look, try to understand, the pace of the photo sequence asks of itself to be paused in order to gain a more clear understanding of the place captured in any one of the photographs.
Finally
final
