Texas A&M University. Department of Architecture Fall 2017.
Totemism. a Gallery for Louise Nevelson, Houston, TX.
Student: Daniel Enyon
The project, from the initial diagram,
started its development as an understanding of Volume, Poche, and form,
articulated as a canopy over a public space booleaned into the plinth. However,
through the translation of the digital, my project shifted to the understanding
of the figure. This figure as an object focuses on the idea not of the vertical
totem, but the horizontal collection of objects with a small degree of
stacking. This totemic articulation allows for the object to discuss a separation
of surface, object and volume, leading to the presentation of the argument of the tea set.
The
idea of the Tea set begins with the scenario where a collection of objects has
multiple ontologies. But, simultaneously, the tea set argues a unified object
through articulation of the surfaces. The tea set is, in its essence, the
middle ground between the ideas of the still life collection and the unified surface
object, and the complex nature of these ideas generates enormous ontological
tension.
As
my object argues figure, the separation that occurred in its surface from its
volumes led to the blending of specific moments of the surface. Because of the
specificity of these moments, my objects as the idea of the tea set, continuing
to delve into these contingencies through volume, pattern, surface, color, and
shadow,referencing the paintings of Wayne Thiebaud. -----Thiebaud's from my
perspective, speculates on the realities of what is the natural and it asks the
question of how surface and color relate to materiality, are these real cakes,
real plates? His also work evokes a sensation: an affect embedded behind the
initial understanding of the work. Through the questioning of the natural,
using the work of Thiebaud the issue of aesthetics comes into play, his work
also presents itself with that kind of a specific aesthetic, and proceeds to
challenge the aesthetic regime of the modern, I decided for my project to use
this idea to question the modern aesthetic regime through the same methods that
Thiebaud does.
In
terms of my project's aesthetic regime, it stems from a misreading of art
history, from Thiebaud, into conditions that are not about the history of art, pop
art, etc. But specifically misreading the labor of the painting, the color, the
shadow, the pattern, and the texture from Theibaud. The contention of
architecture according to these principles engages an aesthetic regime that could
possibly be outside of our present concept of reality: the reality which is
obsessed with the aesthetic regime of the modern.
The
new aesthetic regime is a political act against modernism, and operates as such
through the direct questioning of what a new aesthetic regime should be, and the
criteria for what is considered beautiful, natural, and real. My project
engages viewers to resist the status quo of the aesthetic regime, and through
the embedded nature of aesthetics into an architectural objects, this allows my
project to go through a process of disengagement an resistance avoiding modern
strategies like contextual blending to undermine it.
