ANASTASIA LAURENZI DP BOOK 2009.
106/UPSTAIRS? by Anastasia Laurenzi
RESPONSE::PROPOSITION
As a response to the BROWN BAG LUNCH LECTURE SERIES: by ANDRE SCHMIDT on TVCC, Anastasia Laurenzi has some thoughts on our technical courses in 106 and its relation to the “upstairs” studio works.
I thought that the lecture today was pretty amazing on many levels.
First, someone that can talk to others about what the topic is and to have such a succinct presentation that explains thoroughly throughout the process.
Second, a project that defines the connection we are supposed to understand in our education - that of design and construction.
I thought it so perfect when andre looked up and said see “these are your blue foam boxes that stack on top of each other, this is what they mean”.
I would like to say that this lunch lecture should pave the way for the new premise of technical course teaching at this school.
—-to present a real project (how wonderful even that the lecturer knows it intimately by working on it) with photos, like this that bridges the (huge) gap between studio upstairs and technical downstairs.
Using the techniques of understanding scale, then design, and then construction… this is where the technical course then steps in and zooms into the connections.
The welds, the steel, the concrete, the cladding of skin, the heaviness of glass, what a cantilever imposes/exposes… the equations then make sense because the physical realm steps in to show what these “logical” moment diagrams mean.
I am speaking from the standpoint of someone that does not quickly understand mathematics and equations and needs the physical example to make sense of it all.
I guarantee that the students would then be more interested in the technical learning, and would then take it back upstairs to have more intelligent designs.
The paper and chipboard would then start to be a medium for understanding thickness and not just implying it.
The presentation would give an example to us as students on how to thoroughly present our thoughts for understanding in those that do not know the project intimately.
These are my two cents of thought, but seeing that i have been here for three years and have found some things to be inconsistent in the learning process, i would highly recommend a [re]thinking of how to teach and to look at the method of power point presentation that we are all trained to present as a new method of understanding in the classroom and as a teaching method not only to put bold colored letters up on the wall to write down on paper, but to show how the “world” uses these blue foam boxes and numbers and algorithms to create something that stands up, withstands earthquakes, encloses a space, creates inhabitation, and connects the rendering of an idea to the realization of the space designed.
Anastasia Laurenzi: April 14th, 2009.
LISTENING CRITIQUES 2009 with David Gersten
A space for individuals and their works to engage in a collective dialogue.
Graduates students from six departments bring their studio works together into a space of reciprocity that will expose what their disciplines share, and their differences, while amplifying their individual pursuits and questions.
Amartya Sen has said that the aspiration of collective judgments should be individual agency.
Each discipline of art and design affords us unique means of comprehending the world and acting in it. They offer distict modes of navigating; of articulating light, substance, space and thought; they provide structures of perception, representation, and comprehension. All of the disciplines are implicated in each other’s hopes; they have a shared capacity to ask questions and mediate an exchange between our lives and our works. These exchanges may speak loud or in whispers…heard in their own beat and measure, the works themselves, empathetically call us close offering a deeply human sonnet.
Monday April 6th, 10AM in Fletcher 407
Saturday April 11th, 11AM in CIT 103
The Architecture Department was represented with the degree projects of Damir Vukovlajak and Anastasia Laurenzi.
Listening Critique arranged by the RISD Circus and Graduate Studies.
ANASTASIA LAURENZI, DP BLOG (four images from a series of case studies of “transition” from Feb 17, 2009):
“In contemplating threshold as a point of entering or beginning, the act of the transitory space is the interest in this degree project. The understanding is that intention leads one through a threshold-a particular reason to pass through. In many cases there is a point when the same threshold is crossed again (perhaps in the leaving) but the intention is different. Using the word intention, an understanding of coming from and going to is used, the word perspective in one of its definitions. To study through perspective the direction one is going and then to look back at where one came from is the beginning of this project.
To understand the idea of the in-between and how to inhabit that place as an architectural space. What is the difference in living between two walls or inside of the wall. To use this idea as a physical understanding as well as an investigation in the aspect of time with the present being the mediating “space” of past and future”
See the complete set of case studies, which cover the work of Sejima, Rossi and Mateus (and an appreciable set of (hand) drawings!).
