Season Finale

I officially finished my semester on Friday night (I submitted my last assignment at 11 pm) so this weekend has been dedicated to some serious spring cleaning. As I am deciding what to throw away and what to keep, I took a moment to photograph the model from my final studio project, the Vitra Design Museum. Models take up so much space and don't weather very well, so I think this will end up down the garbage shoot in the next few days and with that in mind I wanted to document it thoroughly:

The view from the sidewalk into the museum.

View of first floor and mezzanine from outside.

Another peek from outside featuring more of the staircase.

A bird's eye view into the Sheila Hicks Exhibit.

Bird's Eye View of the entire model.

View of someone exiting the museum.

Best Laid Plans

Here are the plans for my Vitra Design Museum. These were printed out 8' high so they're a little hard to see at this scale, make sure to click and blow them up to see a little more detail. Probably unless you've had some architecture education they aren't going to mean anything to you, but for those of you who get something out of them, enjoy:

Process Work

A layout of some of the process sketches I did while designing:

Final Presentation!

Today I presented my final studio project of the year, the Vitra Design Museum lobby! In the previous critique my marker and pencil renderings didn't go over very well, so this time I attempted watercolors:

Ticket booth

Lobby seating

Lobby and Temporary Exhibition from Mezzanine

Cafe

Cocktail lounge at night with view into museum

These were still dubbed too heavy-handed, but I think they're a definite improvement.

Keeping With the Trends

Here are two sketches of my updated design.

This is my lobby seating area, now the furniture layout is more flexible/variable:

This is my cocktail lounge, I've updated it to include lighting from FLOS by Philippe Starck:

Sketchup Saved My Life

I've been having a serious love affair with Google Sketchup. I'm not that comfortable drawing perspectives, so this software that lets you quickly make a model on the computer has hugely enhanced my perspectives. They help me keep everything to scale, and have really sped up my process!

This is the view from inside the bookstore/gift shop area. The steps to the after hours cocktail lounge on the mezzanine level double as a bookcase in the downstairs.

This is the view from the sidewalk of the museum at night. The light from the mezzanine cocktail lounge spills out onto 22nd street.

This is the staircase that takes you to the mezzanine cocktail/lounge as well as further up to the 2nd floor where the permanent collection is housed

The ticket office, just inside the gift shop area as you enter the museum.

This is the view across the mezzanine cocktail lounge/cafe.

Mapping

I've spent a lot of this year learning about maps, and was enchanted to find this adorable map of Fort Greene. Check out Pratt!

Stairs...

This is a sketch I did today of the view if you are standing inside my hypothetical gift shop/bookstore and looking into the museum lobby. The shelving for the books is literally built into the stair.

Vitra Design Museum Concept

As some of you may know, Pratt offers both a two-year and a three-year masters in interior design. The two-year masters is for people who spend their undergrad studying a related discipline, either architecture or interior design. For people like me, who have their undergraduate degrees in something more or less unrelated (mine is in art history and psychology), Pratt offers a 3 year program. Considering that all the schooling I've had for the preceding 18 years has focused on being able to express myself verbally- its quite a change to be tackling things visually. But, in some ways my verbal background can be a plus, and my current professor has encouraged us to write out what we'd like our design museum lobby to feel like, which I think was a really helpful step. So here it is:


Concept for Vitra Design Museum

Most people making the pilgrimage from the 8th avenue subway west into Chelsea are pursuing one thing: art. While it is also a district that holds some restaurants, nightclubs, and a copious number of taxis, it is first and foremost a destination for art connoisseurs. Usually they are tackling Chelsea in twos and threes, if they are New Yorkers they are frantically trying to multi-task: consuming culture while catching up with friends, if they are out of towners, its an even more social excursion incorporating art watching with people watching.

The Vitra Design museum offers a respite from the monotony of Chelsea attractions. After pounding the pavement up and down the blocks between 10th and 11th aves, (and bemoaning your lack of first born to sell in exchange for that breathtaking Jean Nouvel chair at Gagosian) you enter the Vitra Design Museum for a break. The gift shop which projects into the street is the first sign that this is a break from your usual Chelsea, these are objects you can afford!!! Moreover, these are objects that are projected out into your space instead of tucked protectively deep in the hallowed concrete reliquaries of the galleries.

Passing through the gift shop, the lobby and cafe that you experience next offer up a much needed spot to sit, relax, and get into that deep conversation about Merda D’Artista thats been bubbling up since you left the Manzoni show. As you’re lounging you notice that the staircase is flanked by some intriguing pieces of design, which now that you’re rested and re-caffeinated you’re ready to explore.

Having explored the collection, and exitted back through the gift shop - picking up a great new book on Sheila Hicks inspired by the temporary exhibition, you pass back out onto 22nd street.

Later that week when you return to Chelsea to hit up some Thursday night gallery openings with friends, you leave the Pace Gallery and are excited to see that there are still lights on in the Vitra Design Museum. Is it a private party? No, its their bar- you and your friends are no longer relegated to headache inducing paper cups full of cheap white wine! You can stop into the Vitra Design Museum cafe and sip on some bespoke cocktails while enjoying gossiping and people-watching through the windows.

Neverending Story

For our latest studio project, we are designing the lobby of the hypothetical Vitra Design Museum. (Slight sidebar, go check out their website and ooh and aah over the insanely expensive awesome furniture.) Anyhow, as part of the project we are also designing a hypothetical temporary exhibition to be displayed in our lobby, and I am designing mine around the work of Sheila Hicks. She is a totally phenomenal textile artist who is in her 80's today and still working, in fact she has a retrospective that just opened at the Philadelphia ICA. As part of my thought process for the exhibition I story-boarded out the visitor's experience:


I've never done a storyboard before, but you can see that its really helpful in terms of figuring out what pieces of art will go where and what the feeling of the space will be. Considering my collage background it was something that I was pretty good at and didn't take too long.

Midterm Madness

I have finally finished midterms and begun spring break!! In the interest of having been up since 4:30 I am going to make this short but sweet. Here are some renderings of the interior of my Integrated Healing Center.

View of the lobby from the elevator:


View from inside the Herbalist's office looking towards the Organic Cafe:


View of the interior of the Organic Cafe:


The jurors thought that they looked a little cartoony, but they're the best drawings I've ever done.

Inside the Doctor's Office

So we've been working on designing an Integrative Medical Center, and I've been so swamped that I haven't had a single second to upload pictures of what I've been doing. So now, although I'm even more crunched for time, I'm taking a moment to give you a glimpse inside via two perspective renderings I've done.

This is a view of the lobby as you step off the elevators:

This is the view inside the Herbalist's office looking into the Cafe area:

Totally Mod

I'm nearing the end of the record label conference room and reception area project. We're getting down to the nitty gritty details, including a modular system of furniture/storage/partition walls. Here are some sketches I did today:

Conference room table:

Waiting area:

Check in:

Kitchenette:

Back on the Grind

Winter vacation is over, and the spring semester has begun. To get back into the swing of things at Pratt, we are doing a short 3-week project in Studio: designing a waiting area and conference room for a record company. We were each assigned a piece of music which will serve to inspire our designs, and I got "Pierrot Lunaire" by Schoenburg (hear it)

The piece is a haunting, dream-like melody which for me evokes the ideas of Freud and Jung. To capture this jarring, atonal atmosphere I used mirrors, plexi, and strips of red paper.


The piece can be divided into three components, a wind/string section, a piano, and a woman singing/reading 21 poems by Albert Giraud. Each of the materials represented one of the three: the mirrors stood for the winds and strings section, the shards of plexi represented the staccato inserts of the piano, and the undulating strips of red paper represented the woman's voice.


Schoenburg was obsessed with numerology, so much so that the entire title of the piece points out that it is "3 times 7 poems", and I have carried over this interest by utilizing each of the 3 materials 7 times.


The piece is celebrated today as Schoenburg's "atonal masterpiece" and the last great work of his expressionist period. I think that what I responded to most was the tenets of expressionism which emphasize emotionality over realism of form. I endeavored to capture the jarring, anxiety producing emotion of "Pierrot Lunaire".

Renderings From My Drawing Final

There isn't any witty way to say that, so without further ado:

Perspective Drawings

Here's a peek inside my hotel lobby with some of the drawings I'm working on for my presentation on Tuesday: