PROJECT AN OBJECT OUT OF MOON

In Vers Une Architecture, LeCorbusier states. “The plan proceeds from within to without;  the exterior is the result of an interior.  The elements of architecture are light and shade, walls and space.”

The plan has always been considered in architecture the super ordinate document.  A building cannot be good unless the plan is correct, well proportioned, and balanced.

In this exercise, we will take a plan image and use that to build a transparent drawing.  Before this, we have been making drawings of existing structures.  Now, this is the first step in which we can use transparent drawing to make imaginary structures.

This is the same process that we used in Exercise 1, in which we drew a simple square on a piece of paper, and then we projected our lines vertically from that square in order to form our three dimensional transparent rectangle.

I have become fascinated by Oriental written characters.  To get a feel for these, please feel free to type any combination of the following words;,  Oriental Characters, or Chinese Characters into Google Image.  An enormous amount of examples will be shown.

I have selected this example because it is simple and yet has the basic characteristics of a beautiful Oriental hand written character.

If you like, you can draw this element on your piece of paper just as it looks.  Or, if you have a more advanced graphic understanding, you can draw the image with either a rotation or a perspectival distortion.  The point is, it does not matter that you draw the character absolutely accurately on your paper.  The point is that you have selected something that you are interested in and you are going to use that to make a drawing.

After you get this image onto your piece of paper, it might look like the image below on the left.  Notice that I have rotated the image 45 degrees rather than drawing it just as it looks.

Then, the rest of the exercise is simple.  You draw vertical lines up from all of the corners and edges of the Moon character, just as I have started to do on the above image on the right.  I have elected to stop the lines at the same point;  I have elected to make the top of the three dimensional form the same as the bottom.

So at this point I essentially have a rectangle which contains our three dimensional image.  It is drawn transparently as you can see thru all of the planes that you have formed.

Now it is a matter of providing a tone to some of the planes that you have made on your drawing.  there are of course an infinite number of ways to do this.  I elected to provide a sepia tone to the thee interior vertical planes.  I then selected a dull blue to use for the curved form.  And then a red tone.  So most of the planes have a tone.

How you do this and which planes have tones is entirely up to you.  Providing color on only a few of the planes is fine.

As a last step, then you might want to fill in the character with a color or tone, either or singly at the top and the bottom.

And that’s really it.  Now, what have you really done?  The first significant thing you have done is that you have created a form, an enclosure, an object from something entirely different that you started with.  In this manner you have ended up with something that you hopefully will think is visually interesting.  And yet is not something that you would have generated without this method.  And the transparency allows much greater interpretation regarding the form itself, it’s function, and regarding what further modifications might be made.  With the transparency, you have developed a holistic object which you can understand in totality.

For example, from this drawing you might do another drawing from a more perspectival view.  Or you might elect to do a Çhoisey projection.  Or you might take this form and enclosure that you generated and make a cut.  Any and all of these options we will discuss in the future.