light folding

Great words to me. Light. Folding. 

Here are some words that come quickly to me with them.. 

Light      Energy/giver. Enlighten. Warmth. Delight. Lightness. Dark. Abyss. Ma. Pause. Breathe. (Light) touch. Weight. Drawn (to the light). Reveal - as light does (see fold).. 

Folding     Fluid. Juncture. Space. Time. Process. Care. Edge. Inversion. Dimension. Space. Will. Precision. (Un)folding - reveal = window sill.. 

Let me wash a bunch of inspiration for you. Remember the aim is to have fun (make the world a better place) with design. 

So. 

Here's lovely exploration of light by Peter Zumthor called the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel 

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This is a space of 'death' - as in it is literally burnt out.. and light is so powerful.. Interestingly the process of 'death', of burning, preserves the surface and all life below. And the darkness that the burn creates upon the surface reveals the light pentrations even more dramatically. 

Here's some more musings that might interest you folding and revealing light. 

I am a bit fascinated with edges of spaces. Like windows. These in Japanese terms are 'Ma' spaces, or the space between,  the 'in breathe' and the 'out breathe' . The thresholds. The are the space one can sit at a desk and dream from. Or vice versa, so from outside in.. Etymologically the window is 'the eye of the soul'...  fascinating stuff if it interests you, but we all know what it's like to sit in a window  nook and look out.. Generally I'd say I find them great spaces to pause and think in. You can also often be quite public in your presence in them - it's ok to sit or stand at a window or a door, and at the same time I'd venture your mind is allowed to be quite private. Go figure. 

If you want to geek out on it all by look at Perret and Le Corbusier as big turning points in Western Architectural History, but this may well bore many of you.. 

But here is anice bit of spatial mind blowing by a person called Carlo Scarpa. So if you think the parts of a space with most movement are like the doorways and windows typically. Then the 'stillest' parts are the corners' right? 

The what happens when you put a window in a corner. More what happens when the window pushes out from a corner to further outside? Or, conversely 'pulls/or sinks into a room'? Have a look at these: he goes much further with how the frames to these windows set up edges of dissolves.. In fact if you want to look at his work it is this endless 'folding' of elements between and over edges.. here he does it using light.. This may all seem a bit academic but when you visit them it is skill with these nuances that makes one fell things like 'the sky and light are entering the room' or ' the room is pushing out towards the sky'. Because literally this is what these windows are doing.. 

Here's a bit of folding I have had fun with.. its for a friend of mine . and this is where we imagined we would sit upon a long white cushion (on the banquette) and sip martinis & chatting endlessly which we do.. The cushion is now there but not in the photo below- imagine it. The material I chose to fold was concrete, which intrigued me as a process, and as concrete is both wonderfully plastic and also rather materially hard and cold I chose to soften by inlaying flocked wallpaper into the formwork, which left it's negative upon it's surface, and then to soften it all further I 'sewed' some light [fittings] through it.. one day we will finish building it and get it properly photographed, Meanwhile enjoy the snippets here of light and folding in a bit of friendly making.. 

You'll see me playing a lot with very precise folding and also with the lights. They're both such intriguing dimensions to explore. I've also popped a precast panel installation (if you want to know it is a sandwich of polyisocynaurate between two fat layers of concrete - the house you saw two blogs back, which basically makes it like a giant esky in a whole lot of themal mass so kinda armageddon proof) really to let you know when you design on CAD, which if you make in the built environment this decade you will, it is a really unequivocal process. There's no givebacks. And that's heart stopping as well as devastatingly beautiful as a process. So feel this potential in a good way whilst you embark on your CAD journey.. 

A wall. Who says you don't draw every brick?

Making a wall. It's a Caravaggio rip off. He's was an awesome contributer to humanity - very similar to Shakespeare to us... It's a billboard actually. And a wall in the sense of keeping things out.. We had a fabulous friend Shane Norton (google 'Elvis and Rose') who knows bricks like no other. And we also had fun with making structural steel windows here too... This was actually a bit of a feat because these elements held themselves up, and bricks and kept the water out (part of what a window must do) and were acoustic barriers (because we were next to a rail shunting yard and heavy traffic) and heat constant (it was south facing...).. We chose bricks that played with the light in more a subtle way (the outside was shades of dark).. the bricks were glazed (from Euroa Clay) a popular brick a while back and good for being graffiti proof. We sort of did our own graffiti I suppose..  Here is a sort of graphic commentary of the making of this wall for you. 

A history find.. Here's my late father stepping out into designing the first CAD programs..

making a stair..