Dinner for 7: A Conversation With Five Obstructions

First interpretation:

I saw the lower bayou lafourche as a land of faith, not necessarily a faith practiced in stone buildings with proximity to alters. This place is woven with a faith in the decaying infrastructure. Faith that bridges, levees, locks, and structures will survive the constant world around it. The land is disappearing. People are not.

Horizons

I rendered these observations with watercolor painted from memory. At each memory I was at a different hight(which will push the the horizon line further for the observer). Each is also from a different point along highway 1, therefore trying to cover as much of lower lafourche as possible in my first visit.

Dinner for 7: A Conversation With Five Obstructions

Kristi Dykema Cheramie and Jeff Carney

"a little gem we are now going to ruin"

- Lars Von Treir

As outsiders can we ever really know a place? As designers do we see the world as it is or is our vision hopelessly clouded by our own experiences, desires, fears, and objectives? ...Is this a bad thing?

This research methods and representation independent study will ask you to document a place using all media, and methods at your disposal. Working as a team you will document the Lower Bayou Lafourche. You will define the first documentation: the content, the mode of inquiry, the method. We ask only that your observations tell a story of the place. Choose a character, and environmental condition, a social need, a feature in time, something lost, something feared... You might approach the project as landscape architecture students but you might also approach it as outsiders, as men, as boaters, drivers, silently, with indifference, or as your home. The critical direction of your documentation is completely up to you.

Following this initial investigation, we will meet for dinner once every two weeks. Your critics will observe, question, critique, and debate your work. You will then be issued a series of obstruction to which you will need to respond, react, and remake your observations. As important as the initial making, your must navigate the design challenge embedded in the documentation of the first act.

This study is based on the film "The Five Obstruction," directed by Lars Von Trier

-Work to follow soon...!

Spaces of Play

Spaces of Play

The practice of play is an exploration into physical, mental, and spiritual engagement with space. The space of play will become much more than setting a setting for this engagement to occur. The place of play should become a character itself. This space, friend or foe, once personified should evoke questions, present problems, and invite conversation. Though no ordinary conversation will occur. The conversation of play will be one of energy and dreams.

Play has an interesting language of verbs and adjectives. Words, such as run, jump, climb, deep, dark, and enclosed are a few, each igniting a sense of experience. This language drives the program within any space where one can be left to make choices and envision possibilities. Yet by simplifying the design of a space to a plan of archetypal forms[1] with considered elements of engagement, the user will become responsible for engaging with the place. This responsibility should not be seen as a burden or set back but as an opportunity. Engaging with aspects of a space is the beginning of building a foundation for one to enter into the conversation with a place. This response to the space encourages one to physically move through, challenges one to mentally solve how, and invites one to subtly imagine and see with their soul. The simplicity of archetypal spaces hosts endless scenarios for a variety of individual responses to each space. Each typology, whether it is the grove, the spring, the path, the cave, or the mountain presents unique spatial qualities.

Though, the core of this concept is ultimately a person in a space. This user must willingly enter into the conversation and open them to experience. Why should one be pushed to react and engage with a place, to imagine? What is the benefit of doing so? In a culture that is hyper stimulated, people have little or no connection to the substance that surround most everyday lives. Imaginative engagement and reactive play will be the seeds for growth within the individual. A space of play should stimulate exploration into physical, mental, and spiritual space engagement while nurturing the growth of the users character.

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[1] Archetypal spatial forms and how people engage with them has been the focus of my curiosity for a few years now. I understand the existence of a poetic relationship with space and the participant. I intend to further this understanding trough my studies and practices.