Surface Diagraming/Construction Document

What I am looking to accomplish here is to create a surface that is both a representation of spatial and temporal sequence. Since we as a class are researching “surface” as a basic architectural element, I would hope that my diagrams and rather simple construction documents are a means of fabricating a physical morphology based on my diagrams and studies of the cinematic sequence.

The marked off tic-marks indicate the focal point within the frame. This in return helps me to create the underlying structure of both the form work that is a representation of the filmed sequence of frames. Hopefully I captured motion through time and space represented in the abstracted two-dimensional re-represented three-dimensional film sequence.

- tic-marks represented in the form work model

- tic-marks along with the added spline
- the form that would become the bases for the physical construct

Constructing the Frame

Well first lets start off if the question posed in the previous entry, Why? Now the reasons I decided to choose this particular cinematic sequence was because I found it to be rich in the way the director/cinematographer (in this case its Martin Scorsese) carefully framed each and every aspect of the sequence. He very carefully constructed, represented, and conveyed the elusion of a three-dimensional space, through spatial and temporal re-representation. Basically in most cases (in the film industry) the director/cinematographer is tasked with re-interpreting the space in the film as a three-dimensional space translated into a two-dimensional representation.

Now to pose another question, how does one dissect, analysis, and extract the essential parts of the sequence? It is at this point I took the film sequence broke it up into seventy- seven still frames and started to diagram them, focusing what the eye was drawing to first. These diagrams turned into approximately three analytical drawings that help me to create/construct in what I saw was a “surface” (the second part of the project). Low and behold I was somewhat off target when it came to thinking my first attempt was a surface. When in fact all it really was (in my eyes) was the formwork that would hopefully lead to the creation of a surface.

Animation Sequence

So why this scene?

The future of space...?

Elizabeths Grosz essay on “The Future of Space: Towards an Architecture of Invention” seems to touch on very similar concepts, theories, and philosophies that have be discussed and debated in most progressive architectural schools of thought. The relationship to architecture, and the way she frames the conversation although brings into debate the fundamental traditional metaphysical connection between identity and difference, space and time and the overarching attachment in the ways we might perceive architecture. There is an excerpt that really resonates (I think) with the topics (I believe) in which we as a class are trying to explore this semester as speculative studies in architecture. “ To remember (to place oneself in the past), to relocate (to cast oneself elsewhere), is to occupy the whole time and the whole space, even admitting that duration and location are always specific, always defined by movement and action. It is to refuse to conceptualize space as a medium, as a content, a passive receptacle whose form is given by its content, and instead to see it as a moment of becoming, of opening up and proliferation, a passage from one space to another, a space of change, which changes with time” p. 119 Architecture from the Outside. And it is at this point I start to conceptualize (maybe?) what this next project(2) is going to explore/study. The study of time and space in which the student is asked to perceive, understand, think, and create a reflection in which describes a way to look and consider spatially relationships.

Project 1 Image

This image is trying to provoke curiosity and give an introduction to the project. Compositionally the image is made up of parts that were created from the virtual model, along with frames that were taken from the original motion.

Project 1 Video Compolation

Basically this is a compilation of my work and explorations to date. I think possibly this edit could be better explained with added process and analysis, to understand the relationship between the physical motion of the tennis stroke, and the virtual motion of the computer generated model. I think what lacked in the work and my review presentation was the tangential relation tying the two together.



- Feel free to crit and comment, I would like to know what others think about how this first study and how successful, or not these explorations where.