2018, Summer, 4 weeks, UCLA
This project is aimed at reexamining one of the spaces in the Schindler House, here, a hallway. The process began with creating a plan drawing and 3D model of the space based on images gathered online. A trip to the site then provided the means for extensive photodocumentation of the hallway space. These photos were then arranged into a photocollage - a further fragmentation of an already fragmented piece of the house. The photocollage is a medium of distortion, allowing the viewer to rethink the space represented. To further bring the photocollage to life, it is translated as a “2.5D” model, a sort of gateway between the medium of drawing and the true physical model. The project culminates in a physical model that is divided in half by a “mirror plane”, separating the original, unaltered space and the distorted, reimagined version.
Programs: Rhino, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop
Materials: bristol, museum board, glue
Project Narrative
I lead you through Pauline Schindler’s studio to a doorway that begins the passage to Rudolph Schindler’s studio. Light streams through the glazed wall panel that you are facing, and filters through the translucent panels of the walls behind you and to your right. To your left are walls that feel more solid, walls that have more than light behind them. The ceiling is low, almost low enough for you to touch if you reached up, and the passageway is narrow enough to be called a hallway, about two and a half feet wide, but short enough that secretly you feel as though hallway is too generous a term and decide that you’ll refer to it as more of a corner of the house. (I understand your decision, I used to not think of it as a hallway either). The space feels small and the transition through it is over quickly; you feel as though the house does not want you to linger here and instead, squeezes you through to wider spaces. Now you see the space the way I have reimagined it. Wider than before, but not yet wide enough for two people to stand abreast. Despite this, the space feels narrow, stretched on its remaining two axes, imagination making wood and glass malleable. The floor is no longer strictly horizontal, and, currently, you are unsure as to where it leads. You decide that this space can truthfully be called a hallway (and I agree). As you begin to walk through it, you are surprised to realize that you feel differently in this new space; there is no sense of compression to push you along, but rather an openness that lets you stop and stand while still retaining its primary function of being a link between two other spaces. I explain that the difference is the height and the depth. You don’t see any reason to disagree.
