Gallery Glamour

We began in the morning separating the Glass Pavilion into sections and Uhauling it to the gallery, but when night came, the atmosphere changed. The gallery filled with the work of our fellow design students and its admirers. The Pavilion filled the central space reflecting colored lights throughout the gallery.

Exhibition

Our Glass Pavilion is going to be part of a collaborative exhibition with five other architecture schools Cal Poly Pomona, Otis, UCLA, and Woodbury. The show is called 2D3D-4: Quick and Dirty, and it is curated by Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter and Molly Hunker. We are excited to exhibit our work in a space with other aspiring designer’s work. Today we began the deconstruction process at USC cutting our pavilion into sections and loading them into a Uhaul. Several of us began the cleaning process, and tomorrow we will finish reassembling the pieces.

Endeavor

So what is the lasting significance of the Glass Pavilion? Or even what is the significance of any architectural endeavor after it is complete? Or is the process developed to get to an end what is really important? In the case of more permanent structures, they may be valued for their programmatic versatility. Others like the Parthenon, though it may currently have little programmatic use, is still valued for its beauty. Many wonder at its superior construction. How could such a structure have been built without the aid of computer aids? So maybe the process is what’s most important. People look to the Parthenon to discover what techniques were used to achieve the beautiful marble end.  So when we look at the Glass Pavilion, at first we may see only an ephemeral object designed and built by fourteen architect students. It may possess a degree of beauty, but what will it do to fight world hunger? Can it house the homeless? Probably not, but the invisible structure that holds the pavilion together the processes that we learned were necessary for constructing a full-scale structure that is what is lasting. And maybe someday we will use the ideas gained from the Glass Pavilion to build something lasting a new sort of Crystal Palace maybe even one that will help house the homeless.

After Effects

We may have finished constructing our glass pavilion, but the stories it is creating are not finished being written. We have thus far been featured in superarchitects, uscedu, USC architecture’s home page, and the Architect’s Newspaper. It has been quite exciting to see our project grow from a folded piece of paper to an article in a newspaper.

http://arch.usc.edu/

http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/archives/56993

The Night Life

To explore the different experiential qualities created by our glass pavilion, we visited it at night experimenting with the placement and brightness provided by different light fixtures.

Chevron Connections

Another installation which accompanied the Glass Pavillion was the Chevron Connections installation. Under the direction of Aaron Neubert Corey Norris, Nicolette Landucci, Graham Benjamin, Janice Chen, Daniel Valentin, Kif Mogorosi, Ewan Feng, Rachal Bass, Stephanie Truong, Keith Melcore, Iliana Lopez, and Athur Amirkagan composed an installation composed of aggregated units. Two parallelograms are joined together to form a module. This module is then combined with other like modules to create a series of strips that form the installation. Each module is unique. The fold between the parallelograms varies as well as the transparency and color. The modules are transparent in predetermined areas, and because of the varying angles of the fold, they can be completely transparent or opaque, depending on the viewpoint. The nature of the units allows the module to fold in or lay flat, thus allowing the play of densities to further distort the idea of transparency. The gradient of color highlights the more dense areas in the installation. These chevron shapes serve to connect the ground plane to the sky framing a ring of blue.

Levitating Cubes

Under the direction of Eric Nulman, Michelle East, Caroline Kim, Devina Parbhoo, Vicente Shum, David Takahashi, Jake Cavallo, Reni Somoye, Cindy Jin, Leo Chuang, Avram Winston, Andrew Herrera, Daqian Cao, Jihyun Choi, and Wing Wong created an installation composed of a series of cubes varying in scale and materiality. As you approach the short side of the installation, the planes parallel to you appear to float because all the planes facing you are transparent. However when you approach the long side of the installation, you see the opaque sides of the cubes and the varying materiality of each cube is revealed. Although the installation appears to be a simple group of scaled cubes, these cubes actually generate complex reflections due to the reflectivity of the materials used. Sometimes the reflections are reflected so that an object and its reflection can be seen at the same time. Photo credit second photo: Vicente Shum