Place.
The purpose of this project was to explore a location through photographs, sketches, maps, a small intervention, and ultimately an embodiment of the place and the intervention.
My project took place in Lagomarcino Hall on Iowa State University's Campus. The first day was all about getting to know the place. I took photographs of the whole courtyard, but ended up focusing on one part by the fountain. I was drawn to the brick work, plant life, and sculpture.
I did sketches of the area as well as some of the plant life I saw on my journey to that area from the College of Design. As you can see from my sketches, I focused on patterns that were created by the organic plants and the rigid bricks. The last two sketches are more detailed as they involve the process of my intervention.
These photos show the process of my intervention. This brick pattern really caught my attention, so I used it as the base of my intervention. The color of the blue yarn sticks out from the earthy tones of everything around it, whether thats the bricks, cement, or plant life. It provides stark contrast that exemplifies how man interacts with nature. Each element that I used was found around the site. I gathered pine cones, leaves, and pine needles to create layers that nest around each other. The different items are all slightly different colors to add different visual elements and dimensions to it. I also included the deconstruction process. I took out the yarn carefully in order to keep all the items in place. The last photo was natural deconstruction. I left all the elements in the courtyard to see what would happen to them. The next day I came back and the last photo is what resulted after a day of normal traffic in the area.
This map shows the Lagomarcino Courtyard to scale and includes my journey there from the College of Design as well as illustrates my intervention. The original delivery had layers of trace paper on top of each other with the plant life on one layer and the intervention on another all on top of the base map. Each step of the intervention as well as the materials are cataloged and illustrated in this map to be presented all in one place.
These final photos are of the embodiment I created that was inspired by my intervention and the environment. I made nests out of yarn to illustrate how each layer was nested within each other in my intervention. I put ripped pieces of paper that I painted with water colors within the smaller nests. All of the colors are based off the natural colors of the pine cones, needles, and leaves as well as a little bit of red in the paper to be reminiscent of the bricks.
