The HMS Victory.

Drawn by John McKay in 1987, and published in the book Anatomy of the Ship: The 100-Gun Ship Victory. Even in poor quality reproductions, the drafting skill is amazing.  Click the pictures for better detail.

via the photostream of subnutty.

Just updated my print shop and added a few sketches for anyone who is interested.

Check it out here: RYPAT SHOP

Münich-based Marcus Buck made these amazing portraits of party walls. In each photo, we’re presented with a pretty common urban condition: the residual traces of a demolished building on it’s surviving context. 

Aside from the purely aesthetic genius of these unconscious works of art, the colors and forms on these walls are also a visceral reminder of the real contact that was once made to connect the structures. Not only have the interiors been protected from the elements, but they have gained the character and specific alterations of individual rooms and structural elements. 

When a data on a digital hard drive is deleted, it is not completely gone… There is a remnant of data left a a result of the erasure, holding bits of information about the contents of those files. In these walls I see that same evidence of life and function. Here it’s just so startling because so rarely do we actually see a physical section of a building in one-to-one scale.

And while totally possible in rural areas, its really a unique condition to the city. Whenever I come across these, I get a really bittersweet feeling… like an exciting signal of new growth along with a quietly exposed vigil of the building’s life and death. The secrets of section that are finally made public.

If the drama of posthumous architectural voyeurism doesn’t do it for you, maybe you can think of the visible remains of a building as a drawing. How often can can the architect visibly recognize his 2-dimensional work on the site? As the process of construction is inherently solid and perspectival, it can’t be read as easily a pure translation from the paper. With the combination of dense urban fabric and the indiscriminate act of demolition, you suddenly have an unveiling of the marks made years ago by contractors. So in fact the alteration of the party wall itself and years of interior customization literally create a physical poché, realizing an actual cut along the surface of the wall.

Thanks to Marcus Buck for the photos and Pruned for the link.

Related: Gordon Matta Clark

NYC-based Rosemarie Fiore has a great process. She uses live fireworks to create these intensely colorful and layered drawings. The bright gunpowder residue is sometimes guided with a long staff and sometimes contained and concentrated inside various overturned buckets.

I just found the technique really refreshing — that her relationship with such a volatile media is part precise control and part unknown. She isn’t controlling much about the paintings other than the boundaries of the colors themselves, and even those lines are often compromised by the force of the explosions.

There’s also something very primal or elemental about the way the colors are bleedng and sitting on top of each other… a burnt black spot near the center of a circle giving a subtle clue as to the colors incendiary birth. In a series of controlled palimpsests, the drawings offer hardly any reference other than the method in which they were made. In some cases the traces of making can be read even further, as you start to notice the small white dots within colored areas, marking the location of a sparkling pipe on its end.

All this evidence of the artist is lost on first glance (at least it was for me) since the pieces are so brightly confrontational. But I thought it was nice to start to understand how certain forms were made, and slowly realize different details about what went into each composition. To me that gives a very intimate record of the artists intentions, and puts the viewer right there into the moment again, as if standing alongside Rosemarie as she drew.

Anyway it’s a new type of media I for one haven’t seen before… and it definitely gives new meaning to the thought of drawing as “marks on paper”, since this canvas is literally being bombarded with color.

found at booooooom.

My friend Jason from Cal Poly first introduced me to the Situationists. His architectural investigations are deeply cinematic and bring a complex dimensional montage to the constructed environment. Like his building design, his collages and prints are compositions injected with suspended, fragmented events, all superimposed as surreal escapes from convention.

So as I came across a blog post by Lebbeus Woods on the work of Situationist founder Constant Nieuwenhuys, I knew exactly why I remembered the architectural language.

Woods article outlines the roots of the Situationist International, tracing the motives of Constant and his peers. With ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th century European artistic avant-garde, Constant (along with Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, and others) advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, pursuing a superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of primitive human desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations.

Constant Nieuwenhuys abandoned painting in 1953 to concentrate on the question of “construction”. It was to be a lifelong project based on a vision of a future society freed by a labyrinth of architectural and social spontaneity. New Babylon, as the project would be called, is “a situationist city intended as a polemical provocation.”

Lebbeus Woods brilliantly elaborates on the story of the Situationists and Constant’s work in his article, but I especially like this passage:

New Babylon was inspired by and contributed to the work of the Situationists, a group of intellectuals, theorists and writers, as well as artists who were anything but Modernists in the classic capitalist mold. …

Constant joined the Situationists early on and became their architect, much the same as Antonio Sant’Elia had done with the Futurists, half a century before. The spaces of New Babylon were intended to be spaces of disorientation and of reorientation, from rational, functionalist society to one that is liberated and self-inventing. It was meant to replace capitalist exploitation of human labor and emotion with anarchist celebration of them. Its architecture was to provide a complex armature on which could be woven endlessly new, unpredictably personal urban experiences, determined by ever-changing individual desires. In the end, however, the architecture of New Babylon seemed to overwhelm such playful, radical spontaneity by its sheer weight and monumental scale.

Heavy and sprawling as the vision may be, the work is beautiful. For me it definitely achieves the aspirations of layered and interconnected spectacle, and the creation of radical, mobile, and changeable architectural intervention in its surreal landscape.

What does New Babylon have to offer to contemporary architecture and landscape theory? A lot, I think…

Among the ideas generated by Constant, Debord, and others in the SI, the ones that resonate most with me are the concepts of psychogeography and the act of dérive (“drift”).

Debord defines psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”. In other words, a playful and inventive strategy for exploring cities, as a direct consequence of the arrangement of urban stimulus. It takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape. (a recent psychogeographic meet in New York City saw the practice of generative psychogeography, where participants followed algorithmic walking directions — “first right, second left, first left, repeat.” the results were neither goal-oriented nor random, structured but always surprising.)

By definition, psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge and studies. Debord struggled to articulate this theoretical paradox, and produced “Theory of the Dérive” in 1958, a document which basically acts as an instruction manual for the psychogeographic procedure, executed through the act of dérive.

“Drifting” through the built landscape, as a series of scenographic events, I think young architects today have a lot to learn from Constant and Debord, especially since we are so accustomed to the type of fluid sensory pace offered by the internet. Spontaneous interaction with the city is often the most rewarding experience I have on the street, between the vestiges of older architectural icons and institutions of “style”.

And though the internet has the tendency to degrade real sensory experience, it’s that same instantaneous interaction that can be applied to the city, through strategic — or random — arrangement of architectural events. Instead of the disconnected drift you see with the computer and it’s blogs, the urban condition offers a drift more associated with the lifestyle of the flâneur. It’s a more immersive stroll of sentience and progressive cinematic experience.

Maybe it’s a bit rediculous to imagine the earth blanketed with these deep urban webs, suspended on pillars above freeways and seas… but the ideas generated by Constant are really valuable I think, in terms of reimagining the typologies of an interconnected city. It’s not that far-fetched to consider different scales of architectural engagement… using larger, more malleable architectural frameworks to provide enriched social games at an individual level.

These images of New Bablyon are from Lebbeus Woods.

At what point do you decide to live in a place?
What does it take?

It was by chance, yes, truly by chance, in the summer of 1963, that we came into a part of Haute-Provence in the south of France which was, and still is, rather deserted, and which seems cut off from the world […]

silence eveywhere … and the mystery of the most fundamental and unembellished architectural forms, certainly, but more still the stirring of a shadow on words engraved in stone, or the distant sound of cattle-bells.

We wanted to live here, and we went everywhere in search of a house, and then a few days later, at the end of a road that wasn’t on the map, that didn’t even seem to fit in with what we knew at the time about the general structure of the places around there, there was a tremendous storm, rain that suddenly became a deluge and into which we had nevertheless to throw ourselves: and in the midst of the black mass of water, long walls suddenly appeared, with low, vaulted doors, that disappeared on all sides beneath the heavy downpour. We went in. It was almost night inside, and we visited a labyrinth of rooms without understanding what they were […]

We wandered there amid the clamoring of birds we had disturbed and the sounds of the wind against the tiles that were coming apart […]

There was more of the real here than anywhere else, more immanence in the light on the angle of the walls or in the water from new storms, but there were also a thousand forms of impossibility and so there was also more dreaming. And the year came when we had to shut the place up, give it back to the silence of before. Only the birds live there now; they come in and out of one or two broken windows with loud cries. Except for the shadows that memory delegates through dreams to the places it loves.

— French poet Yves Bonnefoy, on Valsaintes (a house he thought of as a borderland).

Found this, and the carpentry plates (circa 1798) at Woolgathersome.

C-prints by Christine Nguyen.

What I like about her work (other than the fact that it’s gorgeous and natural and elemental) is that it’s right on the threshold of drawing, painting, photography, and science.

She says:

..the photo-based work is a combination of drawing and a photographic processes. “Negatives” are drawn on layers of Mylar, which are projected onto light-sensitive paper.  The paper is developed in a color processor, creating a camera-less, photographic image. What you are seeing is a negative of the drawing. I use paints, inks, pens, pencils, and also grow salt crystals on the mylar to create my drawings…

Geez. Love that process…
Just taking your work and subjecting it to the optical rigor of projected light.

Makes me wonder what other artistic works have this kind of potential when put under the darkroom enlarger.

(By the way, I think they should have commissioned her to do the opening titles for Avatar…)

I saw this really awesome sketch while browsing the zines over at Motto Distribution.
Please click through the image for full detail - it’s so good!

Reminds me of traveling in Europe, and the exploration of those cities through the pen.
I need to get back into sketching regularly…

very cool pieces by Matt Pagett, an artist in the uk.

in his own words: “Chaos and order, death and decoration with the skulls.”

i really enjoy the fragmented order that slowly emerges as you look at the compositions. at first they just seem randomly sheared off like they were found that way, but a closer inspection reveals the intentional cropping and displaced, gridded arrangement that creates the structure.

via booooooom.