Imaginative Feats… defeated and rediscovered

Here are four diagrams:

The first, a drawing of the gallery before the walls were demolished and six 10′ wide “floating” sections installed; the second, a drawing on a “napkin” from May of ’09; the third, a diagram created in September for the catalog, the fourth, an approximate rendering of the actual installation from a few days ago.

And so did we learn an elementary lesson—again—that every first-year architect must know: moving through a space is not the same as enjoying a two-dimensional drawing of that space.  So many changes: the movable walls of Cantor Fitzgerald presented possibilities that we could only “feel” once we started moving them around.  Guarded allowed us to set back one of these walls, and it became a screen; right proportions, 4:3, and a nice spill over the edges.  This formal stuff—interruptions, gaps in the walls, screens—these “edit” Guarded, breaking up the clockwise flow of the images.
Note that in our napkin drawing, the movable walls, all but the middle on are pushed to the sides.  They disappear in the published version, but come back in the actual diagram, because crucial to the space.  Note too that consistent across these diagrams is the spill of Guarded into the small foyer.  We saw that during our first walk-through.  But too note that we got the direction of rotation wrong in the second diagram—something we should know well enough by now.

And Flat Land needed more space, more throw for the projectors and more room around the screen so that its flatness could be felt, navigated, discovered.  And could use even more.
All the torque of the earlier drawing and diagram doesn’t work so well in the space itself; but offsetting  the back wall just a bit achieves the disorientation even more effectively.  The lesson?  Scale drawings.  But more importantly, scale models.  But working it out on-the-spot, though not ideal, can be an adventure.  This time we got it right.  On the spot.  Mostly.

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