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Hand & CAD - The Wireframe Years - 13

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Tokyo International Forum Finals (F) This is my last post on the final phase presentation for the Tokyo International Forum. The following images are views that were dropped from the final presentation. They all deal with the Glass Hall or the Plaza, so there was no real lose in understanding from dropping them. The Glass Hall roof was perhaps the most distinctive feature of the entire design. It was essentially a huge canoe shaped structure, that was rigid enough to “hang” the glass “curtain”. Part of an earthquake-safe structure, it also was a beautiful sculptural form. Several ideas were explored as the design developed, as shown above. Above, photos of the resulting form at night. We tried out views from the bridges over the plaza.       This idea was dropped fairly quickly when it was realized that we would be largely looking at the tops of trees. A photo of the plaza from the north end. I found few photos from the bridges over the plaza, and, as we expected, they s...
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Composition part 2 - The Golden Section & other crutches

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I browse through books and web sites about art a lot.    No… no social life to speak of. But seriously, I love to pick out and collect images that are memorable.   It is a gut reaction thing, but afterwards I like to try to analyze the source of my “like”.   For instance, the image above, Fra Burmeister og Wain’s Foundry by Peder Severin Kreyer, immediately caught my eye.   Before I knew what it was illustrating or had registered the color, lighting or perspective, I needed to keep it.   –Why? You can’t talk about composition without talking about proportion.   And you can’t talk about proportion without talking about the “golden section”.   And the golden section fits quite nicely into Kreyer’s painting. The golden section (or golden mean, golden ratio, divine proportion or simply the Greek letter phi) can be easily constructed, and by constructing it you define it.   Essentially you are creating a rectangle (or other mathematical form) wit...
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Composition Part 17 - Value Studies

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In the last post on composition I talked about the use of simple black and white images to study composition. In this short post I’ll note some examples of values studies; explorations utilizing a range of grays. In a way an illustration using a range of grays is simply a colorless illustration. It is certainly both a step on the way to a full color image, and a potentially final black and white image. I am not worried about this aspect, but would rather point out the obvious; a simple value study is a good test of whether a composition is effective or not. Good composition demands that the artist assemble the work so that any viewer can derive pleasure from the work as a whole, devoid of details. So a test of composition is the elimination of details. The various modern reactions to the bland academic painting of the 19 th century (Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, etc.) all tend to lose the detail and emphasize composition. Even if you dislike the excesses of modern art you ha...
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