March 29 2007

Shared Stories and the Body (also other stuff)

Marc,

I think I forgot to bring my brain to class with me today.

This is a diagram of the wood/steel nightclub table that I talked to you about earlier. Details aside, this is more about my intentions of the wood and steel coming together, sort of the wood table and the steel table interlocking as we talked about.



I’ve been thinking about the question of what it means to dwell in my project. The apartment house? The subway? The nightclub? This might seem kind of obvious, but more and more, I think the answer is that one dwells in all three and it is the moment of experience that defines the program as the narrative unravels. In response, I have been thinking about how the “shortcut” and the party wall act to define the moments. Looking back at my detail in the courtyard from last semester, I think that the party wall may need to have a certain amount of flexibility so that, for example, sometimes a lounge room is actually a living room that belongs to the apartment and other times it belongs to the nightclub.

Returning to the discussion of the table, maybe the “extra performance” it needs to have can be found somewhere in that ambiguity between what is apartment and what is nightclub. If I think about a coffee table in an apartment, they usually have some sort of drawers or shelves for books, magazines, remote controls, whatever, and a coffee table in a lounge is usually much simpler because its intended purpose is to serve as a place to put drinks. If one did put a coffee table with extra shelves/drawers in the nightclub it becomes that place to hide things or pass notes as we discussed. If I go the route of the wood table/steel table interlocking, this extra function should probably find its place in a gap between the two.

As far as a thought on detailing the table, you’re right about the awkwardness of the wood being flush with the steel. When I bought materials, I made the decision to only buy 1/8” thick strips of steel because I wanted to express the thinness of the cross section in contrast to the thickness of wood. That is why the welded the angles instead of buying them. It didn’t come up in the conversation but I didn’t weld the entire length of the seam so that the thinness of the material would read in corner seam. I think the wood/steel leg can still work but maybe the materials need to be held at a distance from each other so they read more as separate components.

Also the reason why I intuitively wanted the piece to touch the floor with wood instead of metal has to do with the potential of this piece to touch a wood floor. I don’t think metal should come down onto a wood floor. This also has a lot to do with my esoteric preference as a maker to use a wood-bodied hand plane instead of a metal one. For me, the experience of using the wood-bodied block plane is infinitely more satisfying. Mine is made of rosewood and its high density makes it have a certain resonance and in use it almost sings like a musical instrument.