Site Geometry

The project directly before the chair was Assignment 6: Geometry in the field. For this project we worked in groups of two or three(I worked with Brian who I am working on the chair with and Dan, another person in my studio group). We were required to pick a spot on campus and create a design using only the materials available on the site.

Our first step was to pick the site. For this we chose the area around the Carr Memorial Chapel, more commonly referred to as the "God Box" which was designed by Mies van der rohe.

We soon discovered that the actual floor plan of the God Box is a perfect golden rectangle. Seeing as the project required us to respond to the site we responded with making a giant golden ratio/mean.

This is a simple plan rendering done by Dan to show what we were going to do. We used this photo on iPads during our presentation to help people see the whole site. 

The God Box is the upper rectangle with the actual site below it

The first step in all of this was taking precise measurements along with calculating a lot of math. Once those could be done we began placing construction lines, just as if we were drafting.

We achieved this by wrapping string around sticks along our predetermined path. 

To make sure we didn't step on these sticks we flagged them all with blue masking tape.

As it can be seen the main material at our disposal were leaves. It was then that we decided that since we are doing one, bold shape why not use one material.

Our next step was placing the leaves inside our lines.

From there, once we were done we completely covered the entire mean in trace paper. 

I am glad that we did because it did rain quite hard that night. The paper did get very damaged but the leaves themselves were perfect. 

The morning of the presentation we carefully removed the paper and construction lines and were left with this. 

Once completed the final product was this. It was hard to capture the whole mean in one photo.