20 Objects Describing a Proposal for LACMA
20 Objects Describing a Proposal for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was produced as a collaboration with Colin Griffin for ARCH 201, a studio that interrogated the museum as a city-in-a-building microcosm. The project brief essentially duplicated that currently under design by Peter Zumthor and included 125,000 square feet of galleries, storage, cafe and restaurant spaces, a library, and auditorium, and more.
Our resulting proposal extensively used non-traditional media in a lengthy and convoluted process that involved the creation of animations, drawings and dozens of physical models at a variety of scales. The final presentation consisted of fourteen plans and sections presented as drawing / model hybrids, four interior renderings created as physical collages, and operable site model and sectional model dioramas contained in boxes.
Although flatbed scanners, digital photo-manipulation, and inkjet printers were used, a 3D computer model of the project never existed, and each stage of refinement of design was done through the creation of new physical models. Our proposal was architectural both on the building scale, distributing the program across a large complex of three masses and six outbuildings, and also on the representational scale: by building the drawings into low relief models, they began to take on the character of buildings themselves – reading at a distance as flat (as building façades do) and becoming, as the viewer’s perspective changes, self-occluding, complex, and deep.
(Studio Project, M. Arch, U.C. Berkeley - FALL 2016, James Michael Tate, instructor; Colin Griffin, collaborator)