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introduction |
Clemson is a land grant and state assisted University established in
1889 and set in the northwest corner of South Carolina in the United
States. The School of Architecture at Clemson University is part of
the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities. Other units in the
college are Planning and Landscape Architecture, Art, Performing Arts,
Construction Science, Philosophy and Religion, Languages, English, Speech
and Communications Studies, and History. This array of disciplines within
the program provides this college with opportunities to test new ideas
and collaborative ventures. The fully accredited program consists of
a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture with a Minor requirement, a Master
of Architecture, a professional emphasis area in Architecture and Health,
and the post-professional degree, Master of Science in Architecture.
The student body of the school consists of 350 undergraduate and 60
graduate students each year. The program has several off-campus programs.
These include a program in Barcelona, Spain in collaboration with the
Polytechnic University of Catalunya, a program in Genoa, Italy, and
a program in Charleston, South Carolina in conjunction with the College
of Charleston. The students may spend a year in residence at each of
these various programs and receive generous funding to attend these
off-campus programs. José Cabán, Chair |
 Installation at the Stazione Leopolda, Florence (photos by: Omar Cotza) |
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| The
Living City (Thesis Studio) Instructor: Douglas Hecker |
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The Living City: Losse Knight The city, as we know it today, is no longer a distinct compact environment that sits in contrast to rural or natural landscapes, but is increasingly defined by the intersection of temporal densities of information and place. As the figure of the contemporary city becomes more and more ephemeral and elusive, the ability to map ephemeral phenomena over time becomes essential to bringing legibility to the contemporary city. Dynamic media provide unprecedented opportunities to analyze and model the city by documenting and visualizing a variety of site conditions from disparate sources (census, NOAA, USGS, etc.). The ability to visualize ephemeralities of place (wind, sun, hydrology, human migration, time use, seasonal change, etc.) both simultaneously and dynamically is an important technology in generating urban and architectural proposals that are more sympathetic to a mixture of contemporary programmatic needs and the particularities of locale and their complex interactions over time. This shifts our notion of place from one of grounded and stabile to a notion of the city as animate and living. In courses at Clemson University students are asked to approach various dynamic media (Flash, A/W Maya, Premiere, After Effects) by rigorously coming to terms with them and the possibilities of visualization and new realities they make possible in as much as they provide opportunities to see time and subsequently to design in time. These new forms of media have the possibility to be combined with the conventions of architectural drawing to meld the relationship between the physical characteristics of the city with the fleeting dynamics of place. These works have shifted the students’ interest and proposals away from architecture of objects to an architecture that pursues an agenda of site as a field of processes. As architects are more and more charged with the coordination, choreography, and ultimately visualization of design data over time, animation could be folded into the designer’s repertoire as a more fully integrated tool in the design process. The Living City students: Dan Culbertson, Nathan Fell, Hans Herrmann, Losse Knight, Matt Warner |
Martha Skinner and Douglas Hecker are both are assistant professors at The College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities at Clemson University and partners in a practice called fieldoffice. Their practice through teaching and also through independent speculative or commissioned projects encompasses a variety of project scales and media. They have received various grants to pursue work that is focused on contemporary media and analysis of the ephemeralities of the contemporary city. Current projects include by-pass a video mapping of Atlanta’s I-285 Bypass, and NY AV map, a video mapping of New York City. As the 1998-99 Walter B. Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan, Skinner developed Notation A/V, a course that explores the possibilities of digital audio and video recorders as tools of notation, to study and document the city. | |||||
| Notation
A/V (University of Michigan) Instructor: Martha Skinner http://www.clemson.edu/caah/architecture/faculty/skinner/notationav.html |
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Notation A/V: Focus / Field by Carrie Pike Digital video and audio recorders have the potential to capture, study, measure, and understand both the ever-changing physical and ephemeral conditions of place. The capacities of this tool are found through the exploitation of its features, camera techniques, by embracing the camera as an extension of our body, and by understanding and rethinking our more common (architectural) drawing conventions via the camera itself. The A/V Mappings and Notations seminar/studio aims to merge the vocabulary of the video camera with the vocabulary of drawing as a way of exhausting and clarifying how we investigate, and what we investigate. Camera features such as zoom, focus, or fade and recording techniques such as stationary camera and panning are looked at individually and coupled with conditions of place such as intersection, boundary, threshold... The relationships between the isolated tool feature or camera recording technique and the specific condition of place are exhausted for their potential in revealing something unanticipated about both the place under investigation and the investigative tool. Drawing conventions such as the section cut, perspective, and axonometric are brought to video to influence the limitations and capacities of the camera through the sensibilities and conventions of architectural drawing. By using this readily available tool critically yet intuitively, students develop creative and precise ways of understanding the camera as an investigative tool, develop the potential of rethinking or clarifying the meaning and capacity of drawing conventions through the use of the camera, and develop an understanding of our complex (physical and ephemeral) environment. In this seminar/studio, place, camera, and drawing conventions are investigated and investigative, and all are exploited. Notation A/V was developed and taught at the University of Michigan between 1998-2001. A new seminar/studio is now being developed at Clemson University entitled A/V Mappings and Notations – merging the vocabularies of drawing and video. The first session will be taught during the Fall semester 2003. Other works with video by Martha Skinner and Douglas Hecker (Side Walk, By-Pass, and NY A/V Map) can be visited at http://people.clemson.edu/~marthas |
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