Architecture Essay

From the open-air amphitheater at the building’s apex, where this abstracted roofscape of skylights are collapsed into the horizon beyond, visitors can begin to understand the institution’s position within the city and its regional context.At a much larger scale, a similar network of experience stretches across the three phases of San Francisco State’s Center for the Creative Arts.

From the open-air amphitheater at the building’s apex, where this abstracted roofscape of skylights are collapsed into the horizon beyond, visitors can begin to understand the institution’s position within the city and its regional context.

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At the smallest scale, the Pittman Dowell Residence and its models directly engage this issue of simultaneity.Yet more importantly, the practice of model making is at its heart about producing form: both the physical forms, and forms of inquiry that characterize our practice.These models employ technique, skill, technology, and experience–these are all characterizations of craft–but they likewise, and more importantly, also characterize ideas.As visitors move toward, into, and through this labyrinth of reciprocal visual relationships, the pavilion reveals itself, its tapered form expanding and contracting in an ever-changing montage of space and light.This investigation extends to include both the performative surface of the building facade and the broader urban fabric at the Fresno Metropolitan Museum, a hybrid museum for science and art lifted above the surrounding landscape of the city and California’s Central Valley.Instead, these themes play out across multiple projects, looping back to extend beyond a fixed, synchronic chronology; in this light, the model can be seen as a project in and of itself.The primary considerations, or inquiries, which organize this work are threefold: space/time, movement, and perception, or effect.Often these models are a part of a continuous narrative which unfolds on the way to the ultimate object.While often beautiful, these models are ultimately subservient to the “real” building, signifiers of the project’s final, built, reality.It is at this moment that the model loses a kind of autonomy, and sacrifices its range of expanded possibilities and expanded trajectories, instead becoming bound by its mimetic role.In contrast, models of completed projects are paradoxically freed from this burden of verisimilitude to ambition or desire, and are thus open to other uses, other relationships, other interpretations.