The Corbusier Exhibition

Corbusier was a revolutionary architect. He believed there were five key points to creating the best building that took in to consideration the elements, the world around the building and the structure of the building itself.

We have designed an exhibition that exemplifies his five points, essentially a space that persuades the attendee that Corbusier's 5 points are the ideal when it comes to building design.

The exhibition is in two parts, the physical space and the digital iPad navigator that shows you around the space.

The visitor to the exhibition is greeted at the door by the exhibition title, and a collection of images of Corbusier's buildings abstracted into three colors. These colors form the basis of the exhibition style and are used throughout.

The visitor can pick up an iPad from the welcome desk and is immediately faced with the building design we are using to show in the exhibition. They can manipulate the building with their hands and move around it to see the five points.

The iPad and physical space work together to provide an experience that is both experiential (physical space) and informative (iPad). We felt that rather than just using text on the walls which people might not read, by giving them a tablet to hold and by them having to make the connections, it would be a deeper and richer learning experience.

Focus

I took the dolls house facades and made them into an art piece for my craft project. The installation piece explores the confusion of multi-tasking with the simplicity of focusing on one moment, a view through a door or a window. The video explores the same but in digital format.

Corbusier's iPad

Revisions to the Corbusier iPad experience include:

- extraneous information put aside in a lighter color to the top
- users should click the arrow to begin at the bottom
- the flyout tells you how to move around the experience
- extraneous information is scrollable right to left

Leave Behind

A 5" x 7" postcard to leave behind and also to mail to existing clients, as a way of keeping up to date with work projects.

I think I've found a new home

I tried Indexhibit today and I think I like it. It's really simple but it actually makes me feel like an artist. I don't know what it is. I know it's built by Europeans and maybe that's it. You can see progress here.

Wouldn't it be cool if the iPad could do this?

Find your way around a Corbusier building in 3D!

Exhibition Wall Elevation

These elevation drawings show the main walls and three moveable walls. There will be no text in the exhibition apart from a short tag line in each room that briefly explains the benefit of each point. Each room has some kind of moveable activity in it: this room is on floor 2 and houses the moveable walls and long windows which can slide up and down the wall, making the view larger or smaller.

The persuasive exhibition

In the H&R Bloch Space there are 4 main rooms. We have 5 points to discuss:

Room 1 - the supports allow for a moveable facade, any size building (1)
- "the supports allow for any size and shape facade"

Room 2 - pilotis raise the building off the ground (2)
- "no more rising damp"
- "I don't just see faces of buildings everywhere"
- "the supports are no longer the walls"

Room 3 - moveable walls (3)
- "free layout design: there are no load bearing walls"

Room 3 - and horizontal window (4)
- "I like a grand view and a well lit room"

Room 4 - roof garden (5)
- "my roof breathes oxygen

To do:
1. buy solid paper from art store for the floor and complimentary wallpaper, it needs to be stuff we can print on
2. build two chairs - one for the roof garden one for the moveable facade
3. use his building plans as shapes to put images in, for line work or as patterns
4. take pictures of iphone and fingers - begin build of sample interface design
5. print a couple more people

This is our color palette: pale blue for light, big sky and space, a dark brown for earth tone, natural and orange for a sense of freedom and fun.

Spatial design

Today a few walls got moved around, Lance got pushed all over the place, then he got shot.

Portfolio shots

I set up a little studio, and took some pictures.

Headphones anyone?

I was recently at an art exhibition at the Nelson Atkins Art Gallery in Kansas City and I noticed people walking around with headphones on. Some folks liked them, said listening to the narrator tell them about the art pieces was a lot more engaging than reading text. While I agree with this and I think this is permissible for an art exhibit with many different pieces, I wonder if it's the best option where a more interactive holistic experience is present. If the exhibition was of this nature, I'd like not to see headphones but more engaging artifacts and text that you and someone else can interact with and talk about.

http://www.phonaut.com

What is more memorable? Someone saying something to you or an actual physical experience where you might say something silly or embarrass yourself? Which one lends itself to a more persuasive experience?

Exhibition Type

After perusing some exhibition spaces online today, I was inspired to try a few sets of my own. In each of these there are three different faces. The main font would I think form the basis of a logo for the event.

I like Akzidens Grotesque condensed here. The letterforms spelling out 'a new architecture' fit very nicely together—like Corbusier's work. DIN is also very structured but with nice curves and Bodoni Old Style is just elegant.

Futura's ascenders are elongated, tall like Corbusier's pilotis. Euphemia has an interesting kerning thing going on, which happens to lend itself to the space between the pilotis.

Orator is mono-spaced. Like the building blocks of Corbusier's architecture. I like the small caps on New Century Schoolbook. As a title, it provides what looks like a very structured cap.

Model building

Oh the talent of my classmate! Look how he builds a model of the H&R Bloch artspace. This is a scale model at 1/2" to one foot. It will house color prints of proposed graphics and a few scaled to size people. Then we'll be able to get in there with a macro camera to shoot some images. Those and some elevation drawings, some background on the architect will all go in a presentation.

It's so fun to work in a studio with a few other creative people, have the space to spread out and make things. It's good too to have a space to chill and relax (we're working on that part). It's fun to go out and get coffee, share ideas then come back and do some more creative work.

One elevation

Here's a look at the large 1st floor wall in the main studio of the H&R Bloch space. Using a scale of 0.25" : 1' you can see how high the 6' man is against the backdrop of seven pilotis. The small scale plan view drawing above it shows where the wall exists in the overall building.

Exhibition concept

For a Corbu exhibition it would only be right to show off the five points of his architectural manifesto in a very interactive way. Moveable walls and facade? That would be very persuasive if people could actually move the walls to their own specification.

1. The ground floor would host an array of the pilotis behind which we would put a large frieze of trees and sky.
2. Two of the pilotis would support a mock floor with overhang and be moveable to suggest your building can be any size.

First Floor

3. Made windows on three walls.
4. Moveable wall shapes, some rectangular, some curved: make your own room configuration.
5. A roof garden room.

The people (brown rectangles) on this scale of 0.25" : 1' are 0.36" wide and 0.2" deep.

The make your own room configuration space.

Wordpress or something else?

I'm looking through a lot of Wordpress site templates and while they have a lot of great features they do look very standard. I love my current layout on Mobileme but it would be great to find something similar for Wordpress, oh and Mobileme will not host a Wordpress site, as far as I can tell.

I just found out I have free hosting with Domains Priced Right. My package comes with 10GB of space, PHP and MySQL capabilities and easy set up for Wordpress. I love that they say 99.9% uptime on their advertisement (image above).

This is the site navigation for the new online portfolio. It's almost the same as my existing site on Mobileme. I'm not going to do the timeline design as I thought last semester. It would be too hard to maintain and I don't think it's worth it, it really only would be for my benefit that you see when work was completed. Here are the tweaks to the existing navigation:

1. I am now Tom Morse-Brown | Collaborative Design - I think I'd like to be known as a team player
2. My Design in Mind blog on blogger will switch over to my main website. I think it's more professional.