For those of you who haven't experienced it yourselves, initial projects in architecture school have very little literal connections to architecture. They are often abstract experiments concerning our perceptions of space and time, and test our capabilities to represent them. Above all, their aim is to get you accustomed to staying up all night and doing a week's worth of work in a weekend.
The project that serves as the groundbreaking of a GSAPP (that stands for the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation if I didn't make that clear, and it's said "GEE SAP") student's education is the documentation of the melting of a 1.5 liter block of ice. No, I'm not kidding, the first thing you do is freeze ice and watch it melt.
Why ice? Why melting? Observation of environmental effect and specifically climatic effect will go on to play a central role in our first studio, whose theme is "atmosphere." The project gets us to ask how does atmosphere affect and change a body? How do we observe and record those changes? And it makes us conscious of the usually invisible body of space that we will interpret and edit throughout our careers as architects.
For my ice experiment extravaganza, I wanted to leave a physical artifact of the melting process that represented the very end of the thaw. To create this imprint, I stacked the 9" cube of ice on a bed of photographs printed with water soluble inkjet ink.
The water creates a striking ink wash on the bed of paper. The paper begins to warp and wave as it's saturated, finally leaving a colorful topography as a record of the now absent ice cube.
In representing the event, I linked the initial and final states of the melting process through a timeline of sections tracking the ice's profile. At each end contours map the growth of the wash and the decay of the cube.
After a pinup of initial thoughts on Friday the 11 of September, I melted, drew and printed this project between Saturday at 12pm and Sunday at 2pm. The ice took a staggering 8 hours to melt. Ugh. Stay tuned for project 2, a climate regulation backpack.
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