Luis OrozcoARCH 201 PortfolioDecember 2010ID: 260375190

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The Passage

The Park

The Section

The Bird

The Birdcage

The Aviary

Table of Contents

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The Passage

After some indecision on how to best define the Tokyo cityscape described in the passage I chose from Haruki Muraka-mi’s “Wind—Up Bird Chronicles”, I found inspiration in the work of de Chirico and his skewed representations of space. The exaggerated, surreal, and impossible perspective afforded by the rubbed pencil technique then went on to define my Composite Drawing. I wanted to accurately, through inaccuracies in what is possible, depict the feelings of being lost and confused expressed by the story’s narrator.

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The Park

When I began designing The Park, based on my Composite Drawing from The Passage, I wanted to as accurately as possible recreate the surreal spaces that existed within that drawing. In order to bring the exaggerated dimensions of the imaginary space into the physical world, I felt that a distinctive landscape on which to place the Park would be an excel-lent place to start. The greatest challenge I faced in my building process was with the material itself, for though it lent itself very well to rendering strong, stoic monoliths coming out of a landscape, it did not allow for the blending of one object into another. Like the drawing, this model only represents a section of what the complete space would be, with circulation leading into and out of the constructed space.

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The Section

What I felt was the most important char-acteristic found inside the Leacock Building was the textured, bro-ken concrete interior walls. This detail is what I decided would be the main focus of my sec-tion drawing, which I rendered with Archiv-ing and Chinese Callig-raphy Ink. Many other details were spared in order to better em-phasize and show this feature of the building. Also, the discovery that this specific section of the building was taken at a 45° from the main axes of the building was an important one when deciding how measure and lay out some of the components found with-in the section.

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The Bird

After experimenting with several different gymnastic disciplines and actions, I settled on the backflip, found across the board in gymnastics, to define the movement of my Bird. It was then through a long series of trial and error, looking at many possible permutations, that I de-cided on this particular Composite Bird. The twisting mo-tion and the ambiguity of temporal reference were two of the most distinctive characteristics of this Composite Bird. The relation of the Bird to the page was also very important in the composition of all my Bird drawings, and was used to define, through centrality, the impor-tance of the Composite Bird’s tangled limbs.

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The Birdcage

The twisting, winding, and tangling behaviour of the limbs in my Composite Bird Drawing were the characteristic which I sought communicate through my Birdcage. The actions and volumes of the limbs were the singular factor taken into account when the decision to make the main construction technique a winding one. The material of the final Birdcage, at right, is scored wooden veneer, chosen both for its physical properties but also because the lines on its surface help emphasize the winding and tightness of the form. The Birdcage’s visual similarity to both a heart and human viscera help link it back to the human form from where the inspiration came.

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The Aviary

Once again the concept of winding, seen in the original Composite Bird Drawing and Birdcage, defined the design process of The Aviary. The gym-nastics discipline chosen as the basis of this building design was Rhythmic Gymnastics, in which the performers defined volumes around themselves using a long ribbon. The movement of this ribbon can be seen affecting the design of much of the project, from the benches, layout and other elements of the Promenade, the sketch model for the Aviary, and the elevated Pavil-ions, external details, and separation from the ground plane found in the final Pavilion/Aviary model. The Bird that this Aviary attempts to contain is the original Gymnast, which explains the large, flat-based volume it defines.

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