Tag: donald judd

sets, bricks, jacks, and squares

NS ColemanLeave a comment

SET_02

From Donald Judd and the architecture of art last week, I bring another tangentially architectural enterprise today: set design.  This work came about through viewing terribly underwhelming sets at the local opera.  My thoughts began to race about how the story could have been more magnificently communicated through architectural form rather than a few gauzy curtains.  This version positions a continuous brick jack arcade along the entire upstage, with four brick ‘el’s that could move about in the foreground, turning towards the audience for an ‘interior’ perspective, or away for the ‘exterior’, or alternated in-and-out, aligned into two open ‘rooms’, or one closed off cube.  Allusions to the work of Edward Gordon Craig, Adolphe Appia, and Richard Peduzzi abound.

SET_01

judd and the american vernacular

NS ColemanLeave a comment

JUDD_01

This project attempted to talk to both the vernacular-traditionalism v. minimal-modernist dichotomy and the art v. architecture dialogue, taking one of the central figures of American modern art (and himself an influential figure to many American modern architects) and running him alongside a long history of American traditional vernacular form.

I took a simple, three-square concrete sculpture of his, untitled (1991), and rendered it in the most prototypical of American vernacular architecture, clapboard.  One rendition maintains the homogeneity of Judd’s concrete as a single clapboard volume (‘abstraction wrapped in ‘vernacular’ ‘), and the other rendered as a full building, with a shingled roof and brick foundation (‘abstraction become vernacular’).

JUDD_02