assignment 4

assignment 4 pin-up tuesday april 8

Read the essay ‘Rain in the City’ by Jill Stoner and the essay ‘City’ by Beatrice Colomina.

As you will find, both of the readings are deeply interested in the role that language plays in the conceptualizing of the city, and architecture’s place within it.

Our next project is to explore the building skin within the larger context of an ‘outside’. At first glance, the specific context of our site is downtown Providence, at the base of a hill, next to a canal. It is the more specific, idiosyncratic or individual context that you are now to define.

Do this using language, not as a creator but as an inquisitor. Search for a fragment of language: a quote, a poem, an excerpt, that expresses, in someone else’s words, the essential idea of ‘exteriority’, ‘outside’, ‘from without’ that you want to explore for the coming weeks. What defines ‘outside’? is it:

the city
nature
land
sky
through doors
water
openness
visibility
weather
cars
walking
crime
etc. etc.

Then build part of an enclosure that defines for you an inside from an outside, as clarified by the language fragment you have discovered and chosen.

Use a material that has significance to you in terms of the way it can be manipulated to generate different qualities, i.e. texture, surface, depth, thinness, openness, opacity, etc.

Use the material. Manipulate it, and in working with it, generate the relationship between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ as your chosen language defines them.