MICHAEL THUT
This is the living room of my partner’s childhood home.
It is a large open space that is split into different environments by a brick
chimney in the middle of the room. The home entrance and kitchen both feed into
the living room, emphasizing the importance of the space in the house hierarchy.
The floor is a six-inch thick slab of of red concrete poured in a grid of
four-foot squares. Radiant heat flows up through the concrete in the winter. A
large portion of the room is covered in floor-to-ceiling windows that showcase
the outside environment. Two couches sit in the corner of the room around a
coffee table. The grouping defines a seating area next to the window walls that
feels as if you are sitting outside. The drawing’s lower detail highlights how
the windows in the corner come together without any support material. This joint
easily disappears, dissolving the corner of the room.
The fireplace is a large brick column that extends all the way to the ceiling
to support the roof. A built-in wood bench extends out from the fireplace into
the living room. The clerestory that surrounds the fireplace raises the ceiling
height at the center of the room to 9’-0” (the ceilings in the rest of the
house are 6’-9”). Aside from the windows and the brick fireplace, the house is clad
in cypress paneling, both interior and exterior. The windows, the use of
natural materials, and the forest that surrounds the home all contribute to a
feeling of being constantly immersed in nature.
This Actor-Network map outlines the actors and interactions
involved in the planning and upkeep of the Usonia Historic District neighborhood.
Usonia is a small private neighborhood that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
and his students. It originally existed as a cooperative but transitioned to a
community with individual home ownership in the mid-1950s due to financial
problems and tension within the community. There is still a board that consists
of elected residents who oversee all neighborhood alterations and improvements.
The board is required to unanimously approve every alteration to the
neighborhood, including play structures, railings, additions, fences, etc. This
oversight leads to interesting interactions between neighbors and the community.
For example, even though it is clearly documented that there are supposed to be
no fences in Usonia, two plots are currently fenced. The rest of the diagram
focuses on the history of the neighborhood and how that has contributed to its
current state.
This organizational diagram of my partner’s living
room highlights the various boundaries in the space. I overlaid the elevation
on top of the plan and extrapolated information from both to construct an
abstracted composition. The two, solid rectangles emphasize the solidity of the
brick fireplace both in plan and elevation. In the elevation, the bench is traced
because it defines the central boundary of the living room. The elevation
profile is highlighted with a thick stroke because it showcases the clerestory in
the roof, a defining feature that amply lights the room. On the plan, the supports
between the floor-to-ceiling windows are annotated and darkened to show
solidity within an otherwise visually porous wall. The main circulation is
layered on top, extending out beyond the composition’s boundaries where openings
and doors in the plan permit.
This is a graphic film detailing the transformation of
my line diagram into an abstracted composition of lines and shapes. Each line is
altered to further one’s understanding of how that specific object is understood
in the space. Solid masses are filled in and transformed to emphasize how they
feel in the space. The bench is stretched to emphasize how it cantilevers out
from the fireplace into the living room to lightly define the boarder of the
room. Furthermore, the circulation is stretched beyond the boarders of the room
to show were doors and openings allow figures to literally break the boundaries
of the space.
Curves from the graphic composition are grouped
together at random to form planar surfaces. These were rotated, etruded, and then subtracted from the tall, curvy, solid mass in the upper right area of the composition. I included the line diagram as a faint backdrop as a hint to the construction process of the model.
This composition showcases the interior space of the model. A
total of four planar curve surfaces pierced the solid, resulting in a myriad of
internal intersections in space and mass. In a literally sense, the act of
subtracting material from an object is the physical breaking of the objects boundaries. Here it creates a porosity in the model that links back to the windows in the original living
room.
This section cut film further emphasizes the interior
space and form of the model. Due to the curvilinear exterior of the column,
each planar surface subtraction creates a wavy boundary cut. This, along with
the thin, floating planes derived from the light line work of the circulation path,
comprise the main elements of the interior space.