Opus entry 10 BETWEEN SILENCE + LIGHT

A lot can be said with out using any words at all. I have no doubt when someone says that someone’s neon orange and yellow car with an airplane wing bolted to the trunk in the parking lot is “loud” even when it isn’t on, you know what they mean. Equally, I’m sure you can recall a room or an outdoors space that you would call “quiet,” knowing that obviously the walls can’t make any noise. The acknowledgement and control of this visual phenomenon is something we as designers must control and use to our advantage, for if we ignore it we will surely end up with some pretty rough work.



The piece of furniture pictured above is a media stand I built and required a lot of CRAFT. Not only in the physical woodwork, but also in the considerations of the dimensions for the whole piece, the drawers and shelf placements were all carefully calculated in order to make it work the way I needed it to. Aside from the design on paper, bringing it to life absolutely required a lot of attempts and failures to pull this piece of with the amount of flaws it has. The building of furniture by hand became popular in the “Arts and Crafts” movement in the nineteenth century. “The most important design reform movement to affect the interior in the nineteenth century was that of the Arts and Crafts” (Massey, p 7.).



The control and balance between PUBLIC AND PRIVATE spaces is especially important in a residential structure. Thomas Jefferson knew this and did his best to control it in his Monticello house that we visited last weekend. The above drawing is a quick 5 minute sketch of the rear porch of Monticello. I was pretty surprised at how small the main structure of the house actually was, considering how much time and money went in to its construction. But as the tour guide told us, the house was constantly flooded with uninvited PUBLIC guests. So I don’t blame Jefferson at all for taking up probably a third of the main floor space for his PRIVATE quarters.



In our drawing and drafting classes all semester we have been working on refining our TECHNIQUE. The above drawing is the plan view rendering of the room I designed for the project last week. I did it with chartpak markers on vellum and tried to use good technique in order to communicate clearly what was happening in my space.



As I mentioned earlier, as designers it is imperative for us to be cognoscente of the LANGUAGE we are using in our designs. Everything counts and should be considered. The medium used, the color choices, the weight of the paper, etc. all has an impact on the successfulness of any project. What makes up the language can be determined and interpreted differently by everyone which is actually one of the great things about what we do. I drew this reflection of my own eyes in the window on the bus when we were driving through the Virginia countryside Friday morning. There is definitely a body language that is present and can be understood universally by other people and even animals without using words. I’m not sure what exactly I’m saying with my eyes here, I’ll let you decide…



In order for people to communicate their designs and ideas in a visual representation, we must create a VIRTUAL representation of the things we create. This 2 point perspective cube I drew for drafting brings to mind some images of my 80’s early childhood where large breakthroughs were happening in video games and VIRTUAL reality. Our generation seems to be largely one of information and technological breakthroughs. No one ever predicted the internet. But now it is the SILENCE : LIGHT that controls almost every facet of our daily routine. I spend a lot of time thinking about what else will happen in our lifetime that no one will predict, but will completely change our lives.

- Jeff Linn