RESTORING GEOMETRY, FIGURE AND SYMBOLIC EXPRESSION IN DESIGN

Selected Works by Matthew Collins 2014-2017
Presented on April 25th, 2017

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence 

is to kindle the light in the darkness of mere being.

              - Carl Jung

In 1981, the Talking Heads released ‘Remain in Light’ a record of hymns, so to speak, 

dedicated to the immanent emergent electronic/digital paradigm.  

The lyrics forecast the saturation of light that has become ubiquitous.

The world of light, she’s gonna open our eyes up

She has messages for everyone

She’s looking to divine, so say so, so say so

The world of light, she’s gonna open our eyes up

35 years later, fully in the throws of ubiquitous light and on the verge of his material death, David Bowie released his swan song album Blackstar.  He begins with these words: 

In the Villa of Ormen

Stands a Solitary Candle

Ah-ah

 in the center of it all 

in the center of it all

your eyes

The first describes the saturation of light which has engulfed us in the age of the digital domain.  It describes a revelation that digitization is ironically hastening the loss of meaning; the second is about the spirit and the preservation of meaning.  This is the symbol of the candle today: 

it is about a return to the body, the localized individual, and a return to spirit - 

that non-transferable, transcendent qualia of value.

Kristi Head asked me in 2013 to think about a geometric design for a disk. 

We began with a conversation about the symbolism of number.

These were my meditations on the number 7

the number of creation

LITE + CYCLE

https://liteandcycleshop.com/collections/essential-oil-candles

Certain aspects of value are local.  The quantitative aspect of value can travel - its 1s and 0s are not localized.  But the qualitative aspect of value remains with body or with an individual.  This aspect of value is its meaning.  

If meaning tends toward the qualitative rather than quantitative value, it appears that meaning is local and conforms to a scale in some proportion related to the human body.  Think about the size of a brick as it relates to the size of a human hand. A wall made of bricks offers the subjective body an immediate physiological empathy through their common scale, a scale that allows the body to feel its relation to the wall subconsciously. Value is localized, in that it is relative to adjacencies and immediate contrasts, immediate resemblances, and the coherence of figures.

Alejandro Jodorowski said “The goal of the life is to create the soul.”  

The goal is to light the candle and maintain the integrity of the flame. 

...

Now we move our eye toward Brooklyn.

To a neighborhood called Red Hook along the south coast of the western shore of Long Island.

VAN DYKE TOWNHOUSES & APARTMENTS

 on Van Dyke Street, 

between Van Brundt and Connover, 

 2017 construction schedule

(For contact information scroll to the end of the page)

Street Side Perspective Rendering by Andre Junget

Elevations

Back Yard Perspective Rendering by Andre Junget

Rendered Elevations by Alla Romanova

You'll observe off-white panels on the third floor of the townhouses overlooking the rear yard gardens.   These will be bas reliefs to be designed by Animal Sleep Stories artist Daria Tessler.  

The 9 panels will be designed based on the 9 muses,

The 9 creative faculties that give rise to memory.

http://animalsleepstories.com

The room illustrated below is on the second floor in the rear, overlooking the gardens.

It is outfitted as a library with a fire place, arched french doors and a trellised balcony.

Considering the preservation of meaning, ink on acid free paper remains THE best method for archiving content, putting digital preservation to shame, not even considering the plastic & unreliable nature of digital storage.

The Van Dyke project strives to achieve a quality of authenticity, so as to harmonize with its surroundings, to offer a benign imposition upon its neighborhood.  

Authenticity in design requires 3 things: a sense of hand-scaled increments, coherent body scaled proportions, and subtle symbolic deformation of familiar typologies and figures.  

The same principle applies to small-scaled projects and large-scaled projects.

We have other projects on the drawing board that attempt the same goal at larger scales.  The example below consists of roughly 3 city blocks to be developed in 2 phases.  

 This project maintains the same incremental quality, brick by brick. It takes the same approach to proportion, despite its larger over-all size.  It appeals to authenticity though its relation to and respect of the human body, and by its likenesses.  It anticipates human people.  It looks like buildings.

These buildings are in the proportions of buildings as humanity has made buildings for millennia.  They are composed of familiar shapes and forms that tempt your memory to recollect.  And they glean their personality, or spirit, in their deviation from type in their details.  But they are nothing new.  For that reason, they might maintain a meaningful value for a long time to come.

FERRIS PARK

A Community of Makers, Artists and Crafts People

Ferris Park is a speculative project currently soliciting partners for prospective ownership for Phase 1, on the east side of Ferris Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn

The first phase consists of 3/4s of a block offering office floor plates at the corners and on Ferris, and 3 story, 3.6k square foot Carriage Houses

This is an early rendition of the Facade on Ferris Street facing the River

This is a more recent version of the facade on Ferris Street facing the River

and the reverse view from inside the garden courtyard/section through the Carriage Houses.

Here we see a first floor plan, sections, and elevations with further breakdown of available units

Here are details of the Carriage Houses and a rendered elevation showing their context

Rendered Elevations and Perspectives by Alla Romanova

Early stage renderings of the garden courtyard behind the Carriage Houses:

I’ve been involved in the community of the Burning Man Arts Festival since 2013.  Despite being a temporary city of 60,000 nomadic people in the desert, it reinforces the immanence of locality. Like salmon return to their birth place, Burners make a perennial pilgrimage to their spiritual home.  The extreme elements of the desert ecology are your master in Black Rock City.  Submission to them is both a pre-requisite and a grace.  There I built my first building.  It is an art project dedicated to David Bowie's Blackstar.

One of the ironies of this spiritual place in the desert is exactly how bad the music is.  It is an inhumane, unrelenting cacophony. Given the environmental extremes of dust, wind and temperature fluctuations, the community is built upon an edifice of digital music, lacking almost entirely in figure, lyric and, because lacking in voice, absent of spirit.  This condition inspired me to make a humble compensation in my contribution of an art piece to the community:

Bowie Blackstar Vinyl Sanctuary

Analogue music.  A refuge for the contemplative meditation on the great man’s final work.  A celebration of the qualitative presence in between the binary approximations inherent to digital logic.  An insulated, quiet place for a candle to burn amidst the noise of hostile environs.  

A place to recover some meaning.

Development sketches for decorating a hexayurt in the desert

inspired by Byzantine Temples and their iconography

Some images for the application of decorating the surface with figure,

and the design for a commemorative embroidered patch

 Stencil in development for application to the hexayurt facade

Our first year for the Sanctuary, the structure complete, applied surface decoration package underway

Something happened on the day he died

Spirit rose a meter, then stepped aside

Somebody else took his place and bravely cried

I’m a black star

In 2010 The institute of Classical Architecture & Art asked me to illustrate some plates for them, for a Classical Primer publication to educate practitioners of all stripes.  

In the digital age, I’m a peculiar draftsperson straddling two worlds, in that I learned to draft the old way, so I emulate a hand-crafted tradition using digital software.  Production of the Primer has had many obstacles over the years.  The final plates have been submitted. 

The Classical Primer is due to be released in late 2017 

These are plates from that series.  The first section illustrates a chapter discussing Classical Greek metaphysics and the philosophy of number, which the great western philosophers and mystics perfected.  The second grouping illustrates a chapter of instruction on composing the 5 major architectural orders applicable, originally, to temples.  The Primer will have other chapters and cover other subjects, but these are the 2 chapters that I have rendered.

Practical applications for Harmony, Resonance, Symmetries and Proportion

Fundamental Profiles and their names

The Tuscan Order

The Doric Order

The Ionic Order

The Corinthian Order

The Composite Order

These chapters represent the only contemporary attempt to disseminate these methods with a fresh voice for the first time in over a century.

This work was a meditation that impressed upon me the meaning of particular geometries and the magic of proportion, also how a thing can have integrity, 

that is, an integral, cohesive relationship between its parts and its whole.  

I am struck by the word “meaning.”  

What is the meaning of meaning?  The content, effect, impact, substance. The essence, but not the smell.  The thing intended.  The thing misunderstood. But what is it? It is definitely a thing measured by the senses - meaning is more aesthetic than anaesthetic.  A thing not felt or observed has no meaning. 

The root, of course, is mean.  Ratio.  “The golden mean.”  The golden ratio. Perhaps the golden rule is a colloquial approximation of the golden mean: the self equalling the other in a proportion somewhere between Phi and 1+Phi.  Phi represents a particular ratio, the best one, the most universal, most scalable, as demonstrated by the Fibonacci Sequence.  Phi is the vehicle of scalability, which enables a cosmic harmony, enabling the mercurial maxim to be true: as above, so below. 

Through it we come to appreciate equitable proportions - that is, the most meaningful proportions.  As we move away from the golden mean, meaning becomes abstracted, absurd, harder to appreciate.  Meaning is a matter of proportion and proximity.

When a thing takes on a hyperbolic or absurd proportion it begins to lose its meaning.  Think of Lenin’s maxim  ‘The killing of one man is murder, the killing of 100,000 is a statistic.’ 

Unfortunately this is true.  

The same is true for sky-scrapers and Fortune 500 CEO salaries.  

They approach meaningless.

To Contact the author, please email:
mgunnisoncollins@gmail.com
or call/text 212-920-7176

For information of the VanDyke Project and/or the Ferris Park Project in Red Hook, Brooklyn please contact Peter Moore at pmaarch@gmail.com or call 917-538-6711