Ambiguous space

It is to reveal the information and restructure the mythical landscape of place between the personal experience memory and the reality in the section of journey event.

From Hypnerotomachia Polophili(1499), Poliphilo dreamed about being in a threatening dark forest and narrates the myriad things he saw. He tells about forest, gardens, fountains and rivers on the island. And the images from the book represent the places, monuments, and fragments visited in the dream.

Another narrative from east culture, in the end of Peach forest(the Eastern Jin Dynasty from 317 to 420), it is a poet to describe the fisherman sailed along a stream for a long time and neglected how much distance he had traveled. Suddenly, he arrived the Peach forest and the forest was ended at the stream source. He caught sight of a mountain，which had a little entrance, seemed to have some light in it . In the end, he intruded another “world”, Utopia, where the people didn’t know outside of real world. When he came back to describe what he saw, no one believed him. There is a literatus believed what he experienced, and then they tried to follow the trace of the route that fisherman left. However, they lost it even they tried to find the way to go several times. He starts to wonder if it was a real experience or it was a dream.

According to these two narratives, it expounds a poetic vision that sets a temporal boundary to the experience of architecture, showing that architecture is not only about form and space but about time, about the presence of man on earth.

It will be launch another trip for the fisherman through modern technique to record the piece of journey and left the new trace on the geography. It will be photography images that are the trace or footprints, or an interpretation of the real, and postcards used the folding papers that left messages during the journey and send it back.

It will collect all fragment elements to evidence the personal experience of the body as the site of meaning. Furthermore, using the fragments to reveal the behind of information and try to map the route of the journey, and to restructure the spatial experience through the drawings.

Context

"The pencil has been called the most potent instrument in the world, for it gives most of man's thoughts and aspirations their first visible form.

Drawings are like windows through which we see things. The draughtsman, who is a maker of these windows, appreciates the effort put into them much more so than others, who only see through drawings,as it were, to the things themselves depicted and so take drawing for granted. Drawing is of this nature, and man who can draw can think of, and deal with, many things and problems which another man cannot."(Peter Jeffrey, B. 1979)

Preface

“It is important to remember that in the classical tradition, drawing began when a Corintian maiden outlined the shadow (a profile) of her departing lover on a wall.” (P’erez-G’omez, A. & Pelletier, L. 1997)
Construction and Reconstruction

Sites Journey :Lines of the Ancient Astronomers Stone Circle-Ley consciousness-Churches

Leys (or alignments) are straight lines running between landmarks such as standing stones and other megaliths, earthworks, tumuli, ponds, churches (which were often built on pagan sites) and natural features. They can stretch for just a few miles, or for many hundreds.

Leys, two of them running parallel, on the Bedfordshire-Hertfordshire border, formed by alignments of churchs on ancient sites, earthworks and stretches of tracks which often lead up to churches.

A line of four standing stones, one of them in the sone circle at Castle Fraser, Aberdeenshire. This pattern of megalithic alignments from stone circles is repeated throughout the country and provides the primary evidence of the ley system.

From the antiquity, the relationship between astronomy and shadow tracers (sundial) had been firmly developed in the Western architectural tradition. The geometric and mathematical arrangement of this sophisticated system has ties back to ancient civilizations, enabling these people to navigate their spatial position on the earth, with an understanding of time and duration. To investigate the simultaneity of light and shadow, the ancients used the structure of the Stone Circle ,one of sites is the rollright stones where is located in Oxfordshire.

It precisely transforms the light from the sun, the moon and the stars to shadows. From Ptolemy’s works, Analemma and Planispherium, were seeking to represent the heavenly sphere by projecting the shadow to a plane. In De architectura, Vitruvius emphasized the importance of both astronomy and optics for architects. Optics was necessary for formal adjustments and proportional corrections; astronomy, on the other hand, allowed the architect to “find the east, west, south, and north, as well s the theory of the heavens, the equinox, solstices, and courses of the stars.

Existence and Destruction:

From fragment to chaos - Performers show on the stage

By definition, the ruin is a fragment. The stones of the Forum, temple columns,cathedral towers-are all vestiges of a now vanished monument,of a history which exists no more.The ruin conjures up absence. And yet in the same breath one might say that the presence of a ruin creates a world with colours,atmosphere, and ghosts of its own, tearing itself off the past like a page ripped from a calendar.Hence the ruin is more than a fragment.

Initially seemingly chaotic, the fields littered with ruins that Poliphhilo walks through appear, as he advances, increasingly invested with meaning, so that eventually his archeological and epigraphic curiosity is awakened:" Admiring these beautiful fragments with much delight and pleasure I was still avid to search out new finds. I roamed like some animal always seeking better pasture over the heap of ruins and the huge columns, some in pieces,others whole"

One step behind the shadow

While we draw, Hands push the pressure to the pen in order to touch the papers. Touching is the bridging of architecture and the environment. For instance, using ultrasound technology scans the inside of human body that can reveal the organs beneath our skin. Digital technologies are allowing us to “touch” different space that are both inside and outside us and close to us and far away from us.

The detail of environment cannot be seen by our eyes but by touch of our hand through drawings.

I choose three different conditions of environments: cliff, swamp, and forest to experiment the concept.

First of three drawings used bird’s view to draw three sites, in addition, putting nine characteristics which I searched and shown on the blog into three sites in order to relate and communicate with environments.

Second, developing the object and at the same time and researching the technological side of the drawings, the instrument for exposing the unseen. For example, the artists used the camera Lucida to project the object on the paper to help them drawing. Taking the instrument into three environments and using different position to measure the sites. Furthermore, the device bases on three different sites to project the image on the papers in order to draw the journey plan. According to researching of the artists using camera Lucida, the device object is my drawing instrument and it constructed my drawing. Following the journey plan which is the process of drawing develop three maps, maps survey the instrument of the route which conceal and shift from the shadow. On the other hand, my drawing constructs the instrument

According to the maps, I begin to look through from the new scope to the real sites: cliff, swamp, and forest to observe. Then developing three models observe and explore the environments and leaving the trace on the papers. These three models become the observatories, furthermore, observing drawing of drawing.

It is the architecture before architecture.