Final Project: Notre Dame du Haut Church. Ronchamp, France. Le Corbuiser inspired

https://www.archdaily.com/84988/ad-classics-ronchamp-le-corbusier / https://www.collinenotredameduhaut.com/discover/the_chapel_of_notre-dame_du_haut.1586.html
This is the Notre Dame du Haut Church in Ronchamp, France built by Le Corbuiser in the 1950s. On the side we see right now I liked how the use of planes of the walls were able to make an interior and exterior space by not being connected. The negative space goes back into the building and kind of makes you want to enter the building has a sense of continuity between walls. I also saw the hierarchy of the planes in contrast to the bug solid mass that is the roof of the building, it almost seems like these planes are being latched on to by a huge mass and shouldn't be able to hold up the roof but none the less it is. Going off of that the compressed feel that the building gives off was very cool and made me feel like this building was an organic shape and I had no idea what would be on the other side. The use of line though was not so prevalent in the building but I had ideas that I would be able to incorporate into my work, the only real line would be a column that is supporting the roof that you cannot see in this picture. When I saw this work I instantly wanted to base my work off this image, the organic feel, use of planes supporting a large mass I felt that I had a lot of room to play with and to make it my own artwork.

I will now connect how I used the Notre Dame du Haut Church as a reference to create my piece. First like I stated before the huge mass on the top of Notre Dame Church was my main inspiration for the work. I wanted to feel like this mass was taking over the composition and almost crushing the other pieces I would add. I think I was able to capture this very effectively, the mass is supported and suspended over the planes and solids that were once connected (in the original building that is). I also liked the interior and exterior that was shown in the original work that I decided I would make them feel like the doorway or the right of passage to go "into" the interior. Also with the widows and notches made into the walls I tried t replicate that in one of the planes of the piece and I feel it adds a sense of depth in the sense of psychological depth, that to many those are just accent pieces but it closely relates to the original work and only if you knew that you would be able to make that connection.

The original piece did not have a lot of lines suggested and that is where I felt I needed to, or had the most freedom in this work. I like the organic and continuity between forms and decided I would try to replicate the forms and planes with different curves and compressed lines. Which I feel like I could have improves some of the lines but I think it brings a level of similarity between the large piece and the smaller piece underneath. At some angles the rhythm between the curve of the line and the curve of the foam really play to my advantage, but again I think I could have improved in the line area of the work. Another difference is in the mass that I decided to make the main focus, I decided to make the mass touch the ground instead of being suspended over the planes like the original piece is.

The following images are from my first iteration of the work I intended to submit. I did not submit this piece due to the fact that when I brought it to my professor he brought to my attention that though this is a good work and is interesting to look at, it does not fulfill the requirements for the assignment and this is because that it uses transitional pieces, or pieces that are from solids to planes and plane to line. With taking that into account I ended up with the work I submitted above.

Lines

Here are some of my initial line forms I came up with focusing on shapes and different line variations I could come up with to help form my composition. These were very rough shapes and forms that did not make it into my final composition but I wish I would have added some variation of these models in there somewhere as I feel they are interesting .

Here I have more in depth composition and forms I wanted to include in my final composition but some stuff still needed to be changed. I liked the feel of the suggested plane and was going to make the round plane with vertical columns of some sort but when we get to my final you will notice that was not the case and it was mainly because I ran out of time and though I had come up with a composition that did not need anything else added to it.

Lastly here is the final images for my piece. I had the idea of an organic shape made out of dead tree branches sanded down to give a different worn look to them, almost like a living animal. This is not my first rendition of this work though, the first part was very lackluster to say the least, it was not interesting, a very symmetrical, dome like, and a pain to look at. After a brief talk with my Professor, he stated that I was not far off from having an interesting piece and that there was some quick alterations that would make it a very more effective piece for the assignment. I made a few quick alterations to the piece and this is the work you see here that is the result. One of the hardest challenges from this work is figuring out how to connect the pieces, I initially was using dowel rods to hold everything together but the smaller pieces was giving me trouble, I then decided to use twine and wrap the pieces together to secure the work, I then used some super glue to hold some of the twine and wood in place. This was a very effective strategy to use but if I were to do a work like this again I would do some research on what type of knot and how I should tie the two pieces together. Overall this was a very fun piece to make and construct but at the same time was very time consuming and very frustrating. I would like to make something like this again but on a little smaller scale I think. 

Planes

Here is all my preliminary models that I made for our planes project. The outline for this project is that we had to have 4 planes, Base plane - which is the bottom of the plane that would be normally be on the base of the object, a depth plane - which is like a base plane but is the "containment" plane for the base plane generally is above the base plane. We had to have a portrait and landscape plane. Additionally we had to have an exterior and interior space and a hole in one of the planes. In the beginning I had a hard time with how to make an exterior I kept thinking as long as there is something I thought of was an exterior I was okay. But I soon realized that making an exterior had to do a specific thing. How I though of an exterior and what I kept telling myself was to "make a corner of a cube". It had to 'keep people out' in a sense to become an exterior. once I got that down I played with a few principles that I learned from 2-d and our solids project. I played with attitude of the planes, spatial intervals, inscribing, connection types and a few others. I love the look of inscribing and decided I wanted to take that and make it a very big process of my sculpture. My final sculpture ended up closely related to the bottom left model that is in my process images.

Here is the final pictures from the planed project. Overall I had a lot of fun designing my sculpture and watching it come together was super cool! I feel like the inscribing I included into the sculpture helped this design in a outstanding way. I ended up painting it even though we did not have to but I did just because I like how it gives it a unified finish and brings out the inscription that are in my piece. I did have an issue with the landscape plane that was the only part that gave me the hardest time. I drilled to far through with the counter sink and had to glue another piece to the base plane to fix my mistake. It worked but then after I glued it in and screwed it I realized after it was too late that it shifted ever so slightly to make it not a 90 degree connection which is something I hope to be able to fix if I can get it unscrewed and unglued. At certain angles it does not affect the piece but if you view it to where it lines up with the 90 degree portrait piece you can tell that it is not at that ideal 90 degrees. I love the look of my sculpture and feel that this is definitely something that could be a large scale work at a park or at a center city park I just wish that I would have saw the mistake before it was too late.

Solids

The top images are wip's that are combining the foam together to make a more solid rather than a plane or line. I then imitated the figure onto the square foam pieces to make a outline to have help when sculpting my peaces for assembly.

The four images show the 3-D object in the round with various shadows and angles that I feel make the image very interesting. The shadows the come from the different shapes that are hidden in the work make very pleasing object to look at. I love the contrast in size between the large object falling over vs. the small object keeping everything tied down. I ended up using rocks and some change to help keep the object from toppling over due to the drastic difference in size that i would say is the hardest thing for me to accomplish. Making sure it was not too heavy and that it looks like nothing is inside the smaller object was a huge success in my opinion and I am very happy with how this image turned out!

This is the second work through of the solids project focused on the surface quality more than anything. I decided to keep the same design due to the fact that even though it is slightly linear in one viewpoint I believe it was interesting enough in the round to not change the design. Like I stated the surface quality was the biggest draw back from the first assignment. Though everything was smooth and for the most part the same surface quality I decided to take a more stone/marble look for the final product which was more of the look I originally wanted to go for. I ran into a problem during the connection part, during that one side of the object looks to be one full object which is a easy fix. Taking a file to the one side would be able to extenuate the connection on the two object for a more dynamic look. Another issue I ran in to us the weight distribution. The way I orientated the larger object kept making the sculpture tip over. To help counter balance this the smaller object that is suspended on the middle object has 4 rocks set into the object to balance out the sculpture. Overall reworking this design was a good idea, it came out almost exactly how I pictured it to come out like.