Specifying the Area

Keeping in mind the idea previously mentioned of a continous garden that is being interrupted by solid elements all throughout campus, I decided to focus on one specific area of the UNAM, as an area of transition, which is the area of the School of Architecture. In this area, the main quad, which is a very big and continous garden space, is loosing that continuity and starting to be disrupted by the school of architecture, creating small pieces of non continous garden. This transition moment ends with the begining of the road that surrouds campus, which has no gardens at all, and also counts with a more linear and dynamic arrangement than the big and continous garden.

For my first map, What I tried to to was to give some depth to the area that is being analyzed, giving some emphasis to the important elements such as the regulating lines that the map has, the green spaces, and the solid elements that show the idea of disruption previously mentioned. The area of the road at the bottom is represented with linear elements, also with depth, that represent the dynamic quality of the bottom part. As for the area of transition, The School of Architecture itself, its the part with more importancem therefore the 3 dimensional qualities of those elements differ from the rest in order to give it more importance.

For the second map, the axonometric drawing, I am showing the plane of the area analyzed, and on top, all of the extruded buildings, represented as solids, in order to show the massive quality of the buildings and the capability of disruption these buildings have. Underneath the plane, the regulating lines are shown, as the possible arrangement and extension of the gardens which suggest a big open space, that is not disrupted by any element at all, and that reminds us that the gardens found at the UNAM in the end are all one. Sections are cut through the transition zone, to show that mass and void of the transition area.

As for the third map, the concept I was thinking was to base my map on my previous project, Boîte-en-Valise, and treat the UNAM campus as a cubist painting, and give depth to the different elements found in the site around the main library, in order to create not only different spaces, unique spaces, such as in the previous project but also, to show that the idea behind the UNAM campus is very abstract, very modernist, turned into useful spaces.

Area of Focus

The area of the UNAM campus I am going to focus in, is the Main Quad, and how from this place, rivers of green space flow from it, and spread all around campus. The relationship between all of this green spaces, that in the end are only one, and how they are interrupted by buildings and concrete walkways is what I am going to analyze.

Map(in) UNAM: Site as Text

Assignment 3 has to do with mapping the UNAM campus in order to show the viewer some contidion of this campus. Mapping is all about interpreting what you see. Seeing is all about perspectives. Therefore, mapping is just showing a personal perspective of something. When first introduced to this project, I thought of ancient maps used by Spaniards that came to colonize the Americas, and how they seemed somewhat distorted from the maps we are now used to see. These maps are not necesarilly distorted but just an ancient perspective of the world, according to a group of people.

Following this principles, we now have maps that depict everyhting, from sound, to geography, to population density, etc. Normally, in order to show your point of view of things, or to be able to map somehting you need to be familiar with the place, or at least have gone once. As a contrast, none of our group has ever been to the UNAM. This is why I see this assignment as the perfect opportunity to experiment with the UNAM campus, and to show the perspectives of a place with a magnitude, that has just been explored by us with the use of pictures.

Still Interpreting the Box

As I kept developing my concept, I worked on ways of creating space, or 3 dimensional elements, with the use of planes, or 2 dimensional elements. This elements would strictly be facade elements that were found in the murals, which led me to the idea of trying to merge the four facades in the interior of the box by giving depth to all facades. This idea was not successful because the space inside the box is not very big, and the elements start having conflict with each other, creating confusion and not much clarity on the definition of space.

For my final scheme, I decided literally to build one of the facades with depth. Basing myself in one of my previous projects for another class, in which I took a cubist painting by Picasso, and gave it depth, I decided to give the same depth to the mural and that way create space as well. To this idea, I also added some of the abstract elements that were used in the previous schemes. For this final scheme, elements would be vertical and not horizontal, creating space with the use of horizontal supports. Frontally, this scheme looks like an abstraction of the mural, but from the side, you are able to see the space that these vertical elements create.

Interpreting the Box

For Assignment 2, we had to interpret the interior of the Central Library at the UNAM. Basing ourselves on Marcel Duchamp's and Cornell Boîte-en-Valise's containers as inspirations, we had to interpret or find out what could possibly be inside the library. Considering that the shape of the building is a rectangular prism, the possibilities were infinite.

I decided to approach this problem by the use of abstract elements in order to define space. These abstract elements would meet in any angle and even cross each other, and would create space in between each.

After a couple of crits, my approach became to interpret the murals that are in the facade, with the same goal, creating space. I decided to use real elements on the facade, as well as abstract some others, and with the use of supporting elements, define that previously mentioned space.

The Mistery Inside a Mirror

When I presented the book of mirrors to the crits, more than telling a story, I showed them the mysterious reality of a mirror itself. I demonstrated how inside a dull, old cover, we can find many different ways of seeing ourselves and our surroundings. In the book of mirrors, every page, is a different way of seeing the world, as if we were seeing it from the point of view of someone else, becoming a whole new experience as well. More than telling some story, the book of mirrors invites us to experience a different way of seeing our everyday life.

During the final review, the crits thought that the ideas above mentioned, were well represented in the book. The idea of creating a dull, boring cover, and demonstrating the complete opposite in the inside was very effective, as well as the idea of having a very heavy book, with thick pages, which gives mirrors that importance that most of us don't, although they form a very important part of our lives. Finally, it was very effective the materials that I used to experiment reflection as well, as the shaped used and mostly the use of text to demonstrate the two approaches that I had, a book of mirrors represented textually, and a book of mirrors represented visually, and also the fact that no matter what angle or what distance the mirrors were looked at, they would always show a new perspective.

Besides what the crits thought was effective about my representation of the book of mirrors, what I think was the most effective overall, was the fact that I was able to understand books a lot more, and that I was able to bond with my book, and understand and represent the mysteries inside a mirror.

The Book of Mirrors

Our first assignment for this semester was to develop a conceptual book about Peter Greenaway's "Prospero's Books". I chose the Book of Mirrors, which according to Prospero, is " Bound in gold cloth and very heavy, this book has some eighty shining mirror pages, some opaque, translucent, some manufactured with silvered papers, some coated in paint, some covered in a film of mercury that will roll off the page unless treated cautiously. Some mirrors simply reflect the reader, some reflect the reader as he was three minutes previously, some reflect the reader as he will be in a year's time, as he would if he were a child, a woman, a monster, an idea, a text or an angel. One mirror constantly lies, one mirror sees the world backward, another upside down. One mirror holds on to its reflection as frozen moments infinitely recalled. One mirror simply reflects another mirror across a page. There are ten mirrors whose purpose Prospero has yet to define."

I decided that the best way of representing the book of mirrors was to understand mirrors completely. To achieve this task, I began experimenting with different types of mirrors, materials, shapes, and different reflections. These experiments, not only gave me a better understanding of mirrors and their properties, but also gave me plenty of ideas to include in the book of mirrors.

To the right, you can see one of my first ideas, which was experimenting with a normal mirror, but blocking certain areas of it, in order for the reader to just be able to reflect some part of his face, instead of all of it. If you flip the page once, another space is opened, and although you can't see your entire reflection, the reader can see something more of his face. If the page is fliped a third time, his entire reflction will be seen through a normal mirror.




These other pictures are of one of my latest ideas, the result of one of my experiments, which began as an experiment of combining mirrors and shapes, and that ended up as the idea of reflection through a shattered mirror. The shattered mirror is represented through uniform shapes and different depths of the mirrors.