-Assignment 1-review

The Memory-book is a graphical project, on-going and eventually life-long, paper based, consisting on the collection and assemblage of drawings, editorial and private photography, private documents and messages, used transportation tickets and any other trace of personal activity on a bi-dimensional form. It works as deposit of memories and image album and is set therefore on chronological order. The book has an A4 format, landscape, and is kept together by two loose metal rings. 160 g. paper, or heavier, is used as base for the collages. Original writings, posters or flyers on paper of comparable weight are also used as assemblage medium. The project is running at the moment on a third volume.

The Spoorhuis is a waiting house for bus drivers, located on the newly design station square of the city of Voorburg. The area around the station was transformed in order to integrate efficiently several means of public transportation and related facilities, while offering high quality pubic space. A connection between the human scale of the user and the complexity of the infrastructural network was the main goal of this design and the Spoorhuis plays an iconic role within it by its materialization, position and form. It’s a small building occupying a 6 per 15 meters area comprising two volumes under a single roof. One of them is the actual house, the other one is only a light display for a poem. The volumes have the same depth but are shifted, diametrically positioned within the roof, introducing a dynamic character into this sheltered space for public use in between them. The volumes are mostly in glass and the combination of this transparency with the perspective variation introduced by the sifted volumes allows the Spoorhuis to be perceived in many different ways depending on the position of the user within the whole station area. The volumes get lighted up in the evening and the house becomes a safe coordinate which polarizes the public use of the square or simply works as orientation point. The outer material of the walls and roof is in concrete and has a cold and hard character, while the inner side is in wood and intensifies the feeling of being sheltered. There is no distinguishing between the materialization inside the glass or outside the glass. The public space is seen as an extension of the house interiority. The inner floor surface is 45 cm higher than the Square and its extension beyond the glass pane allows passersby to literally use it as bench.

“A sério, não fui eu” is a 16 seconds long stop-motion film, made out 17 frames. Each frame is a pencil hand sketch on tracing paper of a man holding a newspaper and communicating with somebody out of the observer view. The character is taken out of a state of peace by what appears to be an accusation; the sequence of frames show how he tries to explain himself or dismiss any responsibility about something and how he naturally gets back to the original state of tranquility. A fragment of music from a free-jazz quartet, Tetterapadequ, is used as emotional backbone of the sequence.