Relections, Part VIII
Now that I’ve covered all the travels, it’s time to to start wrapping this up back on the domestic front.
As I stated before, I had dabbled into set design and theater. There was a lot more of a discovery process there and has had such a profound affect on the way I think about design, I feel like not devoting more time to it would be irresponsible.
Dog Sees God was the beginning of a long journey that lasted from third year to graduation. It began by taking acting classes and being able to participate in the ten-minute and one act play festivals that occurred at Iowa State, for which I am incredibly thankful to be a part of. If you have anything like this around you, go and give it a try. It’s the perfect thing for amateurs like me and it’s incredibly fun. You meet alot of new and different people and get to experience that process of creating a play in a manageable proportion. These were the only things that fit in my schedule for actual acting, and barely at that, but I got to do some great stuff with great people.
The classes were great too, and opened me up to the world of design in a way I had never thought of before. First, in the acting classes, I became aware of how the actor’s body inhabits space. We did a lot of breathing exercises, a lot of games that focused the senses and the mind, making us aware of everything around us. We also were taught to allow impulses occur and follow them through to create natural responses. I began to understand an idea about honesty and the relationship to an audience that I felt could be connected to architecture. I had already thought that improvisation would crate interesting architecture, but I had never thought before that by denying these sudden, natural impulses, we might create bad design. I was beginning to become more keenly aware of how architecture relates to all those who interact with it, physically or non-physically. There was more to come of this, but not until my final year.
After my acting classes, I took set design and script analysis. I really need to explain these classes together. During script analysis, we began to talk about previous action and how it you have to read the script to understand what happened before page one. It was then that I started to get these feelings of deja vu. I had heard this before, I knew exactly what he was talking about. It occurred to me that the process of actually analyzing a script was no different than analyzing a site. Once I began to learn the language, I started to understand that the entire process that I was seeing in set design was incredibly similar to building design. I understand that most arts are interrelated and their processes very similar, but I have heard about buildings and sculpting, buildings and painting, but buildings and performance…well, I had heard the word performance tossed around environmentally, but could a building perform on a site? Could the building be a stage, an actor, and a director all at once? Or was it different, where the architect is director, the building the stage, and the people the actors? Can our facades be considered backdrops for the activity that takes in front and behind? And, environmentally, if a building responds naturally to its environment, as an actor might respond on stage, could green design become an innate part of design, without the need for checklists and points? And the big question, what kind of spectacle could I make thinking like this? It was as if something clicked in my head and I started to mold this idea that I’m still working on. I wrote about it for a class, but it was still so new to me then.
As such, I’ve been trying to keep my foot in this world as well as architecture. While I was at Iowa State, I tried to stay in with the people in the theater department, and I got to do some really good projects and see even more come to life. I am trying to attend plays on a regular basis, as well as seeking out the hidden gems where I’m at to find some of the more experimental and forward thinking theater occurring so that I might get a sense of where things are headed. I also want to draw on these ideas moreso now that I find myself out of school and needing to distinguish myself from the crowd. There are few opportunities, and they are far between, and if need be, I might just have to make my own.
There is more to this, but this is where it began. I’m going to finish it all up soon and really begin talking about these ideas once the reflections are done. Stay tuned folks.
