Saturday, January 5, 2008





































2 comments:

Frances Grob said...

Hi Michelle-

I enjoyed your pages. The images are great and I really liked how you brought a personal connection to them. I think that the emotional connection one has to a place can make an everlasting memory. Great job!

enno said...

Michelle,

This second time around I might have even better comments on your work as before. Let me start by saying that your carefully crafted boards speak of the pride and love that you invested in this task!

Your focus on emotion is a well chosen, but as you point out difficult to express. Places that are meaningful to you because of your experiences there might be meaningless to others. But in some instances the quality of a place ( the tower where your husband proposed to you) is a factor in what happened there and this quality can be communicated independently from your personal history. In other words: he chose this place for reason inherent in the site,

Your theme of connectivity is certainly one of those aspects and it reoccurs in different forms in in postings. The sense of place and belonging is related to this. Although you show examples located in nature, the topic is relevant to urban sites as well.

Following the implications of the definitions that you included it may be possible to further sharpen the focus and identify a whole range of states of consciousness (including "hate" & "fear")that could be evoked by architecture. They are certianly evoked by music. You reference symphonies in specific, which remind me of Gustav Mahler's work: his vast symphonies - some of them written in a small mountain hut in Austria - deal with a wide range of states of consciouness.

The reference to music is also helpful, because it allows me to point out that the effects in music are carefully crafted and formed adding a layer of logic and calculation (music = frozen form)to balance and supplement the emotional content. I mention this in order for you avoid the pitfalls of an overly emotional approach in which reason and logic (which are just as much a part of architecture) come too short.

Ideally feeling and thinking go hand in hand.