I am looking to figure out how the building can dematerialize. The hollow accumulates a lot of fog, both natural and artificial from the neighboring boiler plant. I’m not looking to cloak the building in the fog, but I think it would be interesting to consider the exterior of the building as a porous, indefinite whole. The materiality can dematerialize, shift, obscure, and float the mass.

The interior social spaces are unrelated to the external form, creating an experience that cannot be objectified by understanding an exterior to the interior. Like the belly of a whale, the inside spaces and structure have no evident relationship to the exterior form. This results in an architecture that is purely experiential.

Panther Hollow’s location in the midst of cultural and educational institutions creates a space which doesn’t belong the urban condition of the neighborhood. The topographical rupture includes a small village, railroad, and quick connections between neighborhoods. Above, each institution stands tall above the topographical condition below.

Carnegie Mellon overlooks boiler plant

Overview of Panther Hollow Institutions

Homes overlooking lake

Homes follow the topographical shifts of the hollow

House on Diulus Way

The topography creates perceptions of stable buildings that on closer inspection are not as stable as perceived from above. This exurban condition within the city is considered an ‘other’ to the permanence of the city. This unstable condition is ripe for the locus of a transient inhabitant, who maps the city from within this space.

Various conglomerations accumulate around pedestrian connections

New pedestrian conditions are formed from the new light rail station. This city circulation becomes the infrastructure for a hotel and dormitory. The transience of the passerby engages the transient habitation of the architecture.

Structural Component Study

These components vary in their overlapping distances, creating a variation in spatial porosity. I think this system offers a more comprehensive structure that could be applied to and disturb the current system. It seems likely that as variations in scale and density occur, this would have an interesting perceptual exeprience.

Pittsburgh’s hollows

Possible site locations

Community typologies surrounding hollows

Circulation typologies in hollows

Panther hollow’s community divisions and circulatory connections

Photography has a clear relationship to architecture: the documentation of space for those who are unable to experience it. It provides an opportunity for people to understand the physical relationships of a certain situation. Its use allows architects to publish their work, for news agencies to inform the public, and for google to document the world. Slowly, the physicality of the world is collected in images and stored in databases, accessible to everyone.

Backwards and forwards.

Architects rely on representational forms of art to design. Drawings, models, virtual reality, and photography enable viewers to understand architecture they cannot experience. The architecture lives in an imagined arena manifested by each representation. Viewers piece together this information and create their own imagination of the architecture. Each medium creates a different understanding of the architecture that another medium cannot give. None of the mediums, however, allow a viewer to understand the architecture as an experienced reality. More interestingly, the experienced architecture will not tell you what a drawing or photograph can tell you.

Each medium edits reality and displays the most pertinent information that the medium can explain. A plan of a building allows us to understand the circulatory relationships between spaces, their various sizes, etc. A plan, however, cannot help us to experience to the architecture, it enables us to understand a holistic interpretation of various aspects of the architecture. A plan is important, however, because experiencing architecture will not make such relationships obvious.

These images are both inside and outside.

Photography, on the other hand, can only document the reality of the world, not our imagined proposals for it. In architecture, photography comes after the fact, once the design (the imagination phase) is complete. It is used to document the product and to inform people about the architecture.

A house in Mongolia is not important unless it has been photographed. This same house in Mongolia need not be visited if it can be seen in a photograph. The house has become important because of the photograph, but at the same time the photograph denies the importance of experiencing the house. The photograph of the house is more important than the architecture of the house.

These are dark.

I think it is important for architects to challenge photography’s assertion over the reality of architecture. The process of creating a photograph alters reality. A few examples include the altered perception of time, the flattening of space into two dimensions, viewing the world from a single viewpoint, and the distortion the camera lens creates. These are aspects, among many others, that separate the medium of photography from the reality it represents.

These are also the aspects which make photography an interesting medium. I think it is interesting that unlike any other medium, photography begins with reality. It alters and distorts many spatial relationships, but it must always have the trace of the real located within its representation. Unlike drawing or painting, the essence of photography is its distorting relationship to the real world.

It has been hard to think of a specific photograph that is important to me. I can easily think of groups or collections of photographs that I definitely feel are important, but it is hard to pick one out of the bunch to talk about. There are family photos, photos of my life, photos I have taken, photos my friends have taken, and photos that have made me think a lot about photography. Some are important to me because of a personal connection to the subject, others because of why they were taken, and still others because I do not have a personal connection. So how do I pick?

It seems like photography begins for most people, myself included, as a personal record of one’s life. Most of my life was well photographed until the age of 10, and then there is a big gap until I get to college. I think its amusing because the years without photos are years I didn’t enjoy so much anyway, so I don’t need another reminder of them. Those years were also years that I didn’t look at photographs from when I was younger. It wasn’t until fairly recently that I have seen the two boxes in the basement of my childhood. Not seeing these photos until now has made the age of 5 seem like it was longer ago than my memory makes me feel.

Most of the photos were taken when I still lived in France and my dad was alive. In my head, this doesn’t seem like so long ago, I can remember how I felt pretty well. When I see these photographs, however, it exemplifies the differences between then and now. The way I look, how outgoing I was, the really great places I grew up in, etc. The photographs exist of me, but in a context that is not attached to my reality of today. Within two years, my dad passed away, I moved to Pittsburgh, and the photos stopped.

What I remember about growing up in Paris is the happiness everyone seemed to have there, and the mystery of the intertwining spaces of the city. Things in Paris seemed happy, huge, and very strange. It was an adult’s world and I didn’t understand it, but it was interesting. Pittsburgh became quite the opposite: people were not so nice and the mystery of the suburbs didn’t match the mystery of the city. I want to know the Paris in my memory more than the real Paris. Whenever I visit, I feel like my perception of my childhood is rewritten with an adult’s point of view. As Paris becomes understandable, its mystery disappears, and so do the perceptions of my memories. Photographs help make Paris a real, concrete, immutable thing. They replace my memories. Seeing the photographs after such a long hiatus was a shocking reminder that my perception of things is more important to me than reality. The more I see these images, the more they replace my memories. I don’t like that.

That’s not so say there are exceptions. I think the photos of my father and I are really important. They document the small amount of time we had together. Unfortunately, these photographs of my dad have almost completely erased any memories of my perceptions of him. Most of the images have become my memory. The only memory I have that isn’t from a photograph is the expression he would have and the way he used to stand. I don’t have many other memories of how he looked or felt. My mother has never had the photos of my dad on display, because she feels like it is sad to have reminders of people who have died, and she would rather remember the good times they had together. I appreciate that she has done that, to the extent that it allows me to attempt to remember him for him, and not for his photographs.

These are personal photographs that are important to me. Photos from my childhood and photos of my dad. They are important because the subject of the image reminds me of an experience I had. Slowly, the photograph replaces my memory. Should my perception of things, or the camera’s perception dictate what I think is real?

More and more, we each see photographs every day of people, places, events, and things that we do not have a personal connection with. The photographs are the only reality we know of these situations. We place our own values and perceptions onto them. But the reality of the photograph and the reality of the situation are not the same.

I’m not sure how I feel about this sequence.

10:37am

10:38am

10:39am

10:40am

10:41am

10:42am

10:43am

10:44am

10:45am

10:46am

10:47am

The camera photographed the space every ten seconds while furniture and garbage were rearranged. It is unclear if all 55 images should be separate, condensed into minutes like these, or shown all in one. None of them read the way I want them to yet.

55 10 second frames

Regardless, this should be a portrait, but I am pretty sure its a spatial documentation. The change in the space documents an individual’s life for a specific amount of time, so it seems like it might be both a portrait and a space.