Kalan Rutstein`s Complete Thesis Booklet

Kalan Rutstein`s Complete Thesis Booklet

Not Really...
A Thesis
by Kalan Rutstein
A Thesis
by Kalan Rutstein
Advised by Andrew Atwood
and Ajay Manthripagada
U.C Berkeley College of Environmental Design
2014
Kalan Rutstein
Not Really...
Contents
Kalan Rutstein
Introduction.................................1
What?..........................................3
How.............................................17
False Backdrop................29
Forced Perspective..........39
Mirrors.............................47
Proposal.....................................53
Notes............................................70
Kalan Rutstein
Introduction
This thesis explores the space between real and fake. It will begin
with an exploration of fake places, fake materials, and false perspective,
among other fake things, with the ultimate goal of employing these
investigations in the design of a hostel. Specific moments within the
program will be prioritized, such as the lobby, hallways, and rooms.
The medium of scenic design will be investigated in order to learn
techniques of spatial illusion.
Finally, experiments of creating and breaking illusion spatially will
be conducted, captured and analyzed.
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What?
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The fake and false
We constantly and persistently try to escape reality. Movies,
novels, and theater are just a few of the mediums that we have created to
transport us. The best fiction is grounded in reality - it lets us simultaneously
lose ourselves and find ourselves. I propose an Architecture that, like a
work of fiction, re-situates us in order to situate us.
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Frau Im Mond by Fritz Lang 1
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Fake Place
Fake place strives to re-situate the inhabitant by concealing and
suppressing evidence of actual place. It fabricates a space that pretends to be
something that it isn’t.
Fake place forces a process of reconciliation between the real and the
false.
People from time immemorial have sought the thrill of this re-situating effect through books, theater, music, film, and so on.
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Frau Im Mond by Fritz Lang 2
Architectural Device For A Forsythe Movement by Peter Welz 3
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Fake Material
Fake material assists the production of fake place by taking away the
physical and logistical limitations of real materials. Ask a fake brick what it
wants to be and it will tell you that it doesn’t care.
The creation of fake material is not just an opportunity to mimic, but
an opportunity to adjust reality. Concrete can be made more or less brutal,
wood more or less organic.
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Architectural Device For A Forsythe Movement by Peter Welz 4
Santa Maria presso San Satiro by Donato Bramante and Giovanni
Antonio Amadeo 5
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False Perspective
False perspective has been used in theater and film to control and
adjust scale and depth when circumstances limit them.
Believability is certainly one reason to adjust perspective, but it is
also an opportunity to reconstruct reality and present us with a new frame
through which we can peer and walk.
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Santa Maria presso San Satiro by Donato Bramante and Giovanni
Antonio Amadeo 6
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Where?
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A Hostel
The hostel could be anywhere, but must be placed somewhere; so I
will place it in San Francisco. It will be designed as a series of illusive moments surrounded by standard hotel/hostel spaces such as kitchens, quarters,
dining rooms, multipurpose rooms, etc. The illusive effects will take place
in the lobby, the hallways, and the rooms. At times the real and the fake
will blend into each other, creating the experience of being transported and
grounded simultaneously.
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Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson 7
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Lobby
The lobby will be the first illusive space. The lobby has a clear
frontality and program. We enter it and walk straight to the reception desk.
This moment provides the perfect opportunity to illicit spectacle and illusion
because the inhabitant’s view point and movement are controlled. Followed
by the grand entrance is the mundane experience of waiting around for
the room to be readied or for someone to take your bags. This is when one
might look back and notice the mechanics that created illusion. The sense of
wonderment tires and is replaced by a fascination with the machine.
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Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson
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The Shining by Stanley Kubrick 9
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Hallway
Like the lobby there is a frontal relationship that creates a one point
perspective. In the hallway, the view and movement of the person is even
more controlled. This opportunity is rarely capitalized upon. Typically
the doors are monotonous, the carpet drab and repetitive, and the overall
experience bleak. There is an opportunity to create a dynamic and shifting
space by adjusting the rhythm of repeating doors and carpet pattern, forcing
the perspective in exciting and unexpected ways and alluding to multifarious
spaces behind the walls and doors.
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The Shining by Stanley Kubrick 10
2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick 11
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Room
While the first impression is important in the ‘lobby’, lasting
impression is crucial in the ‘room’. You will spend most of your time here
performing your most intimate functions. Your movement in the room is less
expected and controllable than it is in the lobby and hallway, so the illusion
relies less on points of view and more on perception over time.
Because one ‘lives’ in this space, there is an opportunity to
drastically re-situate the inhabitant by subverting his notions about such
perfunctory functions as sleeping. Perhaps the interior can pretend to be an
exterior that lets you sleep, shower, and shave in simultaneously new and
familiar ways.
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2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick 12
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My Fair Lady set design by Robert Carsen 13
How?
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Scenic Design
I will investigate techniques and principles of scenic design, a
medium wholly concerned with pretense, to inform my process of creating
illusive space.
The key difference between a person that watches a film or play and
one that stays at this hotel is mobility. His position is fixed in the former,
and dynamic in the latter. Some of my design will adapt to address this
change but much of it will intentionally stay the same. In such a space one
might walk in and be exhilarated or overwhelmed by the spectacle and then
grounded by proverbially and actually peering behind the curtain.
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Electronic City set design by Paul Gelinas 14
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Black Box
With scenic design, it is important to understand the space one is
designing within. The black box is one of two main spaces in theater. In it,
pretense is made explicit. The machinery assisting the fakery is ever present
and on display along with the play. Plays that take place in black boxes often
focus attention on the performer because their ability to create illusion is
limited by the architecture of the space within which everything is exposed.
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Centre Pompidou by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers 15
Chroma Set design by John Pawson 16
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Proscenium
In a proscenium, the spectacle is controlled. The theater machine
disappears and we are allowed to escape. The audience simultaneously
focuses on what is contained by the frame and what exists beyond it.
When belief is totally suspended we imagine the world of the play beyond
the frame, and when reality periodically sets in we fix upon the machine
assisting the illusion.
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Interior by John Pawson 17
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When we enter this room our thoughts center on the tree and the
mechanism in place that shows it to us.
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In this room the mechanism is no longer visible and the extents of
the room are unknown. The space prompts us to ask ourselves what exists
beyond this room.
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When we cross the threshold of the frontal view, the illusion is
broken. The space becomes a conflation of what we see from the front, the
back, and in between. The perceived and the real flicker and we experience
space as expanding and contracting.
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The Salk Institute by Louis Kahn 18
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The Salk Institute is a built example of a space that oscillates between hiding and exposing. The stairs and offices are obscured from one
side creating a space that isn’t about laboratories.
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The Salk Institute by Louis Kahn 19
When we pass the frontal plane the machine is revealed.
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Wizard of Oz, production design by Malcolm Brown, William
Horning, Jack Martin Smith 21
Idomeneo set design by Josef Svoboda 20
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False Backdrop
The proscenium necessitates a number of techniques that extend
space and heighten illusion. The false backdrop is one of the oldest
theatrical conventions. It allows the audience to see for miles in a space 30
feet deep.
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In this room the actual view isn’t important. Light enters through
frosted glass illuminating a fake mountain range.
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As one walks through the space, mountains get impossibly stretched
and contorted. The room oscillates between enclosed and expansive, natural
and strange.
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In this room, the view through a small punched window is framed by
a backdrop that completes the view. When the real and fake sync up, we see
what we would through a floor to ceiling window - except the world outside
will undoubtedly change and the backdrop will not.
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The uncanny view is made stranger when the real and fake no longer
line up.
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Spada Colonade by Bartolomeo Baronino 23
Teatro Olimpico by Andrea Palladio 22
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Forced Perspective
Forced perspective, like the backdrop, extends space and has the
added benefit of allowing us walk through and experience shifting perspective.
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In this hallway a fake marble floor and fake travertine walls cant
inward to create false perspective. They also bend to make concave surfaces
that create a fish eye lens effect. The chamber pretends to be larger than it is
- as a real thing and as the photo of itself.
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Cues of the trick are emphasized by the contrast between the inclined
bent surfaces inside and the planar ones outside; between the scrunching of
the pattern of floor panels inside and the regular pattern of panels 10 feet
away.
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When we step out of the chamber the machine is prominently expressed, emphasizing the divide between our experience in the chamber and
our experience out of it.
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Don Giovanni, set design by Michael Levine 25
La Traviata set design by Josef Svoboda 24
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Mirrors
Mirrors in theater have been used to break up the fixed frontal view,
to extend space, and to force the audience to acknowledge themselves – one
of the most dissonant moments in proscenium theater.
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In this hallway, parallel mirrors on the sides and a mirror leaning
forwards at the end of the hall create the perception of infinite space.
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As we step into the mirror space, we are confronted with multiples of
ourselves. The illusion is both broken and intensified. Space becomes both
confined and endless and we grapple with what’s real and what isn’t.
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Don Giovanni, set design by Michael Levine 25
La Traviata set design by Josef Svoboda 24
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Proposal
In this thesis, illusory techniques from set design are employed within a hostel to create spaces that oscillate between stable and unstable, real
and contrived.
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Partitions act like a proscenium. As you walk through the lobby, program
reveals itself. You experience sections through the image of a landscape at sunset that
was perceptible as you entered. The further in, the more disrupted the pretty picture
becomes.
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As you make your way to your room you pass through a double loaded
corridor. On different floors the experience is varied, but on the third you see an
ersatz image of hills and sky reflected in water. The tight one point perspective is
strongly juxtaposed by the image of a landscape in elevation. This makes for the most
extreme warping of the image as you walk through it, as opposed to the way it stops
and staggers as you pass through the image in the lobby.
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In this hallway perspective is forced by descending arch heights. The space is
expanded with mirrored walls that multiply the arches infinitely.
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In this room, you are met with light and diffuse colors that contrast the deep
saturated hallway. Hills are more refined through varied color that show concavity
and convexity.
In the lobby, the neo-classical architecture is masked to let the image
dominate. In this room the architecture and the image conflate. Even the blinds are
applied with the image. As you adjust them for light, an abrupt disturbance is created
when you see the building across the street.
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On the north side, a smaller room pretends to be the more glamorous room
on the south side. A panorama and a one point perspective collide to soften the
warping. The distortions more subtly unfold as you walk into the space. The space
you experience physically is forced to reconcile with the space you are experience
optically. You can’t rely on form and the shadows it produces to define your
experience in the space.
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Notes
1 Image courtesy of http://www.stummfilmkonzerte.de/glossar/stummfilme/frauimmond.
html
2 Image courtesy of http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2010/04/fritz-langs-woman-in-themoon-testament-of-dr-mabuse-cinefantastique-podcast-111/
3 Image courtesy of http://www.peterwelz.com/02.html
4 Image courtesy of http://www.peterwelz.com/02.html
5 Image courtesy of http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Goldmund100
6 Image courtesy of http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Goldmund100
7 Image courtesy of http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/files/2014/03/Screen-Shot-201403-26-at-6.42.06-PM.png
8 Image courtesy of http://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/2014/03/grand-budapest-hotel-behindthe-scenes-release-schedule/
9 Image courtesy of http://cdn.overclock.net/e/e0/e0a7feff_Ekubrick2.jpeg
10 Image courtesy of http://filmmakeriq.com/images/danny-lloyd-on-the-set-of-the-shining/
11 Image courtesy of http://www.collativelearning.com/the%20shining%20-%20chap%20
15.html
12 Image courtesy of http://www.digititles.com/movies/2001-a-space-odyssey-1968/photos/behind-the-scenes-filming
13 Image courtesy of http://www.sceneweb.fr/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/ChristineArand-dans-le-r%C3%B4le-dEliza-Doolittle-%C2%A9-Marie-No%C3%ABlle-RobertTh%C3%A9%C3%A2tre-du-Ch%C3%A2telet.jpg
14 Image courtesy of http://jiyounchang.com/past-show-archive/
15 Image courtesy of http://www.archdaily.com/149901/architecture-city-guide-paris/centre-georges-pompidou-all-rights-reserved-by-chimay-bleue/
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16 Image courtesy of http://www.johnpawson.com/works/chroma/
17 Image courtesy of http://www.johnpawson.com/works/plain-space-exhibition/
18 Image courtesy of http://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/12-post-your-photos/221340-architecture-salk-institute-la-jolla-california.html
19 Image courtesy of http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:File_Upload_Bot_
(Magnus_Manske)
20 Image courtesy of http://theredlist.com/wiki-2-20-881-1399-1143-view-operaprofile-opera-collection.html
21 Image courtesy of http://maxseesmovies.blogspot.com/2011/12/10-wizard-of-oz.
html
22 Image courtesy of http://philip.greenspun.com/images/pcd0803/vicenza-teatro-olimpico-straight-80
23 Image courtesy of http://timelessitaly.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/20131101101017.jpg
24 Image courtesy of Jeff Busby
25 Image courtesy of http://www.michaellevinestudio.com/work
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