“This project imagines a way to explore space and create a tangible keepsake of your experiences. Urban Textures is a collection of impressions of places that allows you to make small impressions of textures you will find in the environment and keep these as a collection of your experiences in the city.” -Andrew Robinson, professor
My inspiration for the design of my archive came from the childhood memory of my mother’s jewelry box. It was beautifully embellished and traditionally Korean, where she stored her most precious pieces of jewelry. It was forbidden for me to touch and placed out of my reach, making it all the more desirable. With that in mind, I decided to create an archive reminiscent of my mother’s jewelry box. Reference pictures below.
This was my original model made out of chipboard. I wanted to incorporate many compartments to store all 40 of my textures.
As I kept exploring different models, I decided to settle on one that looked mostly (almost exactly) like the middle reference picture.
Sketchbook pictures and drawn out representations of the archive, including measured dimensions of each wooden piece, will be uploaded soon.
Following are documentation of my progress.
I realized that making precise measurements of each piece and planning out every move was crucial in moving forward in this project. There were countless times that I miscalculated a measurement because I hadn’t written it down, and many instances I had to start over because of careless mistakes. For example, I found that the dimensions of each face piece of the box wasn’t exactly identical so the box would not piece together right. Through these mistakes, I learned to be precise and immaculate in every cut and also learned how to use basically every machine in the wood shop.
These are inaccurately cut pieces by even a centimeter; I couldn’t use these for the exterior of my archive. However, I saved them because they would come in handy to make my smaller interior drawers.
The second time around, I managed to make exactly straight cuts, and all ten pieces were uniform. These I used.
I assembled the pieces together with hardware, filled in areas with wood glue, and sanded each side. Then I stained the wood.
I realized through this project that extreme precision and patience was key…It took forever but I’m really satisfied with the end result.
