SOCIAL SPACE
Social space is a general space created by creatures(especially human) because of their connections with each other.
For the Space/Materiality: Habitat final project, our group held the idea that social space should never be a place where only human could interact with each other, but also a location where human could feel their connections with nature. With this specific idea in mind, we wanted to take elements from nature into our project. And the major objects we came up with that could represented nature were leaves. We noticed that whenever we walked into parks or along streets, leaves were every where. Leaves could easily provide people feeling of nature by their special smelling, cracking sounds and visual colors. To make the effect even stronger to audiences, we chose the location on the twelfth floor in the stair case to put our installation so that the sense of nature will even be more effective with nature light and silence environment.
Space Final Project (Side View 1)
Space Final Project (Up View 1)
Space Final Project (Detail 1)
To start with the whole installation, we selected two important keys that we had learned the whole semester from Space/Materiality class:the method to make polyhedrons and the theory of minimal surface. In order to achieve the idea of transparency, we ordered mash online shipping from China to make polyhedrons. The size of each polyhedron was well designed as side length 4 inches(small), 5 inches(large) so that it could fit the environment. We selected same types of leaves early morning in the Washington Square Park that looked nice and could easy to be broke into parts. We believed that chips of leaves and mash polyhedrons would take our audiences feeling of both nature and modern technology. We totally made 80 mash polyhedrons which (each side)connected by the glue gun. For 50 of the mash polyhedrons, we filled leaf chips on their surface and for the other 30, we neither left them blank nor just glued a small amount of leaf chips on their surface by white glue. The reason for different amount of leaves on each polyhedrons’ surface was that we tended to create a feeling of change gradually on our final installation so that from the iron banister to the center of installation which suspending in the mid-air there would be a change from modern to nature. We spent weeks deciding which kind of minimal surface would fit our installation, and finally we selected one which can let a large amount of light went through. The way we chose thin wires to connect individual polyhedron. Thread and fishing nylon was chose to connect our installation and the whole environment.
Space Final Project (Side View 2)
Space Final Project (Up View 2)
Space Final Project (Detail 2)
Space Final Project (Detail 3)
Space Final Project (Detail 4)
The project we made follows the idea of sustainability. No matter leaves or mash, the materials we chose to made the whole project was sustainable. And we were planning to move our project to the Washington Square Park as a installation but also a container that can plant plants in.
