Colin wasn’t sure why I got so excited when I saw his collage. The assignment was to represent ideas without representing the form of the building per say. For my student, the giraffes standing on the site have something to do with the sort of poise he wants in his tower; the image “worked” in a way that was hard to specify. For me, it reminded me of one of my favorite essays to use in studio, Caroline O’Donnell’s “Gibson, Giraffes, And Gibbons” published in log 8 in 2006. The giraffes stand for an approach to site that is biased rather than comprehensive, design responding to “the abstraction of particularities.” For the giraffes, this means the treetops; for our studio, we’ll find out on Monday’s site visit. Hmm, time to re-read Ingraham’s Architecture Animal again.
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