t2: final lecture poster

I wanted to show Deborah Sussman's ability to flatten architectural space, but still keep its structural integrity.

t2: mies interactive editorial

t2: revised wireframes

last time my wireframes were not portraying interaction, so I redid the wireframes for the one that was picked during critique

t2: wireframe sketches

wireframes

everyone in my critique liked this one

more structured, i need more subtle interaction

t2: final mies editorial spreads

t2: mies editorial mock up

I changed my article to an interview with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from the book Conversations with Mies van der Rohe edited by Moises Puente. I took Marty's advice in exposing the grid in the background and showing the structure of the layout in order to speak to Mies' aesthetic of bringing out essential qualities of architecture. Overall, I wanted it to look constructed and rugged; not too delicate and refined, but not too messy and cluttered. The spreads I did previously were a bit on the cluttered side, so I cleaned it up a bit. I think I need to incorporate more of my material from viscom and a closing spread. The last page seems like an after thought too. Still, I'm actually pretty happy with how this turned out! I've been feeling kind of uninspired and indifferent these days, but this design gave me some inspiration. Critique: illegible, didn't take the viewer into consideration, have a more logical/rational layout, make a distinction between title and quotes

t2: mies magazine

i'm struggling a bit with figuring out how to depict Mies' work/personality and the specific content of the article through the spread layout and design. 

Things I want to take into consideration: 

-Mies accentuates essential qualities of buildings

-the article is about how Mies' image was created and its implications (usually seen with stern face and smoking a cigar)

-how to break conventional layouts

-i want the design to be very structural and raw, down to its essential qualities

-maybe i could incorporate the grid, though still trying to figure out how 

-how to incorporate color

the obsessive repetition and newspaper-cut-out aesthetic seems crude and rugged, which is what i'm going for - should i keep going in this direction, or should i try something else?

other possibilities:
-exposing the grid and all the lines
-a more refined approach with ample white space

t2: two iterations on mies

t2: layout sketches

three column

five column

open

t2: project 3 research

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Quotes
"Less is more"
"God is in the details"
"I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good."
"Means must be subsidiary to ends and to our desire for dignity and value."

Tidbits from articles

“But today at 70, after living inconspicuously in the U.S. for 20 years, Mies is bursting into full, spectacular view … [A sudden surge of high-profile commissions] is accepted by Mies as vindication of his lifelong principle that architecture must be true to its time. His own severely geometric, unembellished buildings have been designed to express in purest forms a technological concept of our technological age. They also … express the simplicity and sturdy nobility of Mies himself.” 

“Romanticists don’t like my buildings,” Mies told LIFE, speaking with the sort of simple, unadorned directness that one would expect from the visionary behind the Seagram Building, the Farnsworth House and other Modernist architectural touchstones. “They say [my designs] are cold and rigid. But we do not build for fun. We build for a purpose." 

Read more: Mies van der Rohe: Architect of the Modern World | LIFE.com http://life.time.com/culture/architect-mies-van-der-rohe-and-the-poetry-of-purpose/#ixzz2yAmAl5wc

Mies's real problem was that he was arguably the first architect to have the last word. His abiding achievement was to strip architecture down to its purest essence – to "almost nothing", as he put it. He was well placed to achieve this technically, taking advantage of progress in materials and engineering, but he was also philosophically driven towards his reductivist goal. He believed in revealing the underlying "truth" of the world, primarily through pure geometric forms and proportions. He succeeded brilliantly, of course, especially with austere American structures like the Seagram Building and the Farnsworth House. But where do you go from there? You can only reproduce what he did already or create inferior versions of it – hence the cheap Mies knockoffs that came to characterise the international style.

But times have changed and evidence of Mies's resurgence is everywhere. First, there's the reconstruction/restoration of some of his "greatest hits". The Barcelona Pavilion, for example – one of the most radical, influential designs of the modern movement, with its flowing open plan, elegant proportions and opulent materials. It was demolished after appearing at the Barcelona Exhibition in 1929, but was painstakingly rebuilt in the 1980s – it's there in Barcelona today. Then there's the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czech Republic, which he completed the year after. An expansion of the themes developed in Barcelona, it's another monumental modernist landmark – not necessarily a comfortable one to live in, but you can't have everything. The Tugendhat House, too, has just been restored, and opened earlier this year.  

Read More: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/mar/27/mies-van-der-rohe-google-doodle

Mies aspired to a certain universalism. He thought of the steel frame and industrialism as inherently international. He once made the pompous claim that architecture was the spirit of the epoch transposed into space. But he also responded to the hidden continuities of particular cities such as Berlin and Chicago. His arrival in the latter city in the late 1930s could have been engineered by fate. 

He was able to return to the precepts of the early North American frame skyscrapers of the late 19th century and give them a new energy inspired by the European avant-garde visions of ‘crystal cathedrals’ of the 1920s. But then the so called Chicago School was itself full of echoes from Mies’s early 19th century master Schinkel. Sullivan’s Wainwright skyscraper recalls the reductivist pilasters of Schinkel’s Bauakademie (1833), whereas Wright’s Unity Temple harks back to the simplified neo-classicism and rectangular piers of the Berlin Schauspielhaus (1820). Such are the longer wave motions of history.

http://www.architectural-review.com/essays/mies-van-der-rohe/8622955.article 

 

 

t2: 2 iterations of 1 + apps

reshot images of the cards again then tried to make the posters more coherent

another version...i know it needs a lot of work, but some people have said they liked it better than the first one. Advice on how to push the image?

Postcard

t2: 3 iterations of 1

Critique:

too busy! maybe get rid of the big letters?
the white box is interesting but integrate it better
get rid of the text box on the lower right
incorporate vanderslice in a more interesting way (looks a bit awkward placed on the lower left)
work with the "deborah sussman"