Author: areach

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Kigumi Connection Animation

Why did I name this structure with the word Empyreal? The word evokes something celestial and inspiring awe. What is more awe inspiring than the concept of time? It looms over everything, yet it has no shape, no structure, no physicality. There are no atoms in time. I think about time a lot. I have downtime when I can’t work. This is a conundrum because time also has no direction, no up, no down, yet humans refer to periods of rest or relaxation or pause in one’s life as downtime. Ok. Where am I going with all of this? During this ‘downtime’, my mind wanders. This is when most of my ideas come to me. During one of these meanderings, I thought about making a structure that spoke to time, not a precise timekeeping device like a clock but something that occupied an isolated realm of contemplation for meditation on its intangible nature. But it would track time, just in a more abstract way.

I remembered learning at Pratt about the Japanese art of wood joinery called Kigumi. It has ancient origins dating back 4,000 years. I haven’t thought about it for many years, but I wasn’t able to sleep, pain was keeping me up, my mind wandered, and it came to me that this would be the solution to build this structure. Its ancient origins emphasize the relativity of human existence. We say 4,000 years is ancient but to time, it is a meaningless number.  Predating the Iron Age, Kigumi is the art of connecting wood with interlocking joints without the use of nails or adhesive. Wood joinery is done with hand tools. This is how Shinto Temples are built. But here, I’m combining the traditional with modern technology; with mass-timber wood members whose wood comes from sustainable forestry and all the cut-outs done with a computer-controlled router which would enable pinpoint accuracy for everything to align properly. The tower has 1,938 horizontal members, 952 vertical members and 4,832 dowels with a height of 82 feet high to the top of the wood and 105 feet to the top of the spire.

The tower is surrounded by a 10-foot-high mound topped by a circular promenade, that like time, has no beginning, no end. To ancient humans, the mound has housed the sacred. Here, a mound houses the tower in its own realm. One enters this realm through a corridor cut through the mound whose splayed walls are a result of them being radially projected from the towers origin point. As you enter this corridor, space compresses and greets you with a portal upon which passing through, space is released. Ramps (handicap accessible) connect the lower plaza to the upper promenade.  Moving around this circular ring enables the tower to be viewed in the round.

The morphology of Empyreal Tower emphasizes tectonics, using wood members in a way that allows the structure to be visible and understood. With a grid of wood, a cubic module of four vertical and four horizontal members stack in an arrangement giving its eight inverted rhombus shaped sections. It’s not unlike building with Legos, except the blocks are hollow instead of solid. Horizontal voids in the tower’s forest of wood house an upper and lower glass disk. Embedded in each glass disc is a white arm illuminated with Polymer-Dispersed Liquid Crystals (PDLC) technology. The arm on the lower disk makes one 360-degree revolution per day. The arm on the upper disk makes one 360-degree revolution per year. The movement on the arm of the upper disk is so slow it is imperceptible to the human eye. But with patience, one taking the time to watch the arm in the lower disk which rotates 30 degrees per hour (360 degrees divided by 12 hours per day), this movement is perceptible. A spire rises from the solid cube that supports the upper glass disk, connecting time to the celestial.

The center of the structure has a monumental opening. Open on its four sides, it’s like a giant mouth. Time is like that, like a mouth. It swallows everything in its path. It’s all powerful.

#ARTITECTURES #architecture #kigumi #time #pavilion #sacredspace #blender3d

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Ariel Vergez, one of 7 awarded a grant for the City of Cleveland Transformative Arts Fund for his multi-pronged public art project “The Art Garden”, invited me to collaborate on the “Plant Monumental Sculptures” part of the grant. I’m excited to be a part of his beautiful vision.

Scheduled to be completed in September my MODEL CITIZEN will occupy a vacant lot on Storer Avenue on the West side of Cleveland. Fabricated in aluminum and painted with the vibrant Valspar color “Tangy”, it sits on a concrete plinth that doubles as a bench. Cleveland Metroparks will be transforming the lot into a micro-park. MODEL CITIZEN will be in dialog with two other sculptures, Ariel Vergez’s Spina Florae on an adjacent lot and GeoBird by Arlin Graff on a lot across the street.

About THE ART GARDEN:
The Art Garden (TAG) is a transformative initiative spearheaded by the Black Brain Group, aiming to rejuvenate and empower the West Cleveland communities through a creative synergy of public art, mentor-ship, and cultural revival. Guided by an overarching vision of artistic expression and collaboration, TAG is designed to intertwine community engagement with innovative art installations including a vibrant series of murals co-created with community input and sculptural installations reinvigorating vacant lots.
TAG fosters the growth of emerging artists by providing mentor-ship, skill-building workshops, and real-world experience. This ensures the development of local talent while embedding a sense of ownership and pride in the community.

More about TAG on the Black Brain Group website: https://www.blackbraingroup.com/home-1

Video:
app: moi and blender
original music – app: waveform

#publicart# techspressionism #sculpture #functionalsculpture #CityofClevelandTransformativeArtsFund #TheArtGarden #ArielVergez #BlackBrainGroup #ClevelandCulture #CommunityEngagement

Click here to see Circus Maximus Diatonic Dialogues Publication

I was invited to do a lecture at the University of Washington Rome Center for CIRCUS MAXIMUS – DIATOMIC DIALOGUES,  Astra Zarina International Architects Speaker Series at Palazzo Pio in the heart of Rome. It was sponsored by City Meta Lab. The other speakers were from Urban Office Architects in Milan, Massimo Marinelli and Tatiana Mardare.  I did the lecture on March 19 live streamed via zoom in Rome at the Palazzo Pio that now houses the University of Washington Rome Center. The palazzo was built in 1450 It is built upon the ruins of the Temple of Venus, which once crowned a theater complex built by Pompey the Great. 

My lecture was titled ART-ITECTURES and in it I say:

Architecture never left; it lives inside me, continually drawing me in directions unknown with hybrid tectonic form making synthesizing architecture and sculptural art. An explorer needs a vessel, and mine is 3d modeling software, allowing me to travel where my imagination takes me.  I get lost in the virtual space, an escape hatch from pain. Pain is inspiration; Fuel for fire.

Also, something new for me. I’ve been thinking about this for sometime, years actually but never had the courage to do it, which is to make music. In my videos, I’ve been using music, not my own, and realized this would be an opportunity to have original music composed by me that is choreographed specifically for each video. So I got a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) Keyboard and learned the basics of how to compose music with it and with that, magically, as I don’t understand how organically I took to it, composed three new musical compositions in 3 of the videos I showed in the lecture.

In the virtual world, my 3d models live in video. Digital technology has upended the visualization of architecture from the analog era I learned architecture in. With a physical model of which I built many, one can physically experience it in the round. So I have all these 3d models that can’t be experienced like a traditional physical architectural model. I’ve thought about bringing them into the Metaverse but it has not become accessible to the many, so my work around is video, where the virtual camera is a stand-in for the physical body as it moves around and inside the models. As architecture is music expressed in physical form, I’ve begun to compose music to accompany the movements the camera navigates. 

For best viewing experience, watch on YouTube (click link at bottom). Check that setting is on 1440p HD resolution and unmute sound.

For best viewing experience, click Watch on YouTube. Make sure setting is set to 1440p HD and unmute sound.

apps: moi and blender
Original music composed by Andrew Reach
app: waveform

I’ve been trying to get my head around the terribleness that is happening in our country. It’s frightening. Such cruelty. Such lawlessness. Such greed. Such racism, homophobia and hatred of the “other”. Such cravenness for power. Way too many adjectives to list that can’t describe this dystopian reality. I needed to create something for my sanity as a backstop, something for me to lean on that expresses the better nature of our humanity.
Forged with six MODEL CITIZENS, TOTEMELISK is inspired by ancient Egypt, the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest and Mesoamerican cultures. MODEL CITIZENS are sentinels that represent a world citizenry with democratic ideals that respect all peoples from every walk of life and care for the common good. The common good is a broad term that encompasses ensuring that everyone, regardless of economic status, religious affiliation or agnostic, gender, race, sexual orientation and disability and the entire spectrum of humanity too long to list, has access to clean air, clean water, nutrition, education, a livable wage, good working conditions, culture, a viable livable earth and most important the pursuit of happiness. MODEL CITIZENS have a common structure; 4 legs, a cubic body and a vertical pinnacle representing the spine. Within this common structure, is carved out different personas. We are all the same and all unique.” Our shared humanity is a beautiful thing to be celebrated, not torn down and to be pitted against one another.