Ben Brown M. Arch Application Portfolio

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Ptolemy Stone Furniture Sculpture Artifice

Ptolemy Stone salvaged steel

A Ptolemy Stone is an example of an ancient sextant, named after Greco-Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (AD 100-170). Stylistically, this Ptolemy Stone is more like a quadrant or a mural instrument, although they all work on the same principles. These instruments were used to create astronomical models and star charts that were accurate for centuries.

Designed to be permanently mounted, the faces of Ptolemy Stones are aligned with a meridian (the map lines connecting the North and South Poles). When the sun crosses a meridian line, it is solar noon at that location. At solar noon, the arrow of the Ptolemy Stone is pointed at the sun in order to measure the sun’s angular height in the sky.

Mapping the sun’s position reveals the solstices and equinoxes, and shows that the sun gets higher in the sky in summer and stays lower in the winter. After a year, the sun returns to its original position. Hence, a Ptolemy Stone can be used as a solar calendar. Ptolemy Stones were used to discover the exact difference between a solar year and the contrived calendar year, giving us leapday calculations that remain unchanged to this day.

Utility Cart steel wood

Speake steel wood

er Stand

Bookshelf steel wood

Lamp

salvage steel found objects

Untitled Birds Maquette salvage steel

Untitled Birds salvage steel

Leaf Sculptures

salvage steel

Abstract Maquette salvage steel

Plant Sculpture salvage steel

Untitled Tree salvage steel

His tree of gold would be crafted in the jungle far west of the barracks where no one went because the land was huge and the people few. He wasn’t supposed to be in the barracks or even in that country at all because he wasn’t in the military, but equipment had broken and he was the sap sent to fix it.

Except: he wasn’t the sap so much as the willing exile. Stepping smoothly over the lumpy jungle ground, he allowed the not-so-guilty thought that being a member of the empire wasn’t so bad. At least not at this sleepy and irrelevant outpost. There were other places like this—pristine and devoid of people—that by their beauty and peace and clean wind kept the soldiers blissful. Their only goal was to avoid promotion and the accompanying risk of assignment to busier places.

Self-exiled from his own country, he was doubly exiled because he wasn’t a soldier and they had no interest in him. In this pseudo-paradise he had taken to walking alone in the woods, loitering down narrow animal paths and stopping on the banks when his feet neared the river. Now he walked purposefully down more obscure trails than he had before.

The forest to his back was green everywhere, from the plants on the floor to the curling vines to the hanging boughs to the cathedral of branches, with dark pillars of trunks revealed in a shy burlesque, so that the whole effect was of floating verdantry that let sun in in sips and splashes deflecting off leaves.

In front of him the forest was open. Tree trunks were prominent and lashed, with strips of bark twisted away by falling limbs, and on the ground prickly masses of dead branches seesawed with rootballs. Rather than clouds and pillars, the foliage in this area was akimbo and tattered. The storm must have been last year. Great torn clumps of earth were softened by rain and the flesh of trees was no longer fresh but greyed and dusty, and the wounds were being probed and wrapped with new tendrils.

He sat on a fallen tree and looked around, noting that the larger gaps in the trees allowed swaths and barrages of light that upped the contrast and darkened the shadows of the woods until he could no longer see more than a few meters under the canopy, like peering into an empty storefront and seeing the first rooms but only shadows through farther doors.

Off to the side a tree had been split when one of its main limbs had been caught and wrenched down by a falling comrade. The standing remains held somewhat more than half the leafy portions topping a cleanly bisected trunk, a near perfect vivisection.

On the ground was the sundered side, with huge branches and nebulae of shriveled leaves. It had been cloven straight from the airy forks down to the earth, falling over and shearing even into the roots, showing the first private spreadings of the hidden veins and byways of the tree.

Crouching at the base he traced the standing portion upwards from the furrow of dirt, seeing grooves and heartwood, following splinters and rivulets and streams of fiber twining round knots, departing common paths as they flowed contrary to water and diverged.

He got up and walked from the torn clearing and found a low spot between trees and prepared a small fire out of twigs and thicker sticks, building a teepee. He watched it burn and curl and the smoke rose first shuddering and then pouring upward until he kicked the half-burned logs apart and stomped them into the dirt.

That night at his desk his pen could not draw the tree. The hand hovered, wavered, and then retreated as the paper’s whiteness became its own light and flooded opaquely from the table until it blocked all vision. He remembered back to before his degree and his job, to the night before he left home and his father’s workshop.

The business turned out huge gongs and bells after ancient patterns, and he had chosen to abandon the family practice not out of greed but boredom. His skills in metallurgy were to be turned to stricter disciplines. ·Don’t you want to be an artist? Will you enjoy servicing engines? ·I don’t know what difference it makes. And who’s to say that industry can’t be artistic? If you were an alien, would you know Art? ·Art is easy to know. Art is when you look at something for the very first time and you know that it’s true. ·You make the same things everyone has made for a long time.

These gongs are as old as the culture. Can it be Art when the surprise is gone? What is new?

HJKL The craftsman stared around the shop, isolating in turn a forge, a scrap heap, unmarked chests, another forge. There were shelves of material and racks of tools and the smell of chemicals. He looked down at his hands cupped upward as if the callouses needed holding lest they be lost.

HJKL ·It is true that I don’t create new things, that my service to Art is done with sweat and not with imagination. But my service is good. I make old things because there are always new people.

They need to see.

HJKL Together they walked to the display room with ceilings so high they were dark at the apex. A colossal gong floated in the middle, its symmetry and power sucking the walls and eyes towards the center that always glowed. Over the wide surface shadows intimated.

HJKL ·See. His father didn’t point. ·The strength of an object pulls thoughts out through the eyes and our concern is intermixed and subjugated to the object. The bulls-eye pattern, the regularity of the shape: they bring focus. But step closer—

The crinkled surface resolved.

Illustration diorama digital

The gong was Achillean. Thereon carved were a thousand scenes in a hundred scales cut and molded deep and shallow: a woman cooking alone, a city besieged by an army, a river of fish, a court of law, one whole side of a mountain containing villages and fields and herdsman in battle with lions, and elsewhere dancers, and miners in a cavern, and a drowning man, all of life endlessly crammed and interlinked and motley. Around the edge circled the ocean, and swirling over the cragged surface of the world murmured a million golden birds, individual and sparking. ·Step closer and you forget the larger form. Details stop the rush of your eyes to the center. They keep you circling the circumference without seeing the circle and dawdling over a part and forgetting the whole. And when you finally look to the center these stories pull you right out again.

His father took a smooth inward breath and floated his hands wide above the land, then turned his head and let his cheek rest nearly against the constellations of birds as if the flock were a pillow. He closed the outward eye and stared with the inward at the filigreed and woven world.

From down there the bellies of the birds were visible, and each carried a tiny diamond, flecking light over the land.

His father broke a bird from its fixture and gave it to him, and the next day he left.

fin