UTILITARIAN CHURCH

TYPE: EXPERIMENTAL DRAWING

SITE: AMES, IOWA

Project Description

The site of this project is a Utilitarian Church in Ames, Iowa. The prompt for this class was to create a sin gular drawing while having access to plans, perspec tives, and elevations. Once a week, for three hours, we continued to develop these drawings. The goal was to create an experimental drawing that revealed or abstracted the site through the line’s contingency.

The church is communicated through the plan rather than materials. I found myself drawn to the vol umes that made up the sanctuary. The curved walls, natural light, and oculus were powerful elements that created a sense of intention. The space felt nondescript and pure. It did not appear to be affiliated with any particular religion but felt spiritual. I began my anal ysis of the space through quick gestural drawings. In some cases, gestural drawings capture the essence of space better than literal interpretations. Literal inter pretations can have beautiful qualities; they often sac rifice emotive qualities. Spirituality already has meta physical qualities that cannot be defined literally. So I needed to approach this project by abstracting forms to allude to a greater sense of being. An exploration of the spaces that exist beyond our limited perspectives. Rather than working on a single detailed drawing all semester, it was more important to ideate and exper iment until I captured the desired elements that felt true. Working on a single drawing for more than a couple of days is difficult. I feel compelled to complete numerous iterations of the same subject to truly un derstand the physical and sensed space. In each class, I would draw something completely different to avoid definitions. My final drawing is the culmination of all of these gestural exercises. I began by transferring edited prints of the church into a composition that allowed interpretation. From there, I used a series of volumes to create dimensionality. This dimensionality inferred the depth of the 2D plans. I then used graphite and charcoal to establish atmospheric qualities.