The forest is a place of enmeshed memory; it holds a special place in our imaginations.
The forest engages five of our traditional senses, from sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. These
faculty of the senses cannot be neglected in the role of memory making. Here sensorial qualities are
investigated not just at face value, but through the forest fleshes out the causal nature of such
sensorial qualities.
STRIATION
Stroking the bark of wood, such textural quality is generally described as simply variation between
roughness and smoothness. The rough striation of a cracked bark versus the smoothness bare
nakedness of a peeled away bark.
EXPULSION
The smell of a thing is the closest quality of its essence, of thing-in-itself, often revealed through
expulsion of its inner matter. In the forest, the breaking, cracking or burning of wood exposes its
inner composition, its smell into the air.
TINGE
Taste, as probably the most indirect sensory for spatial experience, but is aware through perceptual
framework of other senses. Looking at the woody trees we perceive the tinge taste of bitterness, or
smelling the leafy trees we perceive the tinge taste of sweetness. And such tinge lingers and
composes the spatial atmosphere where we are in.
RUSTLE
Sound, experienced when one element physically strikes the other once or in succession, forms the
principle of sound percussion. The brushing of leaves against each other, a rustle – striking of
branches against each other, a crackle.
DAPPLED
In the forest, the visual quality of light is not perceived through the quality of light itself, but rather
perceived through the existence of obstructions, here being the trunks, the branches, and the leaves
of the trees.
The forest is a place of enmeshed memory; it holds a special place in our imaginations.
The forest is usually imagined as an ambiguous spatial condition as the positions of the trees in the forest are seemingly random and indeterminate. However, within the obvious ambiguity, there exist certain definable spatial typologies and perceivable qualities of the forest.
SINGLE TREE AS A MARKER
As the forest is composed of a number of individual trees, a single significantly different tree out of a stabilised forest acts as a marker in the landscape.
TWO POINTS IMPLYING A LINEAR AXIS
Two or more successive points in the field implies a linear axis either straight or not, a directional journey through the forest with an entry and an exit. Like the march through the landscape, the two points are the beginning and the destination.
DOTS IN THE LANDSCAPE
Similar to a constellation, dots in the landscape forms a nonlinear connection with each other.
DENSENESS IN THE CENTER
As the numbers of trees increase in the center of the forest, denseness becomes a perceivable quality, like looking at the dark forest in the landscape.
SPACING AS FRAME
Gaps between trees act as a window to the landscape, and similarly the incremental spacing of
the trees perpendicular to the line of sight.
AVENUE OF TREES
Row of trees flanking alongside a path or a path clearing cutting through a dense forest. Avenue of
trees is inherently linear, and acts as a threshold or approach prior to a destination.
CROP CIRCLE CLEARING
The crop circle clearing is a negative space within that is not visible to the outside, a sort of courtyard of the forest typology. Here, the ground and the sky becomes more apparent than the surroundings.
LOOSELY DEFINED SPACES
There is a kind of spatial intelligence in process when a family is finding a picnic spot among the woods. Discounting the view factor, narrowly spaced trees act like an ambiguous wall whereas a further spaced region act as a picnic room within the forest.
MEANDERING
The virtue of a meandering within the forest is the consistent flexibility of the paths offered within the forest. For meandering a path is therefore not defined, characterised only by the stabilised spacing between the poles, like a pathless trekking within the jungle.
THE PINWHEEL is one of the results of a design studio experiment led by Stephen Neille in the narrative of urban strangemaking on the city of Perth. The process includes mapping and recognizing the city as an existing and complete order in any given time, and positing as to slightly reset the familiar order of the city, hence the term urban strangemaking.
The urban strategy seeks to make aware of the distinctive qualities of the city of Perth, in this sense the Perth city grid and its anomalies. Irregularity of the grid such as unexpected streets end up in buildings rather than a continuous line, hence coined as linesight terminations.
The pinwheel plan is formulated due to the unaligned meeting point between Queen Street and Wolfe Lane. As the threshold, the pinwheel in this manner serves to rotate the forces not just two-dimensionally, but also three-dimensionally upwards and downwards. The facade is formed in recognition of linesight termination and dual old and new quality of Perth, serving to bridge the old and new in a gradual manner.
As an urban acupuncture, THE PINWHEEL is introduced as an urban spinning moment within an existing set of constellation of linesight terminations within the city of Perth.
Context: white horizontal steel railings.
A foldable series of tubes transforming a trafficable dogleg staircase into a demarcated elevated podium.
A system of six pulleys folding / unfolding the screen, reducing the full required pulling weight of 60 kilograms by six decrease folds.
