Carly Preattle

Through a series of related design exercises, this course explores human scale and the ways human beings perceive three-dimensional objects and spaces. Engages students in reading, writing, research and reflection about scale and perception in architecture.

Nora Ladd

Seasonal Spatiality

My personal investigation of scale and perception uncovered two major themes: the fluid and transformative nature of time, space and materiality and the binary relationship between light and dark. The original composition connects a series of photographs into a continuous scene where planar geometries expand and contract, creating a sense of movement and altering the viewer’s spatial perception. This is reflected in my first model, which features rotating, foldable pieces that can be manipulated to create dynamic and impermanent spaces. Intersecting the plan and section drawings of the model reveals refractive imagery of the original perspective. Taking this imagery and the material contexts from my creative writing, I transformed specific moments from these perspectives into cyanotype prints. The collage elements naturalize the prints, evolving interior space into exterior space. I translated my spatial constructions into a fairy tale in which a little girl lives in a place where the seasons shift throughout the day. Eventually, the little girl grows tired of the constant changeability of her surroundings and goes to live underground. The sharp contrast between the two living conditions explore how Nature and its layers, light quality, seasons and weather shape human perception. The final model unites all these themes; it is almost entirely clear and uses vegetation to emphasize the layering of nature and to represent the change in seasons. Architectural elements from earlier works - geometrical apertures, terracing, stepping - still remain as a structural aspect. The perspective of the model shifts between expanding and contracting views, showing changes in vegetation and lighting to signify seasonal transitions. Through various modes of representation, I explored how temporal scale, spatial scale, light scale, and material scale affect perception of the physical world.