Threshold

JoBeth Halpin, Theresa Luthman Angelini. (1985). Threshold; Journal of the School of Architecture, The University of Illinois at Chicago. Rizzoli, 3, 9-174

  

Contents

 

Threshold, stated on its cover, is literally a book of Journals from different architects during the mid 1980s which embrace reality and the economic factors too.

Out of the many Journals, I have reduced down and only focused on the first and the last chapter of the book -'Eleven South LaSalle'(Dennis E. Rupert) and 'Full Circle'.(Michael J.Geraghty)

The interesting visual texture in these two chapters interested me and forced me to read it flawlessly. 

ELEVEN SOUTH LASALLE

The wall texture material studied on the photographs instantly caught my eyes with its luxurious and elegant character. I should experiment and explore different texture materials which can embrace the concept of elegance as weel as charisma and modernism. 

'This journal walks you through a client's renovation program which incoporates two major architectural objectives. The facade was given a dominant vertical emphasis that was more plastically concerned with the articulation of mass and surface than with line and attenuation of form. The windowns contain no vertical membranes and can be read like voids in an architectural mass rather than surface in a frame. The entrance and lobby renovation in architectural concept (spatial, formal and material) was implemented through the classic tectonic convention of base, shaft and capital and was bound in a tight geometircal composition derived from the controlling fixed conditions. This geometircal disposition of the plan/section elements, through regulating axed of symmetry and the forms of circle, square, and triangle guided the formal, plastic articulation of mass and surface through details expressing the aesthetic intent of the architecutral concept.'

photographs on the left page
-solid marble colums, jambs and corner blocks expresses the idea of solidity in the classical tectonic convention. It also creates a more sculputral and ornamental form language.

FULL CIRCLE

Full Circle talks about the spatially organised architecture in grids in Chicago. It is a project with a proporsal of how to return the grid-llike housing to the morphology of the city. By doing so, families with children would be moved out of the towers and offered housing in the low-rise buildings for the safety-sake of their children. 'The idiosyncratic condition of Chicago's grid is a discontinuous grid which owes its being to the particular circumstances of growth over a period of time.'

Housing and its morphology both generate and are generated by this grid. Chicago and its many ethnics and culture differences, can be well related to Daeun's Journal where it talks about the relationship between ethnic culture differences and its surrounding enviornment in architecture.

mor·phol·o·gy

   [mawr-fol-uh-jee]  Show IPA

noun

1.

the branch of biology dealing with the form and structure oforganisms.

2.

the form and structure of an organism considered as awhole.

Threshold journal will be my first starting point influence. I will be using its grid-like composition modern character.