From Sketch to Product

Designing Postmodernism, Part 7: The Build

27 August 2011

Less than a month now 'til opening, and the Postmodernism exhibition is moving rapidly from 'sketch' to 'product'. The past two weeks have been devoted to what we call 'the build,' that is, the construction of the cases, platforms, walls, and scenographic elements for the show. At the end of this process we'll be ready to install objects - and that means that we can't let anything wait for later, because (a) we'll be too busy and (b) you can't do construction work in the galleries once you have art in them, because of dust and possible damage to the objects. In our case, the majority of the build is being carried out by MDM Props, a production company located in South London, under project leader Tim Meaker.

Though it has created many museum exhibitions, MDM also carries out high-spec craft for theatres, retail spaces, film sets, and especially fine artists. Sculptors from Fiona Banner to Anish Kapoor turn to them for a bewildering variety of services, including woodwork, plaster casting, metalsmithing, painting, and model-making.

These skills were put to good use in the signature element of our first gallery: a recreation of a temporary facade designed by Hans Hollein for the 1980 Venice Biennale. Here are Steve and Danny, the lead craftsman and one of the set decorators who worked on the reconstruction.

   

And here's what they were trying to make: Hollein's facade, photographed in its original 1980 incarnation. The idea of the design is that it reprises the whole history of architecture, from the Garden of Eden through Classical ruins to Art Deco.

To make the columns, Steve and his team first made enormous cylinders in hard foam - a light but durable material.

These were encased in a light coat of plaster, which can be sculpted to provide texture, like faux brickwork. Here's their handiwork (on the left) compared with the real bricks at the Arsenale (right), which Hollein had incorporated into his installation - not bad eh!

 

The large Art Deco style column - which Hollein based on an unrealized proposal for the Chicago Tribune by Adolf Loos - MDM built from wood. Here is the whole thing in situ.

Another reconstruction in the space is the Garagia Rotunda, a building designed by the historian and architect Charles Jencks in 1975 for his own use in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. This element was built by an independent craftsman, Nicholas Shah, together with the V&A's Becs Ash. Here are a few stages of its construction and installation, starting with an image of the real thing. Note Nick's careful sketch - a retroactive design drawing!

When Charles Jencks saw this reconstruction he had to laugh - it was built much more carefully than his original house!

Of course the show has many other elements in it too, ranging from standard fare (painted plinths and lighting) to structures you'd be most unlikely to see in a museum, including giant wallpaper installations, the scaffold structure for the 'Strike a Pose' section of the exhibition (about postmodern performance) and an extraordinary curved wall made of stretched black vinyl. Here are a few shots of the installation in progress.

Hopefully you've enjoyed these 'behind the scenes' shots of the Postmodernism exhibition taking shape. Very soon you'll be able to check it out in person - we open 24 September 2011!

Designing Postmodernism, Part 5: Birth of a Label

27 July 2011

I know I've already posted about the graphic design for our Postmodernism show, but we've just finished the label design for the exhibition and there's a new example of "sketch to product" process that is just too good to pass up. It comes courtesy of Jason Wolfe, one of the designers at APFEL (who are doing all the graphics for the show).

Here was the problem: in exhibitions that include 3D objects, especially crowded ones like ours, it can be difficult to work out which label goes with which exhibit. A great solution is to include an image of the object on the label. The problem is one of scale: using a photo doesn't really work, because it won't read clearly at such a small size. So Jason has designed icons for each object in the more densely packed areas of the exhibition. Here's what the finished label looks like:

Jason arrived at the icons in a fascinating way: he used photographs as his preparatory sketches, and then drew on top of them with a digital drafting programme, simplifying them gradually. The process more or less speaks for itself. (The object, by the way, is one of my favourites in the show - a necklace from the Helen Drutt collection, now at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, by the Swiss punk-influenced artist Bernhard Schobinger, who in the '70s and and '80s worked with detritus picked up on urban streets. His jewellery is just about the most ferocious ever made. I particularly like the smashed bit of corporate identity in this example.)

 

 

 

 

The use of solid black and white areas for contrast (in the left-hand version) is a particularly inspired touch - it increases legibility, which lending a uniform personality to all the icons. It's one more touch that will help visitors navigate the exhibition, while adding a sense of style to the experience.

To see all the other icons (and the objects too) you'll have to come see the show - opens September 24th!

John Abbott: Portrait of a Plasterworker

14 June 2011

This guest post has been contributed by Jenny Saunt, a recent graduate of the V&A/RCA Course in the History of Design.

When you are trying to piece together the life story of a seventeenth century decorative plasterworker , you are lucky if you can connect a name to a few bits of decorative plasterwork. John Abbott of Frithelstock in North Devon is the fabulous exception to this rule. Not only is there a portrait of the man himself (above), but his modelling tools have survived...

... as well as his prayerbook (helpfully signed by John)...

 

...his shirt, and the good man’s wine bottle.

 

But this is not all that John Abbott has left us, all of which survives at the Devon Museums and Devon Record Office. There is also an extraordinary little book, about A6 size, which contains over three hundred sketches and designs for plasterwork. The cover leaf is dated 1665 and has been signed by various John Abbotts, or perhaps John Abbott impersonators.

The drawings appear to cover a period of 150 years, from 1550 to the early 1700s, and the general consensus is that they were drawn by several Abbotts from the same family of plasterworkers. However, scholars are undecided about the nature of the book. Who drew what, why and when, is not known, so this fascinating object remains something of a mystery and its exact purpose is unclear.

The Abbott book is not often produced for viewings due to its delicate state, but I recently had the opportunity to handle it as part of my research for the RCA/V&A history of design MA.  Actually handling the book sheds light on some of the questions which surround it, and as you turn the pages of the book a sequence of phases emerges. About the first fifty pages are filled with ceiling designs of complex geometric  patterns that were popular in the second half of the 1500s:

 

      

The designs are neatly executed and lightly drawn; fine lined work, intricate and delicate, the ink hardly glancing the surface of the paper. These images would have made an effective pattern book, offering multiple options of pared down designs which could be further ornamented to the client’s taste, creating a fashionable sixteenth century ceiling like this one:

But just when these decorous drawings have lulled you into a sense of comfortable expectation, suddenly, the pages start to explode with possibilities, and there is a noticeable shift of purpose in the images. The contents of the pages become increasingly haphazard; the placing of the drawings more irregular; and the images squashed in. The lines are heavier in places, and the style takes on a freer feel. The subject matter becomes more variable, as designs for single motifs jostle with coats of arms and ‘high maintenance’ mermaids.

   

   

These compilation pages seem to push for some experimentation which reaches out for ‘new’ ideas. Is this just a new look, or is it a new John Abbott?

There are over 30 ideas for overmantles in this section, like this one:

These can be associated with much Devon plasterwork; whilst not identical there are marked similarities between the plaster (below) and the drawings (above).

In the same section of the book there is a drawing for the royal arms which John Abbott modelled in plaster in his parish church at Frithelstock, which can be seen below on the right (Many thanks to local Frithelstock man Dr. Canniford for step ladder and rake intervention).

   

The drawing is meticulous but tiny, too small for a design proposal, considering the size of the actual monument, and far too neat and resolved to be a planning phase. This image may have been performing as a portfolio piece to record and advertise John Abbott’s work.

The book moves through many more phases. The shifts in style and subject matter provide evidence of its changing ownership and the transformations in its role. Pinning down exactly which John Abbott did what is part of a bigger project, but before leaving Abbott I would like to look at a couple of my favourite oddities from the book. The first of these is the appearance of a mystery guest hand at work. In the preceding pages John has been carrying on in his usual inimitable way, churning out reasonably cheerful cherubs and disgruntled Green Men...

 

...when without warning an unexpected sophistication hits the page. For one drawing it seems that a different hand is at work.  This visitor conveys a fluid grace and authority of line that has not been seen before. The image suggests the edge of frame.

This clearly had an impact on subsequent drawings, and it is followed by 20 or so frame designs which, being less accomplished, appear to be by a hand which is much more familiar to us.

 

 

Is the one-off drawing the work of a friend, colleague, or idol? Whoever did it clearly had access to different influences and education, and John knew or admired this person enough to let them mark his book.

Another of my favourite oddities occurs a little later. This time the style is similar to the preceding drawings, but it is one of the few that is executed in pencil. It depicts a frame, but it’s carried out so heavily that the impression of the drawing can be seen several pages on. The imprint is so extreme the next two pages can’t be used at all, and the following pages continue to hold the impression.

 

This weighty drawing is unique in the book and the dented pages are some of the only ones left blank. The impact of the line suggests that the image might be a sketch from life. The placing on the page is lopsided, but the details are well recorded for reference. Was this object something so fantastically new and satisfying that John Abbot just had to make a record of it when he came upon it? With no table to rest on the book took all the pressure of his hand.

Although it heralds a new phase, he doesn’t make the same mistake again and the blank pages are followed by pages of delicately drawn fragmentary pencil sketches, capturing details of architectural ornament.

 

So at this point it seems the book has become a means of recording what he saw.

It’s intriguing that the date of this heavily textured drawing, where the tip of the pencil gouges out the page, corresponds with the date of his most extreme high relief plasterwork. Leaping from the ceilings, this plasterwork hurls itself outwards reflecting the physicality of this drawing. This plasterwork is more than high relief; it is three-dimensional form that might escape its moorings at any moment.

The Abbott book is bursting at the seams with ideas, teaming with entertaining possibilities that can feed endless conjecture on its role. Multifaceted, it operates on many levels; an archive of design proposals; a possible copy book, a record of work done and a tool of self-promotion. Being pocket sized, it would have made an ideal portable portfolio and pattern book, whilst being handily available as a sketchbook for those moments when John Abbott felt moved to record decoration that he saw about him.

Designing Postmodernism, Part 4: Lighting and AV

05 March 2011

There are many ways to look at an exhibition. For curators like me and my colleague Jane Pavitt, it's mainly a matter of objects, and the narrative we create around them. For our 3D designers Carmody Groarke, it's about a sequence of spatial experiences, each with its own character. For the graphic designers at APFEL, it's a series of pictures and texts which stylistically unify the exhibition, pulling it togther with a snap. But there are two further contributors to the project for whom the exhibition is basically a big geometric puzzle -- made of planes, angles and cones.

I'm thinking of our lighting consultant David Atkinson and our audiovisual specialist Lol Sargent (of Studio Simple). Here are the two fellows in question.

  

In the picture of Lol, on the right, you can already see an example of ingenuity: he's showing us how it might look if we projected a music video on the floor. How to demonstrate that? Simple - just lay your laptop on its back.

Most of what these guys do is a lot more complicated than that, though. In the case of lighting, there are a huge number of variables, all of which have a dramatic impact on the visitor experience. 'Dramatic' is a good word, in fact -- David is a lighting designer who came from theatre before turning his attention to museums and architectural projects, and in some ways the job's not that different. It's just that in an exhibition, the audience is walking through the set.

The angling of the lights alone is enough to cause considerable difficulties. David has to get the fixtures high enough to avoid shadows on the objects; he has to overcome the contraints imposed by the existing lighting track, which may not be quite where he wants it; and he must avoid creating 'hot spots' on highly reflective objects. And then there are all the other decisions he must make: colour, brightness, reflectivity, and special effects like timed sequences, dappling or other textures. All of this has to be done with conservation requirements in mind (works on paper, for example, are especially vulnerable to fading). As mentioned in a previous post, our handmade model is a good way for David to work out some of these issues. Here are some colour studies he made by shining gel-tinted lights right into the model.

AV poses similar challenges, because the projector beams that Lol is using can't cross obstacles (such as David's lighting tracks), and the projectors themselves need to be located at the right distance from the screen surface. Lol has been imaginative in working out the problems that result. For example, we are showing a short excerpt of Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner in the exhibition's first gallery. In this preparatory drawing, you see two possible locations for the projector: first, hung from the ceiling on a long pole; or second, set on top of a large scale architectural reconstruction nearby. 

We all wanted to avoid the pole option - not a terribly clean look. But the reconstruction is a bit too high and too far away to be optimal, and of course we want the film to look as good as it can. So Lol is considering two solutions: first, he is using two projectors, not one. If he can get the projections from both machines to overlap perfectly, it will double the luminosity of the image. The difference in aspect ratio between the original film and the projector also allows him to drop the image area to the bottom of the beam. The below screen shot shows the result.

Toward the end of the show, we are displaying a clip from Koyaanisqaatsi, an amazing film from 1982 with a soundtrack by composer Philip Glass. The footage is all about movement, an endless flow of people and traffic coursing through a city, and the music is equally intense. We wanted it to envelop the visitor as much as possible. But there were two problems: if the audience came too close they would throw shadows on the screen; and we were concerned that the soundtrack would be too loud, annoying visitors while they are looking at other things. Again Lol came to the rescue. First, working with sound designer Peter Key, he suggested the speakers high up and behind the screen, with a shelf to deflect the sound from going up to the ceiling and rebounding into other parts of the gallery. This should direct the sound where we want it without allowing too much spill. He also designed a rear projection system, which will allow us to have the film projected from behind the screen. Visitors will be able to walk right up to it without disturbing the image.

These examples show how handmade drawings and models - the oldest of design tools - can be of use even in the most technically challenging parts of making an exhibition. And it's a good thing we have David and Lol to depend on. Because in the case of postmodernism (the ultimate attention-grabbing style), I don't think we'll feel like we've done anything much til the bright lights turn on.