Centennial Chromagraph
2013
Ralph Rapson Hall, University of Minnesota School of Architecture
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Small Project Award, AIA National
Honor Award, AIA Minnesota
Honorable Mention, Architect's Newspaper Best of Design Awards
Centennial Chromagraph is a life-size representation of the history of the University of Minnesota School of Architecture. The project is an exercise in data spatialization: using computational design tools to generate formal and spatial constructions with large quantities of data—in this case, information collected over the 100-year history of UMN’s architecture school. The installation consists of 100 robotically-routed plywood ribs, joined together with 8,080 colored #2 pencils. The curvature of the ribs expresses major historical eras and periods of the School—the tenures of its leadership, the buildings it has occupied, the colleges it has belonged to—while the color of the pencils reflects the changing composition of the School's degree programs over the past century. For example, the tenure of Ralph Rapson as head of the School of Architecture is evident in the large thirty-year curve that swells out in the center of the piece. Similarly, the prevalence of the Bachelor of Architecture degree, which began in the 1930s and lasted until the late 1990s, is legible in the large number of red pencils that extend across that 60-year period.
The installation was built in the central courtyard of Ralph Rapson Hall to serve as a centerpiece for the School's centennial celebration. Throughout the centennial year, pencils were distributed to alumni and friends of the School as souvenirs of the celebration.
The project began in a graduate Architecture as Catalyst studio taught by Adam Marcus (with Nathan Miller of CASE) in March, 2013. Students in the four-day workshop explored digital techniques of using historical data to generate form, and they also developed several different material strategies for representing this information tectonically and spatially.
Project Credits:
Design: Adam Marcus, Daniel Raznick
Fabrication & Assembly: Adam Marcus, Daniel Raznick, Jordan Barlow, Sam Daley, Kevin Groenke
Computational Design (Catalyst Workshop, March 2013): Nathan Miller
Prototyping (Catalyst Workshop, March 2013): Will Adams, Philip Bussey, Sam Daley, Matthew Enos, Derek Gallagher, Mohsen Ghanbari, Dantes Ha, Hwan Kim, Benjamin Kraft, Wei Liu, Dan Raznick, Stuart Shrimpton, Christina Smith
Centennial Graphic Identity: Kai Salmela
