Brian Jungen's whale--

Tom-- That's true, Brian Jungen's work is particularly relevant in that the common object of the lawn chair is so abstracted that it becomes something else. Your comment is highly relevant since as an assembly, I do not want the tires to read so much as individual parts but rather as a layers breaking the visibility into the pit below-- creating a visible foreground of small framed views-- a cloud in the sense that it is not a dense object-- but an object imposed on the view nonetheless. I might come talk to you Tom later this week when I start to wrestle with how this thing can precariously balance on my two slender posts and need more Jungen inspiration or anybody else :)

I agree too that not all the tires should be in good shape. I am actually hoping to get ones that are without treads, older and starting to rust, even bent for most of it (the two Ottawa bike dump's winters hours don't include Sundays, Mondays or Tuesdays so it will be tomorrow but I counted 40 available tires to barter for already) I could stay on the bike theme-- and integrate sprockets-- but I could also investigate into other circular framing devices which is more likely my path to come. (See attached photos of stove element catchers attached with simple nuts and bolts-- which if I integrate I would dismantle and integrate into the greater whole)... This part will take some thinking and material explorations-- I will see what works in the next few days for the basis of my decision.

As for today-- I built two railing footings which sink into the concrete floor of the pit. I wanted to minimize the vertical emphasis to the floor of the sculptural railing which will instead emphasis is the cloud of tires which has left them quite slender indeed. I used 5/8" tubing over a 1/2" threaded rod which is tied down with nuts into both the footing and into the fork of the bike but was sure to make all my own washers to fit just so and weld in logical sequencing. And yet, they are not as sturdy as I would like so I will try stiffening them still. I might also slip an extra tube into the part in the ground since the prototype I have from the pit is actually also too loose-- so I could gain some lateral support if I build the difference in hole girth perhaps. This part is reminding me very much of how Rubins needed to often sink in a structural leg at least as big as sculpture height into the ground-- only that I am not allowed such a luxury in my site. I can't help but remember reading that a number of her structures collapsed...

I'm attaching today's progress in photos set into the site. I am content that the 5/8" tube that meets ground camouflages itself quite well so I imagine the sculptural elements will succeed in attaining their prominent hierarchical position in the final design.

Jen's Rx to Railing Design

Kelly,

I like the visual strength of the tire. Nancy uses such familiar objects within the context of her thematic studies too.

A consistency of product will allow the piece to be more graceful and sophisticated.

I was thinking that the mish mash of lots of parts might be a bit too ‘craft’ or ‘folk’.

So, I like the direction. Keep it up.

Jen

Re-Railed Unconventionally

A quick recap for those who might forget-- I am investigating what the railing will be now not in the TDR but rather the central railing to the pit which fortunately is removable. This site is adjacent to the wooden pit seating and provides me with 1.75" footings into the concrete floor at every 4.85'. Still considering Nancy Rubins and ferrous metals.

The above images are preliminary sketches of what I am intending on using as the starting point for my design now-- and I will see what kind of problems I run into and whether extra support will be needed for the many many tires- some with rubber treads and some just the frames. I will bind them with a combination of or bolts and nuts or thin picture cable as Nancy Rubins might have herself.

It borrows from Rubins in reinterpreting an object- in this case, the bike-- and obscuring it so that it can become something else- an object that interferes with the view and begs to be noticed. I'd like to have wheels with their treads of varying heights at the bottom to act as the grip for the hand, and maybe have the occasional one that still spins so as to challenge the idea of the continuous railing which merely acts as a guide rather than an object to be looked at (in awe?). It is also contradictory to the idea of railing because the railing becomes the view itself, and the filling material where the railing usually is empty. In this light-- the tires seem to be freestanding and the railing is the obstacle that disables a standing figure to walk through.

Tomorrow's agenda is getting the footings done for the pit-- making sure they fit. The next step is getting a whole lot of bike tires-- most likely from the guys at the bike dump-- and maybe some sprockets too which would add to the precarious nature of this railing.

De-RAILING

De-RAILING:

Traditionally in the most basic sense the railing does support itself from the floor whether bracketed directly to it on the floor surface, or to the edge of the floor surface if it looks out onto an open space of some kind- like the mezzanine to the TDR if inside or a cliffside view to the ocean if outside for example.

But-- what of the railing along the freeway?

The idea of a suspended railing?

A railing that does not absorb all the force that an individual exerts on it-- rather gives just a little- whether vertically or laterally.

A railing that is friction fit and meets two vertical walls or posts rather than floor?

A railiing that is mediates what can and can't come through?

A railing that is mobile-- whilst the view is fixed.

A railing that is intended for the automobile that drives along its edge and is the constant rythym beating to a California vista.

A railing made of recycled bike forks, bike chains and sprockets from a BIKE GRAVEYARD poking at the idea of what's the use of a bike in California? Especially if the bike parts are placed inside and out of context?

These are the primary considerations I am making whilst designing this railing.

SUCCESSES thus far:

-acquiring junked free BIKES which I can take apart. I took two with shocks on their bike forks thinking about how BIKE FORKS at the floor of my railing could give in when a little when pressure was exerted on its handrail. This would be unexpected and breaking the convention of a stabilizing railing-- thankfully of metal too. I was thankful and happy to know that once the fork was sanded-- it was weldable to the metal angles and such in the shop which creates more flexibility in design possibilities.

I ordered a bunch of used GO KART CHAINS today for a sketch I did which I will bring to crits tomorrow. This integrates the design of bike forks meeting the floor in an interior mezzanine space whilst now introducing ways in which I can recycle more of the bike and translate the roles of the parts into an integrated moving railing system in a system of pulleys (bike sprockets with ball bearings) and bike link chains? The idea is ambitious and absurd-- and as such could be exactly what Rubins would explore for the excitement of new possibilities.

So-- I will need to explore where I could get 5 good ball bearings of the same size ideally-- (the bike ones won't serve this purpose i don't think). Hmmm. Ideas anybody?

And THE MERRICKVILLE FOUNDRY:
The entire process of sand casting an object-- from the intricate steps of pattern making to the actual pour was shown to us yesterday. And lucky for me, the iron is cents a pound.

Can't wait for the California Metal Shops now!

MERRICKVILLE FOUNDRY

jen's posts

Kelly,



I have so enjoyed the stream of consciousness approach to the blog.

It helps me to really understand your train of thought.

I like how you have set information on paper and then questioned it. We must never stop asking questions.





In our work, we constantly look to alternative expressions of railings.

There is a great book of stair designs published by Phaidon (I think).

A railing can add to the sensual nature of climbing a stair.

Metal; if explored as a series of parts can become art (Scarpa) so that its flexibility and versatility is tapped to the extreme.

I love to play with metal as if it were paper….it is so strong and yet so playful.

When you are here we will visit lots of metal shops.



Railing gives a sense of safety and yet is can engender an emotion of excitement and precarious pleasure.

One line can change your relationship to moving space.



Rubins really is the perfect artist for your explorations.

Even the metal that we are familiar with is contorted and played with by her.

An airplane wing is no longer that.



Railings usually sit on the ground…..hmmmmmm.



Jen

METALS HISTORY- just for fun

Historical Methods of Steel-Making:

Bloomery : in a furnace where with slag (bloom) and iron combined to make wrought iron.

Pattern welding : forging various types of steels (wrought iron and cast iron) together for specific purposes to create swords, knives and armour for areas specific to where certain metal characteristics like strength were needed.

Catalan forge : primitive form of today’s open hearth method (see below) where pig iron’s impurities of carbon primarily are burned out.

Wootz steel : (crucible technique): developed in India by the power of windmills during tremendous winds.

Cementation process : now obsolete, used to convert bars of wrought iron into blister steel. Unlike steelmaking it increased the amount of carbon in the iron. It was apparently developed before the 17th century. The process probably originated in Bohemia in the 16th century and was in use in Bavaria in 1601.

Crucible technique :evolving after Wootz steel

Puddling : molten iron in a reverberatory furnace was stirred with rods, which were consumed in the process. Later, it was also used to produce a good-quality steel with the correct amount of carbon; this was a highly skilled art, but both high-carbon and low-carbon steels were successfully produced on a small scale, particularly for swords and other weapons.

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Modern methods:

Electric arc furnace : a form of secondary steelmaking from scrap, steel is hard as a resultant of this, though the process can also use direct-reduced iron. Arc furnaces range in size from small units of approximately one ton capacity used in foundries for producing cast iron products, up to about 400 ton units used for secondary steelmaking. Temperatures inside an electric arc furnace can rise to approximately 1800 degrees Celsius.
Production of Pig iron: Pig iron is raw iron, the immediate product of smelting iron ore with coke and limestone in a blast furnace. Pig iron has a very high carbon content, typically 3.5%, which makes it very brittle and not useful directly as a material except for limited applications. The traditional shape of the molds used for these ingots was a branching structure, formed in sand, with many individual ingots at right angles to a central channel or runner, bearing some similarity in appearance to a litter of piglets suckling on a sow.

Bessemer process : the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass-production of steel from molten pig iron. The key principle is removal of impurities from the iron by oxidation through air being blown through the molten iron. The oxidation also raises the temperature of the iron mass and keeps it molten.

The Siemens-Martin/open hearth furnace process : where a number of kinds of furnace where excess carbon and other impurities are burnt out of pig iron to produce steel. Since steel is difficult to manufacture due to its high melting point, normal fuels and furnaces were insufficient and the open hearth furnace was developed to overcome this difficulty. Most open hearth furnaces were closed by the early 1990s, not least because of their fuel inefficiency, being replaced by basic oxygen furnace or electric arc furnace.

Basic oxygen steelmaking : is a method of steelmaking in which carbon-rich molten iron is made into steel. The process is an improvement over the historically important Bessemer process.

METALS RESEARCH

Metals in General and Steel Specifically:

I am now decided on steel as the non-ferrous metal I will explore—rather than metallic metals of cobalt or nickel.

All metal production, from their mining to their typically high metling points, are I assume fascinating processes to Nancy Rubins in the regard that the material and furnaces are hard to acquire and the processes not usually available to most individuals. Recalling how Nancy Rubins is fascinated by things she doesn’t understand, I am certain that the science of producing quality metals with correct amounts of alloys would enter into this category similar to how she also is awstruck in the methods and thinking involved in assembling airplanes as well as the sheer scale.

All metal production requires in essence some kind of ore and very extreme heat to reach the materials high melting points. Furthermore, whether it is pressed, rolled, poured into a mould or stretched, the tools with which one makes metal usually are now often of metals themselves (though presumably once carved stone or sand moulds)- furnaces, pots, stirring instruments, moulds, etc. As such the melting points of instruments used in the metal making process need be considered in metal production.

The Metal used for construction is pre-fabricated into standardized pieces for us to or assemble or weld.

I will choose to examine steel primarily since it is the most structural of all the metals. Its strength seems to allign itself with the element of railing whose primary role is to support the body. The balancing act of volumes far greater than the support is emanent in Nancy Rubins work. She enjoys the sense of contradiction in her sculptures—where they look like they almost shouldn’t be able to stand up (and in her earlier works, two didn’t)—whether she sneakily supports her « Worlds Apart » with a concealed structural footing—or creates a new property for paper by building it up with pencil lead until it becomes more rigid and sculptural.

Another central theme to Rubins work is her desire to make energies of inanimate materials visible and steel is by nature has strong in tensile strength as compared to other materials. The manners in which the railing can be detailed—by suspension or by standing upright—by transfering loads to its various components or by being a continous object that distributes loads evenly. The railing might contradict what one expects and be laterally strong without an evident lateral support.

METAL EXPLORATIONS THUS FAR or OPTIONS FOR RAILING ASSEMBLY:

1. Metal Cutting and WELDING:
Welding being the process of essentially binding a steel with another steel with a similar steel wire that is helted into a steel adhesive. Steel must not have been painted, etc for a weld to work.

BASIC PROCESS:
-Acquire standard sized pieces of metal (listed in a metals catalogue)
-Cut all the pieces to correct dimensions and sizes before begining to weld.
-Assemble the entire object of construction (in my case, it will be a railing) while factoriing at least 1mm in extra width for every joint before beginning to weld.
-Set the ground cable and the ventilater. Also set the voltage and wire speed.
- "tack weld" all the joints of the structure or component
(otherwise joints have a tendency to lose accuracy as metals melt and distort)
-assure structure/component is square and level
-"bead weld" all joints between tack joints

2. FASTENING JOINTS:
This process has the advantage of being able to use more material components and a variety of metals together simply by drilling holes in proper places are acquiring hard ware-- Bolts, Plates, Washers, Rubber Gaskets, Wooden Blocking. This process is able to integrate a plurality of objects and materials which is another prevailing theme in Rubin' works.

3. POURING/CASTING:
Jerry and I (the metals crew) will be going with Sheryl and her materials lab to the Merrickville foundry to see this process in action and find out whether it will be possible to build our own moulds should we like to pour something.

SITE FOR RAILING

THE RAILING'S SITE:

As some of you know, Chloe, Stefan and I collaborated on a redesign of the overall TDR (Technical Data Room, or the School of Architecture's Library) last winter term which included taking down the existing books shelves/mezzanine and building another mezzanine of 2x10s just over where one presently enters into the TDR. A custom-built rolling ladder connecting to the mezzanine and either its railing (so how railing meets stair/ladder) or the railing to the mezzanine level itself will be the site for my Rubins inspired metal railing (though only hypothetically since the railing design to the TDR has already been detailed.)

Magnetic Ferrous Metals:

Rather than merely researching metals, and specifically metals in aerospace advances as I have been researching up until now which seems a too literal inspiration from Nancy Rubins airplane and trailer sculptures, I am considering the potential of magnetic metal for the detailing of my railing. This material carries Rubins' fixation on the energies of objects in their togetherness and gives great potential in how to detail joints contrary to how they might normally be joined.

Ferrous Metals

1a. Action: Called Cohen and Cohen today and asked about anything unusual they migth have in used metal stock
1b. Reply: nothing odd,mostly brass anc copper, it's the Cohen and Cohen staff who are unusual.

presenting Nancy Rubins...contemplating ferrous metals

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NANCY RUBINS:

HER WORKS: overwhelming, thrilling, fantastic, gargantuous, contradictory, perplexing, excessive.

HER CHARACTER: inquisitive, playful, intuitive, ambitious, physically ambitious as well.
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Rx to ferrous metals so far-- that metal will need to be used creatively or in a contradictive way to how it is normally used. Her experiements with how thin one can make concrete until concrete becomes flexible or how paper can be built up so much that looks as if it carries a substancial weight. I am researching metal laminates and airplane metal advancements presently since she is always also interested in things and technology she doesn't understand.
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Rx to Railings: I have picked up a number of architectural detail books but am first thinking creatively as to what railing might mean. In essence it is to divide two things and maintain a visual connection between them still, one side is often dangerous and the other side not. In the process of dividing, they are made with the human scale in mind and make connections with many parts of the body- primarily the hand, the hips when a person leans towards the other side, of the gluts if a person is using a railing to support themselves as they look towards something on their side of the railing, and also the feet which need to slip under the bottom of it so as to get as close a view as they can.. Consequently, railings have to be supportive and rigid-- always maintaining their duty to divide. (divide the sea/cliff from the viewer, the stair from the dangers of failing, the painting from the disrespectful viewer, the animals from the zoo visitors)
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Ideas coming from this:
-a wall is essentially a tall railing without the visual connection of the railing.
-Metal structure is forgiving to allowings a transparency to its viewers on either side which is helpful.
-a floor could be like a wall dividing spaces, though without a visual connection.
-does a railing always create a boundary for viewing? if so- does the object of view always have to be at eye level from a person standing as it typically is?
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Nancy Rubins 3d Collage Progress

This is the base to a visual aid collage to "get" what Nancy Rubins is all about taken in a montage format.

Hugh M. Davies- curator of her San Diego Contemporary Art Museum's exhibit seem to quite rightly say that her works are "fantastic residue[s] of cataclysmic natural events" in 1995.

Initially I planned on doing this collage in a reverse fashion with clear resin and, like Nancy herself does with her immediate studio environments, assemble a collage of all my research notes on her and rearrange them in a way that reflect much more energy than the initial pages in my sketch book, all by my dropping my research notes into thinly poured resin layers lined with reinforcing mesh, so that the hard resin would be "flexible" in the same manner in which Rubins manipulated the conventional sense of hard concrete.

In lieu, this collage approach is images drawn from her most extreme ideas of material in her sculptures. The images included are those I deem most valuable to explain her periods of thought and her self-referential qualities in some as well.
Images of works integrated into the collage are:

Self- Portrait as Cake- 1973 (unfired large sculpture)

Drawing -1975 (as an undergraduate student)

Big Bil-Board- 1981

Worlds Apart- 1982

Mattresses and Cakes- 1993

Airplane Parts & Buildings, a Large Growth for San Diego (installation)- 1994

cont.

The aluminum sheet metal as a base with mesh metal wrapping and enveloping collage elements intend on picking up some of that ship-in-a-bottle feel to many of her installations-- as well as the looseness. Thimbles are integrated into the collage as recognition of the collection component to her work- and also in recognition to the physicality and "bigness" of the materials she uses which must be difficult to manage-- notably the cutting of trailers and airplanes in a way that outdoes Gordan Matta-clark and his dissection of houses.

What is missing is legibility to the viewer in this collage. I intend on integrating my key words (Overwhelming, Excessive, Gargantuous, Cellular and Organic, Contradictory, Fantastic, Nostalgic) next and some of Nancy's relevant background-- her husband Chris Burdens, her inspriration in "Grandma Brisbee" and some of her various cities she lived in-- definitely including the Mojave desert.