preliminary drawings and poster development.

Future Home Research

I did research in self sustainable living and construction. Looking into bio homes of today and how they will influence the future. In particular Mike Reynolds, creator of the Earth-ship. From this research I developed a synopsis on how we will live in the future and what type of housing we will live in.

Write a synopsis

In the near future we will live in small, self sustaining community’s. Life will return to the basics of farming the land for our foods. Community’s will govern themselves and the need for technology will diminish.

Due to lack of concern for the environment and bad political decisions the global warming crisis has well and truly taken control on the way we live. Days are hotter and water harder to come by with rainfall levels still decreasing every year. The need for more efficient cooling for inside housing led scientists to research into thermal mass as a natural way of cooling homes.

Natural disasters such as, firestorms, hurricanes and droughts are far more common and demands housing that can withstand these motherly forces.

Our homes are furnished with recycled materials and only necessities and not needs. There are no TV’s, or computers. Everything a human needs to live is in the house. As it is a self-sustaining home. An indoor green house helps provide clean air and a source of food. All homes are fitted with grey water system that has a four stage recycling system. Water from showers and sinks waters the indoor garden. Water that seeps through the garden beds is then captured and naturally filtered using fine rocks. That water is then used in the toilets. Toilet water is caught in a septic tank, which then feeds the grey water out onto the outdoor garden.

Outside our homes are gardens full of eatable plant life (vegetables and fruit), pens that hold livestock such as chickens, ducks, and goats. We live close to rivers for water and irrigation.

Weather is unpredictable and erratic. Giant storms and natural disasters are a normal occurrence. Due to these conditions housing is constructed using dome formations as they are self-supporting and extremely strong structures. The main building materials are old tires rammed with earth. These offer great thermal mass properties meaning easy cooling and heating. Houses are partially underground, tapping into the natural cooling properties of the earth, and also offering protection from the weather. Old cans and bottles are used in the construction of the homes acting as bricks in-between the homemade concrete.

The look of homes comes second to the need of living. Cosmetics are not of a concern but practicality and safety is of the forefront. These homes provide shelter, food, water and life to humans. The future is about protecting the earth and living in harmony with nature.

References:

http://www.biohome.net/practicl.php

http://www.rammedearthhomes.com/technical.htm

http://www.monolithic.com/topics/news

Film: Garbage Warriors, Open Eye Media UK, ITVS International and Sundance Channel, copyright open eye media UK 2007.

Bauhaus poster finished

Bauhaus poster development

Bauhaus

Bauhaus

The Bauhaus movement is a very famous German art movement that happened across 14 years, 1919 until 1933. Bauhaus was actually a design school. Responsible for teaching design in many forms, such as, furniture, architecture, art and many others. What made this school stand out though was how it taught. One of its main principles of design was to design with the idea of mass production, because up until then this had never been done before, so was very revolutionary. The name Bauhaus is actually an inversion of Hausbau which in Germen roughly translates to House Design.

The school was situated in Weimar and was created by Walter Gropius. The schools philosophies were extremely controversial for the time and frowned upon by the very right winged people of Weimar. So the school was moved to Dessau in 1925. It remained here until 1932 when the city was taken over by the Nazi party, the school them escaped to Berlin. It was only a year later that the Nazi Party surrounded the school in Berlin and arrested 32 of the students who unfortunately ended up in Nazi concentration camps.

It was due to the work of students and teachers who fled Germany and continued to develop the art style.

Notable Artists of the Bauhaus movement are:

Marcel Breuer

Lyonel Feininger

Paul Klee

Josef Albers

Marcel Breuer

Born 21/05/1902, Marcel Breuer become a student and a teacher at the Bauhaus school in Germany. During the war he fled to London and joined Gropius (Gropius formed the Bauhaus school). He was one of the most famous designers in Europe by this stage, made famous for his invention of tubular steel furniture, one big residence, two apartment houses and some shop interiors.

From London he and Gropius revolutionised American house design while teaching a whole generation of soon-to-be architects, not to mention famous ones. He and Gropius then went their own ways and Breuer expanded into institutional buildings. He designed the UNESCO Headquarters mission in Paris in 1952. Other famous buildings that he designed are, New Yorks Whitney Museum, and IBM’s La Gaude Laboratory.

Lyonel Feininger

Feiniger was the child of two American musicians and naturally at the beginning of his life learnt and studied music in particular the violin. It wasn’t until 1887 when he moved to Germany that he became interested in art. Feininger attended multiple schools in Germany and begun to get a name for himself by doing cartoons in various German newspapers.

In 1918 he meet Walter Gropius who appointed him as a Master and the then newly formed Bauhaus school. He was widely responsible for the teachings of wood cut-outs as he had devoted 6 months to the medium in 1918. He remained a teacher for the school for most of its 14 years with fleeting visits to surrounding European country’s.

It wasn’t until he had left Berlin in 1933 and then returned in 1936 that he became depressed about the political and cultural climate of Germany under the Nazi rule. So he accepted an invitation to teach at the Mills College in California. Feininger lived in America for the rest of his life.

Feininger was remembered for hid abstract seascapes and urban scenes. He generally used light hearted subject matter and had also had a strong interest in Germanic Woodcutting.

Paul Klee

Borne in Switzerland, Klee went to Germany to study fine arts in Munich. He developed a very distinct style heavily influenced by art done by young children and other artist like Van Gogh and Matisse. He used watercolours a lot and concentrated in nature and man maid buildings and machines as subjects.

In 1921 till 1931 he was a teacher at the Bauhaus where he wrote The Thinking Eye known to be one of the most detailed books on the science of design. Klee thought of the world as a place that could be unrealistic hence his toy like style and his beliefs that the world could be represented in the freest style and with wit. He set out to portray the world this way.

Josef Albers

Josef Albers started out as a teacher in general studies. After he studied art he returned to elementary school as an art teacher. While teaching he developed as a figure artist and printmaker. He decided to leave teaching and enrolled as a student and the Bauhaus school in 1922. He worked with stained glass and sandblasted glass primarily but also designed furniture, household objects and typeface. He also had a strong interest in photography. It was in 1925 that he became the first student from Bauhaus to be asked to become a master at the school. By the time the school closed he had become one of Bauhaus’s most famous artists.

After getting married Josef moved to America where he explored abstract painting and had multiple jobs in American colleges. He was the first living solo artist to be honoured at the Metropolitan Museum if Art in New York.

Having looked at and researched the Bauhaus movement and the above artists I now have a good idea of what Bauhaus is about and believe I can create a poster incorporating one of Jenny’s truisms.

Post mod work in progress

FINAL PICTURE!
Starting to add Background
Coloring in Photoshop

Second Drawing
First Drawing

Postmodernism

Postmodernism

What is Postmodernism?

Postmodernism is effectively after the modernism movement. So roughly from the 1960’s on wards. It has a lot of movements in it such as.

Conceptualism

Performance

Installation Art

Video Art (animation is included in here)

Minimalism

Photo Realism

And the list goes on. Andy Warhol made a great quote and in paraphrase is “anyone can be famous for 15 minutes”. This has somewhat been how postmodernism artists work. They take the nonsense and experiment with it. So postmodernism is art that hasn’t had a great amount of thought put into it but still has a meaning…sometimes.

For example. In Britain in 2002 when Keith Tyson won the Turner Prize for his creation of a large black monolithic block filled with discarded computers. Not a single painter had been seen as possibly winning the prize.

Although art has always been some sort of entertainment it never has been entertainment as it is today as part of postmodernism. Due to the growth of consumerism and the love of TV and instant satisfaction people tend to want to be entertained quickly. Art has moved with this ideal and is shown in the form of video art, and shock tactics eg. UnAustralain by Azlan Mclennan, which was simply a burnt flag. Something to grab the audience’s attention and draw them in as quickly as it can.

Key factors in Postmodernism is:

Relativism

no universal narrative

social constructivism

Key Artists are:

Andy Warhol

Barnett Newman

Roy Lichtenstein

Andy Warhol was made famous by his Campbell’s soup can series that was shown at the Ferus Gallery in L.A in 1962. He became an icon of pop art until he was shot dead in 1968. Although he had a short career his artworks forged away forward in the new art movement of Postmodernism. It was quick and drew attention. Almost to simple that some argued that it wasn’t art.

Barnett Newman’s paintings come across as simple paintings. Gernerally bars and tones of colors, nothing more nothing less. He was well known for “opening” the doors to what painting could be. His paintings gernally represented something for example his piece “adam” is a representation of man’s intimacy with the earth. As the Hebrew words adom (red) and Dam (blood) are close to those of Adam who is labelled as the first man of mankind. You can see by its simplistic approach and its lack of detail and narrative how his work fits into postmodernism.

Finally Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein has been compared to the great Andy Warhol with his bright pop art style of paintings. Know most for his comic book style paintings which came from his son, picking up a comic with Mickey mouse on it and saying, “I bet you couldn’t paint as well as that”.