Jacob Sebastian BANG | Architect, Artist, Associate Professor
Architectural Representation, Institute of Architecture and Design
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, Copenhagen, Denmark
jbang@kadk.dk
Abstract
I´m interested in making models or fragments I haven´t seen before, in an attempt to create and construct a new “world” in which I´m the expert, a collection of possibilities, of suggestions, something to study in order to develop knowledge and my special view on things – something to reflect on. They are fragments that did not exist before. They are pure form to excite my curiosity, amuse me and stimulate my lust for creating huge collections, fragments that can be held in my hand, considered, scrutinized and reflected on. There's always something apparently recognizable in a fragment, always traces of life and a possible forewarning of an inherent story that can and must be exposed - a promise of architectural potentials.
Keywords: Artistic Research, representation, graphic works, drawing and model.
Creation
I´m like a chemist who mixes two liquids to see what happens. My fragments (fig.1) aren´t representations of anything, but my drawings are representations of these fragments and must thereby be something. The process is about creation, about how the project should move forward. My artistic way of working is between the planned and the random, but it is important that I´m well prepared to get the most out of it. I trust my intuition because I know that material of architectural value will show up during the artistic process. To begin with, I prefer puzzles and questions rather than answers. I'm not trying to solve a problem. I do not have any hypothesis, but only the actual work of creating drawings and models (fragments), the missing link: what is between me and architecture. The drawings are smart, accurate and reflective. They create something even though some of them could and perhaps ought to be called errors, as a redeeming concept of failure. They are analytic, they think and they argue with me. They speculate, they are operational and they are manageable. To draw and to make models is obviously a way to think, but the drawings and models are also works of art in their own right - and fundamental to me as research objects. I can´t let go of them since “they demand their right in the world” as my brother once said1. They are real. I've given up trying to master digital technologies, not because I don´t
1 The author Hans Kristian Bang
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
60 respect them, but because I cannot bring myself to acquire the digital world, and what is most important, I find that a large analogue output with body, mind, hand and intuition (as well as a little sense) is enough for me – combined, of course, with subsequent reflection on what I did. I can walk around the drawing and the model, turn them around, consider them from a distance and work my way into them.
Fig.1-2 Various models (fragments). From the exhibition ”1.001 Models”, Cph. 2012 The fragment.
Without solicitation or reason, I´m interested in making models or fragments I haven´t seen before, in an attempt to create and construct a new “world” in which I´m the (only) expert, a collection of possibilities, of suggestions, something to study in order to develop knowledge and my special view on things – something to reflect on. They are fragments that did not exist before.
They are pure form to excite my curiosity, amuse me and stimulate my lust for creating huge collections, fragments that can be held in my hand, considered, scrutinized and reflected on. The good thing about a fragment is that it opens up possible interpretations and transformations, where a unity (a whole) may seem closed. There's always something apparently recognizable in a fragment, always traces of life and a possible forewarning of an inherent story that can and must be exposed - a promise of architectural potentials.
Fig.3-4 Various models (fragments). From the exhibition ”1.001 Models”, Cph. 2012
61 To work in a series
I always work in a series in order to compare and combine the different results in my process, as inspired by, for instance, Hiroshige´s 36 views of Mount Fuji1, where the famous holy mountain (and volcano) is seen from 36 different positions, around the mountain: from the river, the sea, the forest, the open land or from different villages, among others. In the same manner or somewhat similar, there is Claude Monet´s2 painting of haystacks over and over again in different lightings, seasons, angles and so on. It is about explaining the motive, opening it up, in search of information, to break down the distance between observer and object and thus create insight.
Something slips through the filter and something gets stuck. Certain shapes, structures and relations between characters catch my eye. It is a key point for me to work with several depictions at once. Working in a series is liberating; it provides routines (without too much thought), creative energy, chance and rituals, to keep the work of art open to “whims” or incidents, providing an awareness of techniques, as well as workflows, processes, process optimization and logistics – all important when producing 1.001 different models. It’s important to me to have a large production that I can dig into, duplicate, transform or sometimes even destroy. Not everything should not necessarily progress to a higher level but something does.
Fig.5-7 Drawings from the same series, fragments inscribed in geometric frames that secure combinatorial possibilities
1 Hiroshige: Japanese Ukiyo-e artist, 1797-1858
2 Monet: French impressionistic artist, 1840-1926
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
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Fig.8-11 4 different compositions or distributions: the grid, the negative circle in a grid, the circle and a dissolved version. From the exhibition ”1.001 Models”, Cph. 2012
The making of ideas
The fragments are architectural forms and potentials - what lies before an actual idea so to speak.
They are nothing yet at this time, created in an attempt to locate or conclude architectural ideas and characters. This is therefore not a true progressive chronology in the traditional sense of creation: from idea to sketch to model. It´s not even linear, but more like from model to drawing to idea, and then from idea to sketch to model. Sometimes, it may be drawings that I did years ago that solve a problem. In order to become an architectural idea, the material must go through a process of interpretation or “liberation”, in other kinds of representations, for instance in drawings, in dissolving into geometries, in signs, “alphabets” and rules, in the unfolding of a fragment´s inherent ideas.
Representation
In order to unfold my fragments, I have to invent different ways of representing them in other depictions, such as drawings, paintings or new models, so as to find their potential as architecture or what may be called new ways of being architecture. The drawings are at once analyses, obstructions, limitations and a way to choose and determine which way to go. They form a kind of creative pressure, a way of disturbing or deconstructing my creativity and production. I make many mistakes, but hopefully, I at least gain new knowledge from them, the drawings, and hence
63 am able to pass this experience onto coming drawings. It is important for me be in a space created by the drawing, an almost religious , raving flow, where I compose, reduce and repeat lines, figures or themes, and scale figures and themes, in my search for more precise architectural characters and potentials. The drawings are classic measurements and more imaginative sketches reduced to or concluded as architectural characters. These two ways of drawing go hand in hand in reading fragments and their history. It is about the balance between black and white, about space, shaping, cropping, colours, composition and proportions. I am a romantic and confess myself openly to aesthetics.
Fig.12-14 Various types of drawings: fragment inscribed in a geometric frame / in a circular frame / and a sequence of figures (detail of oil-painting)
The process of naming
I see the different representations of the fragments not only as a documentation of processes, but also as independent works of art in their own right. I create drawings of my plaster fragments in order to achieve an increased awareness of their inherent possibilities. An abstract thought is enhanced when it is backed up by something tangible, by drawings that want to be architecture, measurable plans and sections, as architecture and sculpture in one, architecture that wants to be named and recognized as column, stair, yard, entrance, hall, fence, plateau, furniture, tongue and groove and so on. I try to separate the different depictions into different categories, like a zoologist. After the naming and the categorization, I have architecture looking for a context, a place to rest.
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
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Fig.15-19 Various types of drawings: Plan of a Monastery / plan of column / combinatorial plan / 841 templates (category/collection) / Plan repetition
Artistic context and family
It´s important for me, after a while, to get out of my self-indulgent and imploded cave to look for
“like-minded” sisters and brothers with the same “interest”, both from the past and the present.
I have always been very interested in negative spaces. As a child, my father told me the tragic story about the Roman city of Pompeii, destroyed by the volcano Vesuvius in 79 AD, and I saw images of what resembled human mouldings of people and animals. Especially, the Pompeii Dog made a huge impression on me. Another very interesting image is Luigi Moretti´s1 plastermodel, the Model of the inner spaces of the Saint Maria of the Divine Providence, in which context I see my own models; they could be the inner spaces of buildings as well. Last year, in 2015, I saw the marvellous exhibition “Man Ray2 – Human Equations” at the Glyptotek3 in Copenhagen, organized by the Philips Collection in Washington D.C and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (in 2013). In 1934, Man Ray photographed some mathematical models in plaster at the Henri Poincaré Institute
1 Luigi Moretti: Italian architect, 1907-1973
2 Man Ray: American artist, 1890-1976
3 Catalogue: ”Man Ray – Human Equations” published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Germany, 2015
65 (André Breton and other surrealists were also fascinated and wrote about them1) and later, after the war, Man Ray used the photographs as a starting point for a series of paintings he called
"Shakespearean Equations". This way of creating representations of something that already exists is for me to see a way forward in the “decoding” of my own models into other depictions. The whole idea of casting inner spaces is also seen in Bruce Nauman´s2 Cast of the Space Beneath My Chair” (1965), a concrete casting of a simple chair with the negative space in solid. Rachel Whiteread's3 castings of negative spaces, of entire buildings and everyday objects are filled with mystery and intense atmosphere, and are inspiring as the familiar in the unfamiliar, Das Unheimliche4.
Fig.20-22 Mathematical model in plaster from the Henri Poincaré Institute / Luigi Moretti, model of inner space / one of my own models from my collection of 1.001 models
Work in progress
And here, finally a work in progress: a survey of selected plaster models with special interest in the spaces they create among themselves or contain individually. I experiment with the hollowing of a series of models, in order to make them spatial and "liveable", or cut them up in rectangular-shaped units for the subsequent composition of city-like structures. I´m working on my own order of columns and other building parts, relief models in brass and various other products, all different stages of a work in progress, which can be translated further in order to meet and approach the demands of a concrete or more definite architecture. The process is empiric with a strong dynamic flow and a high level of abstraction in the creation of a collection of possibilities to be examined and developed, a collection of artistic work to be reflected upon. Individually, they can be used in
1 André Breton (1896-1966): "Crise de l'objet", Cahiers d'Art, 1936
2 Bruce Nauman: American artist, 1941-
3 Rachel Whiteread: British artist, 1963-
4 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): the essay ”Das Unheimliche” (The Uncanny”), 1919
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
66 creating creative workshops in my teaching at the Royal Academy of Fine Art, the School of Architecture in Copenhagen.
Fig.23-25 “Cut-up models” (315 units) a way of composing city-structures and building-volumes / Columns in plaster (3 out of 10) / Relief in brass (1 out of 15)
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List of illustrations
Fig.1 Jacob Sebastian Bang. Photo by Michael Dam Fig.2 Jacob Sebastian Bang. Photo by JSB
Fig.3-4 Jacob Sebastian Bang. Photo by Michael Dam Fig.5-7 Jacob Sebastian Bang
Fig.8-11 Jacob Sebastian Bang. Photo by Michael Dam Fig.12-14 Jacob Sebastian Bang
Fig.15-19 Jacob Sebastian Bang
Fig.20 Mathematical Model from Institut Henri Poincaré, probably made by Martin Schilling, Leipzig, between 1900 and 1920
Fig.21 Luigi Moretti, the Model of the inner spaces of the Saint Maria of the Divine Providence (approx.1951) Fig.22 Jacob Sebastian Bang, scan of model, 2011-12
Fig.23 Jacob Sebastian Bang. Photo by Michael Dam Fig.24 Jacob Sebastian Bang. Photo by Michael Dam Fig.25 Jacob Sebastian Bang. Photo by JSB
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
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