UA ARCHITECTURE PROFESSOR DISPLAYS EIFFEL TOWER EXHIBIT AT RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - When the Eiffel Tower was built for the exposition of 1889, artists like Guy de Maupassant couldn't wait to add their name to a petition against its construction.
Among other names, artists called the tower a "truly tragic streetlamp," a "skeleton" and "an iron gymnasium apparatus" in a published protest in Le Temps newspaper.
Such criticism—along with the icon's cultural status and less-than-articulated urban ground condition—inspired Julieanna Preston, associate professor of architecture at the University of Arkansas, to conduct a research-by-design project and exhibit titled "Pinned Structure and Folded Surface: Sewing Operations on the Eiffel Tower."
The exhibit premiered at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Architecture Gallery Jan. 18-Feb. 22.
"Architects often say the Eiffel Tower is not architecture; engineers say it's too ornamental," Preston said. Instead she calls the tower an "androgynous structure" and describes it as "naked" rather than clad like its sister, the Statue of Liberty, also designed by A.G. Eiffel.
Her project began in 1995 when Preston, then teaching at Iowa State University, traveled to Paris with graduate students to work on immigrant housing.
"At the time I was testing a hypothesis about domestic practice, i.e. women's work, and how these techniques could inform architectural design," she says.
Standing before the Eiffel Tower for the first time, she observed that the gardens and plaza surrounding the tower were abandoned, unkept, and unresponsive as an urban public space.
She decided to combine her hypothesis of domesticity with the ambiguity of the tower. The construction and design techniques found in sewing were analogous to architectural design method and form making. Pinning, stitching, folding and tailoring were translated into drawing and building processes.
"When you lay out a pattern, for example, you have to deal with patterns' relationship in a plane and aligning the fabric's bias, which is similar to architectural plans," Preston said.
Jeff Shannon, interim dean of the School of Architecture says, "RISD is one of the top art and design schools in the country. An invitation to exhibit work there is a signature of honor and achievement."
Preston's design includes large format digital and handcrafted boards, scaled fragment models, and full-scale material research constructions. Pieces of the exhibit demonstrate her initial efforts to explore relations between contemporary digital technologies and craft, specifically the School of Architecture's new computer numerically controlled (CNC) machine. Preston is now looking to expand her work and engagement with fabrication using similar industrial machines, a goal she is exploring in a course titled "Surface XYZ."
Her publications include "The Myth of the Matter: Parallel Surfaces of Seismic Linings" in Re-Framing Architecture: Theory, Science and Myth. Architectural Design, a journal published in the UK, recently published her work titled "Scene B," an urban design proposition sponsored by Wellington's Architecture Center.
She just recently returned from a trip to Nova Scotia in conjunction with the John Williams Visiting Professor Studio run this year by Brian Mackay-Lyons.
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