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Julie Kress.

Drawing. Animation. &
Speculative Architecture.

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Framed Familiarity looks outside the discipline towards Animation, Realism, and Cinematographic techniques, to provide alternative frames of view and frame rates within the field of Architecture.

Advisor. Amy Kulper
2nd Advisor. Carl Lostritto
Context. John Soane Museum
Project Type. House Museum

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View Complete Showreel Here

Various architects, from Greg Lynn to Mark Rakatansky, have promoted animation as a generative, playful tool. Framed Familiarity likewise delights in the visual ambiguities that are only possible through animation, that cannot exist as a single frame or image.

Integrating everything from architectural illustrations of the John Soane Museum to open-source motion-captured body movements to digitally scanned objects from museum archives, I create a cross-section through history, time, and place. Through this hybrid treatment of analogue and digital realities my thesis suggests how a skeuomorphic understanding of animation can recover techniques of the past and build a vocabulary for the future.

Scene from the pink panther episode "the pink phink" which perfectly captures the ambiguities only made possible by animation.

Act 1 - Paper Promenade

See Act 1

Delaminating Paper

Act 1 acclimates the viewer to digital paper. The paper-thin surfaces replicate the John Soane Museum—the London house of the neo-classical architect—highlighting an architecture of frames made even more visible by collapsing one room against another.

Act 2 - Zoetropes in the Breakfast Room

See Act 2
Act 2 acquires the optical behaviors of the prefilmic device, the zoetrope.

To Zoetropify:
Zoetrope’s are hand operated mechanisms - The ability to slow and speed up the succession of images allows the audience to also operate the illusionary reality. With the visible frame lines, and the addition of a central mirror, The Zoetrope charges the breakfast room as a space for both observing and to be observed

Act 3 - Rigging the Sepulchral Chamber

See Act 3

Act 3, enrolling Megan (a standard character from the Mixamo Asset library), draws inspiration from puppeteering and rotoscoping by rigging behaviors into objects and surfaces in ways as dynamic as modelling people.

On Character Rigging... In a story, a film, or an architectural space, a character is situational, based on a subject’s reactions in an environment or circumstance. Within this Act, the character of the environment itself is legible in fragments of relational behaviors at play within the scene.

RISD. Fall 2019
Advisor. Carl Lostritto
Context. Ladd Observatory,Providence RI
Project Type. Domestic Space

3d Objects, Elements, and Figures, come together in the imaging of a domestic space to pressurize common workflows for 3d modeling, rendering, animation, and simulation.

First...Some Fluid Simulations!

This work prioritizes processes of drawing, rendering, and animation over a typical proposal for a new architecure.

Whether this is "Architecture" may be up for debate, but I find that digital systems can allow me to reevaluate my perception of real-world materials in novel and unexpected ways.

Drawings &
Python Coded Pen Plots.

Pink Peeled Plan. A thick wall poche is typically associated with the neoclassical style of the Ladd Observatory. This placed productive tension on the infinitely thin digital enclosure. A surface in plan is merely a line, so the alternative to a plan cut? Peel it

An Arrangement of Objects. The mono-colored hatch serves to homogenize dis-separate objects and elements. This provided greater legibility of how domestic objects participate in the creation of spatial arrangements.

Striated Penplots A precursor to the Gridded Home, Exploring illusions of 3dimensionality through line.

*This drawing required python and hpgl coding to make use of a vintage pen-plotter.

A domestic space blanketed within an animated grid

*The Holodeck in Star Trek became a significant reference later in the process, for the use of a grid to set the stage for events to take place. However, my grid Moves!

Animations.

Advisor. Seher Erdogan Ford
Context. Manayunk Venice Island
Project Type. Community Center

This building is defined by three “Guiding Edges”, along which spaces compress and expand to provide unique, identifiable experiences. The guiding edge thickens and thins according to programmatic needs (transforming into seating, shelving, and stairs), as well as to impact sensations of lightness and heaviness.

Ground Level

The 3 gestures are the spines of the building, from which guidelines were extracted to construct the body.

1. Entrance - The first edge provides shelving for exhibiting sculptures in the cafe space.The thick wall serves this function but also responds to comfort and stability. The second edge is thin and porous, inviting visitors into the learning spine.

2.Passage - Along the upper floor, the edge compresses occupants into a narrow passage to create a felt transition. Below, there is not a physical edge but one can sense the weight of the edge above.

3.Expansion - The first edge gives way to a wall of wind chimes. The second edge transforms into seating for the rooftop garden.

4.Transition - The wall of wind chimes leads into the musical program of the outdoor theater. The second edge splits to host a staircase,and the buildings occupants descend within the edge. The librarians desk inhabits the space below the stairs, and the edge continues to thicken to provide privacy for classrooms and office spaces.

The curving roof expands and contracts to produce identifiable feelings of lightness and compression within each space.

Program analysis. Coding the haptic qualities of the intended programs with variables of porosity, and weight, which I would later assign to architectural elements.

Digital Craft

Various experiments navigating the role of computation in drawing, image making, and fabrication.

A Discretized Sphere intersecting with a spiral

Penplots and Python Coding

Models

Though many recent projects have taken the form of imagery and drawing, the thinking behind them are always tethered to model making. Whether digital or physical, I see models as the foremost medium of architectural thinking.

Making Discourse

Interaction

The theme of tactile experience and interactivity re-emerges in projects ranging from haptic UX design for virtual reality, physics simulations that attempt to recover aspects of making by hand, and to getting messy with balloons filled with goo.

Placing Pressure -
A study of mapping bodies through displacment and pressure.

Incidently, the models began to speak.

︎ Sound on before playing!

Scribble Studies

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Quilts

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Foam

See complete project here -> ChunkScapes

RISD. Winter 2019
Independent Study w/ Carl Lostritto

A fictional world made of foam, triggering unexpected modes of digital drawing.

How Can Drawing, Modeling, and Rendering Co-exist and should one hold authority over the other?

The process of faking cuts and imperfections provoked a need to re-imagine how material properties can be incorporated into the digital modeling work flow rather than be applied to surfaces as an afterthought. The vocabulary of foam became a metaphorical device that triggered ways of modeling beyond drawing a line and extruding an infinitely smooth surface. Thinking materially, allowed me to do away with expectations, and immerse myself in an exploratory mode of digital drawing.

Video 1. Chunkscapes

Foam can be carved, compacted, and sanded. It breaks and crumbles, and collects dust.

This is not a “realistic” simulation, but I acknowledge materiality when working digitally. Craft is something we embody and hone. It is knowledge that can still provoke a virtual creative process.

What if foam was weightless? Can I coax the dust into a line? Does it still feel like foam?

Video 2. Residual Paths

The form records bodies passing through, then continues on its way bearing the scars of past encounters..

Video 3. Foam in Flux

How do you construct a drawing for play?

Rather than model a static line, I suggested paths and encouraged the particles to follow. The drawing is constantly renewing itself, with the potential to change in every stroke.

Immaterial Mediums

RISD. Winter 2020
Self Designed 3-credit Course

Immaterial Mediums was a 3 credit course I designed and taught at Rhode Island School of Design. This was an introductory course that tackled digital materiality through rendering, physics simulations, and animation in Maya. Below are samples of student work produced over 5 weeks.

Selected works from students in Immaterial Mediums - RISD Wintersession 2020. Credits in sequence: Rada Singhasaneh, Nicole Strubinski, Truman Lesak, Clarence Mensah, Jasmine Chan, Jose Mata, Yuqing Mao, Sandra He, Eric Wu

Syllabus

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Coming Soon

Transmedia Table Talks

Topics. Virtual Reality & Remote Collaboration
Platforms. Mozzilla Hubs, Unity, Oculus Quest

A collaboration with Min jin Kook on a best practices manual for artist and designers interested in collaborating within Web-based Virtual Reality.

Women Take the Floor

Employer. IKD
Context. Boston MFA
About the exhibit

Prepared construction documents, design visualizations, and coordinated with the Museums in-house carpentry team.

In Women Take the Floor, a reframing of the artists gaze is playfully integrated in everything from architectural detailing, layout strategies, and even graphic elements. IKD’s commitment to strong visual concepts taught me how even a bold idea in a conservative setting can be tastefully threaded throughout the design.

As visitors progress through the exhibit, they encounter a series of frames.

A wall filled with quotes framing women’s voices. An architectural frame where the existing thresholds are rearticulated in red. The central gallery features both open frames and solid frames that re-frame the viewer, the paintings, and sometimes a speaker. (see sample frame detail below). At the end, an interactive wall frames visitors voice.

The Polaroid Project

Employer. IKD
Context. Boston MIT Museum
About the Exhibit

This project required a lot of massaging to the objects that would be cycled in and out throughout the show, while still remaining true to the visual metaphors of a polaroid camera. The accordion style walls had to both retain specific dimensions for art pieces, be a reasonable dimension for material and labor costs, avoid a significant amount of piped ceiling conditions, and be placed an appropriate distance from existing lighting infrastructure. All of this while finding ways to reduce cost without detracting from visual intent + pleasing circulatory experiences