User talk:Johnmulw

Johnbosco Mulwana Master of Architecture student at the Oslo school of Architecture and Design

below is my brief paper about the Vigland Park or Viglandsparken Oslo Norway near Majorstuen. In this paper i expressed my own perception of this park and focusing mainly mainly on movement and trying to highlight its relation to the phenomenon of Architecture as Nature. follow the link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPNani_uiIc) to watch the Visual work.

--Johnmulw (talk) 09:21, 23 June 2011 (UTC) The Vigeland Parkhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPNani_uiIc Brief background The Vigeland Park is the largest sculpture Park made by one single artist in the world and it covers 80 acres (320,000 m2) and features 212 bronze, granite and wrought iron sculptures all designed by Gustav Vigeland. All the sculptures in the Park were modeled full-size in clay by Gustav Vigeland and he then let professional craftsmen do the carving in granite and casting in bronze. Vigeland also designed the architectural setting and the layout of the grounds with their far stretching lawns and long straight avenues bordered with maple trees. Construction work on the Vigeland Park started in 1924 and was mainly completed between 1939 and 1949. Most of the sculptures are placed in five units along a 850 meter long axis: The Main gate, the Bridge with the Children's playground, the Fountain, the Monolith plateau and the Wheel of Life. The Monolith Plateau is a platform made of steps that houses the Monolith totem itself. 36 figure groups reside on the elevation bringing with them the “circle of life” message. Access to the Plateau is made via eight figural gates forged in wrought iron. The gates were designed between 1933 and 1937 and erected shortly after Vigeland died in 1943.

‘My Visual Work’ ARCHITECTURE, SCULPTURE & THE MONUMENT “The interaction between Sculptures in a singular landscape with Architecture; How does this interaction harmonize Movement and embrace monumentality within a holistic perspective”. A 14-metre high sculpture, Several human scale sculptures, The ground

One of the most famous sculptures in the Vigeland Park is the Monolith. The column is over 14 meters tall and carved in one single stone. It consists of 121 human figures. There have been many interpretations of the Monolith: Man's resurrection, the struggle for existence, Man's yearning for spiritual spheres, the transcendence of everyday life and cyclic repetition.

This visual work is a three layered filming, putting emphasis to the sky and the ‘monolith’ that seems to capture dominancy, the middle, ground movement and the ‘ground’. I my visual work and the entire study of this particular Park, I would want to illustrate and highlight the strong Juxtaposition and coexistence of Architecture, Sculpture and monumentality exhibited in the Vigeland Park and how this coexistence contribute to the Human Condition theme of the Park as a holistic landscape. I am mainly putting focus on movement and the ground on which it all happens, looking at materials and the layers of movement created by the split levels of the ground and the different nature of sculptures present in the Park that pull attention and draw the eye off the ground, slow the movement and scatters movement in a random sequence due to the isometric nature of the sculptures. In addition I captured movement of the birds in the sky around the monolith and creating a gaze in scale ‘reducing the monolith to human scale’. Creating the visual work, I experimented on several techniques that helped me extract the layers of movement formulated at the different levels in the landscape and the Architecture of the vertical and horizontal circulation pattern; the staircases and paths around them that direct movement. How this gets in harmony with the different artistry and expressions in the sculptures around these paths and steps is a question that baffles the mind to a certain extent and makes this Park a master piece, I have no answer to that but my visual work offers a crew and triggers curiosity and pave way for the necessary discussions about the same.

For visual simplicity, I will perceive the entire Park as one piece of Sculpture in an architecturally designed landscape within which humans, birds, dogs and other animals move. I will then pay attention to the individual pieces of Sculptural works and how they embrace or are embraced by the Architecture and movement around them but showing all these interactions in one single multi-layered perspective. What makes Vigeland Park interesting in my opinion is the way all the sculptures are arranged with a great deal of Hieratical consideration and given a direction, theme and three-dimensional spatiality which makes the space an Architectural landscape. The symmetry in the entire arrangement gets broken by the difference in the individual sculptures that manifests themselves in different human gestures and conditions which in return disturbs the movement along the entire path and In turn creating a decentralized movement in a centralized plan/arrangement; this is where my main interest lies. The Architecture of the entire Park layout is multi-layered and formed on split ground levels connected by steps and staircases and this intensifies the coexistence of Architecture and sculpture which in turn creates an objective gaze to the human moving within this space and an overwhelming subjective gaze in the perspective when viewing/filming this Park from a distance. This is captured in my visual work where you get to see people’s heads at the same height as the monolith creating a subjective gaze in the scale. The monolith places its self so dominantly and strategically that it boldly forms a gaze in the viewer’s eye that it’s the end/climax of the Park yet it just lays within the ‘perceivable’ middle of the arrangement and obstructs the real climax of this Park, in turn it sets the entire perspective in parallax and cuts off a reasonably big part of the Park in the view.

The German Architecture Theorist Paul Frankl (1914) assumed that designs are always a combination of traditional forms and new responses. He went ahead and defined the Architectonic special design as comprising four elements; the aim, special form, plasticity and appearance. Here is where the Vigeland Park becomes interesting and earns its qualification as my subject of study when looking at “Architecture as Nature” since it comprises the four elements mentioned above making it not just a Park, but “a Park with an embodiment of Architectonic special design” and in addition, its embraced with nature to such a great extent! Contextual-wise, design-wise, content-wise and given the fact that the theme for the Park is “the circle of life” boldly expressing the transcendence of everyday life and cyclic repetitions. In my opinion based on my analysis and perception of the Vigelands Park, its design coveys an ‘aim’ that indicates how the program is dealt and determines whether it take on its own expressive features and contributes to the form backed up with all the expression with the accompanying sculptures. The ‘spatial form’ is created by the colonnade of human scale sculptures and a series of split levels and the adjoining steps that connect the different levels creating a three dimensional feel that reveals how the program is spatially accommodated. Vigelands Park having been designed along a theme, it is in my view “a piece of Architecture embraced with nature” that just disregards whether it takes the form of an agglomeration of limited spaces or whether its comprised of subdivided unbounded spaces. Perceptually, ‘placiticity’ or the ‘ideal shell’, of this Park reveals the extent to which a central force (the monolith in this case) binds the design together. The monolith unlike the rest of many other ‘would be’ center pieces in vigeland Park uses its visual (scale) and material dominance to ‘steal’ attention amongst the construction lines of force and assume an autonomous position in the design (this can clearly be seen in my visual work). In my visual work, I mainly put emphasis on sky and the ground to high-light the unusual view and ‘appearance’ (color, texture, light and material) that can be unequivocal or ambiguous. I tried to capture one image or several that say something about the design’s visual influence; whether it is perceived as monumental or can be understood in various contexts. Frankl’s four elements that I mentioned earlier in the text are general concepts that systematically indicate the relationship between the various aspects of the Architectonic design and one’s perception thereof. Together they insight into the design’s spatiality and combined with my visual work you can get to appreciate how Architecture, sculpture and the monument come together harmoniously in a natural context and how all that influences movement. The Vigeland Park’s landscape Architecture comprises of visual, geometric and spatial systems and in my visual work, the representation of these elements and nature is achieved by capturing specific combinations of plantings and green elements, birds flying over the monolith, the snow and wind as a result of natural conditions, the ground situation, terrain, light and several natural materiality and human/artificial intervention on the ground. The plan/arrangement of this Park consists of geometrically expanding measurement system which imposes order on the leaps in scale and hierarchically links the components of the house-garden-estate-landscape sequence. The sculptures in this Park are anchored in the site condition by a balanced interaction between the symmetry of their layout and that of the Park as a whole, the natural geomorphology and the shape of the Park. The sitting, length, width, height and organization of the monolith and the other major sculptures and fountains that lay on the principle axis are all determined by this arrangement. And that’s how I believe I could capture so much in one visual perspective. I perceive the Vigeland Park’s spatial system as a perspective manipulation of natural topographical shape of the terrain, and the horizontal lies within the imaginary boundaries of the plan. But despite th[[File:[[File:Example.jpg]]]e clear organization, the spatial depth in my visual work cannot be gauged as an anamorphosis, elements of the plan have been distorted in order to create a perfect image from a given view point. In this sense I tried to have the plan and the image linked.

In summery; the design of landscape Architecture and the placement of sculptures in a landscape is always arranged into various treatments in which specific design themes are utilized and this triggers different perceptions depending on individuals. The landscape’s Architectural design can be read according to these themes and is generally identified by its ‘basic form’, or layout resulting from the geometric realization of the topography, its ‘spatial form’, or the Architectonic treatment of the landscape’s three-dimensional space, its ‘visual structure’ in which the landscape’s visual features are incorporated and its ‘program form’, the spatial organization and interpretation of the program. With the help of this interplay between the Architectonic design and the landscape pattern, we can relate to the phenomenon of ‘Architecture as Nature’ and can be studied further. --Johnmulw (talk) 09:21, 23 June 2011 (UTC)