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The Hidden Territory: USGS’s 1950’s to 1970’s Isometric Geological Diagrams

The online archive of the United States Department of the Interior Geological Survey is a valuable resource filled with detailed three-dimensional territorial maps employing various representational techniques.

Thanks to the work of artist, designer, and developer Jill Hubleys and their dedicated ‘X’ page, we’ve uncovered numerous isometric diagrams. Handpicked here, are a selection of them, including categories such as “Isometric Fence Diagrams”, “Isometric Cross-Section Diagrams”, and “Isometric Block Diagrams”.

See more on SOCKS. https://socks-studio.com/2023/10/15/the-hidden-territory-usgss-1950s-to-1970s-isometric-geological-diagrams/

#territory, #isometric drawing, #map

A Building to Tell the Time: The Toghrol Tower in Rey, Iran (1063)

The Toghrol Tower is a 20 meters high tower located in the city of Rey in Iran made of bricks and Sarooj, a water-resistant mortar. It was erected in 1063, and according to some sources, it was conceived as the tomb of Tuğrul Beg, the founder of the Seljuk dynasty. Other scholars report that it was used as a lighthouse to guide the travellers of the Silk Road during foggy days and nights.

The tower has a deep wall and a peculiar geometry: its internal surface is a smooth cylinder of 11m in diameter, while the external shape is a polygon of 24 angles, whose vertex compose a circle of 16m in diameter.

Keep reading on SOCKS:

The Toghrol Tower is a 20 meters high tower located in the city of Rey in Iran made of bricks and Sarooj, a water-resistant mortar. It was e

Fragments of an Unknown Civilization: Works by James Lipnickas

James Lipnickas is a New Haven-based artist and graphic designer. He creates highly evocative scenes representing small architectural stages in axonometric projection. Suspended stairwells, excavated blocks, and plinths separated, or all combined are located in deserted territories in a surrealist fashion.

Read more on: https://socks-studio.com/2022/10/09/fragments-of-an-unknown-civilization-works-by-james-lipnickas/

Madeleine de Boullogne and Louise-Magdeleine Hortemels, Abbey of Port-Royal-des-Champs: Paintings and Engravings

https://socks-studio.com/2022/02/06/abbey-of-port-royal-des-champs/

Madeleine de Boullogne, (1646-1710), was a baroque artist born and raised in a family of painters. Extremely pious, she remained unmarried and lived a semi-monastic life entirely dedicated to working and teaching. (...)

Despite getting progressively forgotten, she is still known for her documentation of the Abbey in Port-Royal des Champs, a series of fifteen gouaches on vellum where she depicted the nuns, their daily activities and the religious ceremonies in the abbey and that reflect her strict Augustinist and Jansenist beliefs. (...)

De Boullogne’s work for the Abbey was later used by another artist, the engraver Louise-Magdeleine Hortemels, as a model for the famous series of reproductive plates dedicated to the same subject.

Read the post: https://socks-studio.com/2022/02/06/abbey-of-port-royal-des-champs/

Database, Network, Interface : The architecture of Information. An exhibition at Archizoom (EPFL), Lausanne, starting September 27th 2021

http://socks-studio.com/2021/07/18/database-network-interface/

We are pleased to announce that we are curating an exhibition that will open in September at the Archizoom Gallery (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland. In an age characterised by the increasing dematerialisation of cultural production and transmission, Database, Network, Interface explores architecture’s historical role in representing and organising information and knowledge.

The exhibition analyses architecture’s ability to structure the access to information and physically construct relationships between content through spatial, typological and structural organisation. Through analogical associations, specific architectural elements (walls, windows, stairs) and drawings (plans, sections, elevations) may be seen as structuring instruments that define, communicate or give order to content.

The exhibition borrows the notions of “database”, “network” and “interface” from the vocabulary of information technology and interprets them through the lens of the architectural discipline.

The chapters and the case studies in the exhibition relate to the three notions, constructing analogies between architecture and other fields of studies related to information.

“Database, Network, Interface: The Architecture of Information”.

Exhibition curated by Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli. 27 September to 7 December 2021

Curatorship and Exhibition design: Mariabruna Fabrizi & Fosco Lucarelli

Production: Clémence Dubuis, Solène Hoffmann

Graphic design:Atelier Dyakova, Sophie Wietlisbach

Archizoom exhibition space, School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC)SG building (SG 1212), EPFL1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

More info on EPFL website: https://www.epfl.ch/campus/art-culture/museum-exhibitions/archizoom/database-network-interface-the-architecture-of-information/

on Socks: http://socks-studio.com/2021/07/18/database-network-interface/

Al White, Illustrations for 12th Isle Album Covers

http://socks-studio.com/2021/07/11/al-white-illustrations-for-12th-isle-album-covers/

12th Isle is a music label founded in 2016 by a collective from Glasgow that has released excellent ambient electronic albums in the last few years, such as XYR’s Eldorado or Christos Chondropoulos’s Athenian Primitivism, the album that let us know them.

Al White is the graphic designer and illustrator behind 12th Isle’s visual identity and the general artwork of every release, shows posters and merchandising. His style for the albums covers selected below is easily recognizable, as it consists of two-tone depictions of alien territories, other world’s cartographies, sci-fi movies storyboards and organic shapes. His work may look to us as an Artificial Intelligence trying to produce pseudo-realistic visual reports of an extra-terrestrial landscape, if the data came from Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, Ettore Sottsass Jr’ The Planet as a Festival, Japan robot anime, and Codex Seraphinianus.

Read more: http://socks-studio.com/2021/07/11/al-white-illustrations-for-12th-isle-album-covers/

Energy as Architectural Matter: Oswald Mathias Ungers’ Solar House (1980)

http://socks-studio.com/2021/06/27/energy-as-architectural-matter-oswald-mathias-ungers-solar-house-1980/

In 1980, German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers took part in a competition for a prototypal solar house to develop on a large scale in the community of Landstuhl in Germany and eventually through various settlements across Germany. The competition was a direct descendant of the 1970’s oil crisis and the consequent debate on alternative energies. Ungers’ proposal, a habitat model of low energetic dispersion, received a special prize but never saw the light.

The most striking aspect of the project is that the architect pursued environmental sustainability through the actual rethinking of the house’s logics rather than integrating further technical devices. Ungers’ design introduces energy efficiency as an architectural matter which requires formal solutions and typological inventions.

Read more: http://socks-studio.com/2021/06/27/energy-as-architectural-matter-oswald-mathias-ungers-solar-house-1980/

Living Inside the Earth: the Yaodong, cave buildings in China

http://socks-studio.com/2021/06/21/living-inside-the-earth-the-yaodong-cave-buildings-in-china/

The Yaodong (窑洞) is a type of architecture developed in the Loess Plateau in the north of China. The name literally means “cave building” and describes a series of buildings carved into the earth.The region has a wide temperature range during the year, with cold and dry winters and hot summers; the earth surrounding the interior spaces in the Yaodong helps keep them isolated in both conditions. The first Yaodong date back to the second millennium BC and nowadays, it is estimated that more than 40 millions people inhabit cave houses in China.

Read more: http://socks-studio.com/2021/06/21/living-inside-the-earth-the-yaodong-cave-buildings-in-china/

Linear Analogies: a Selection of Paul Klee’s Black and White Lithographies

http://socks-studio.com/2021/03/14/linear-analogies-paul-klee

In the multiple explorations of form and composition by German-Swiss artist Paul Klee, a special place is occupied by works where the line is the main protagonist. In a famous quote, the artist describes the line as “a dot that went for a walk” underlining the dynamic nature of the line as the means to conduct the human eye across the space of a painting or a drawing. In the second volume of the collection of his Bauhaus lessons Infinite natural history (Band 2: Unendliche Naturgeschichte, first published in 1946) Klee addresses the analogy of pictorial form with natural processes, introducing how lines in a composition are submitted to specific logic of growth and progression. He further compares the organisational systems of plants to the linear organisations in a drawing.

http://socks-studio.com/2021/03/14/linear-analogies-paul-klee

From Vision to Knowledge: Patrick Geddes’ Outlook Tower (1892)

http://socks-studio.com/2020/12/27/from-vision-to-knowledge-patrick-geddes-outlook-tower-1892/

Scottish geographer, biologist, sociologist and town planner Patrick Geddes bought a tower next to the Edinburgh Castle in 1892. In over 20 years, he transformed it into an inhabitable device to illustrate his thoughts on visual faculties and the relationship between the individual and the exterior reality.

Renamed “The Outlook Tower”, the building became a permanent exhibition space. It is conceived on a vertical sequence of spatial experiences of contrasting nature which the visitor would go through; from steep helicoidal stairs, to a roof-top terrace, a darkened room and the Meditation Cell, a confined, windowless room.

The tower already featured a camera obscura at the moment Geddes purchased it. The natural phenomenon was enhanced by a mirror which would reflect the light through a system of lenses, into a darkened space where the projection of the exterior landscape was visible on a circular white table.

Read more on: http://socks-studio.com/2020/12/27/from-vision-to-knowledge-patrick-geddes-outlook-tower-1892/

Architecture as a Mnemonic Device: Robert Fludd’s Temple of Music

http://socks-studio.com/2020/11/01/architecture-as-a-mnemonic-device-robert-fludds-temple-of-music/

English physician and polymath Robert Fludd (1574-1637) had interests spanning from scientific knowledge to occult disciplines. His approach to sciences, in accordance with Hermetic principles, would follow the belief that a human microcosm corresponds to a universal macrocosm. Fludd’s theories cover mathematics, music, architecture, astronomy, philosophy, engineering in an attempt to define the connections among different realms of human logic. A huge number of engravings punctuate his books and lavishly illustrate the author’s complex theories, providing visual guidance through intersecting ideas. In this sense, Fludd follows occultism’s belief that thought, words and pictures would be connected by magical relationships.

http://socks-studio.com/2020/11/01/architecture-as-a-mnemonic-device-robert-fludds-temple-of-music/

"Its unfinished decoration in danger of slipping beneath the eye to hurtle wildly across the crumbling walls." The Cage, a Visual-Novel, by Martin Vaughn-James (1975)

http://socks-studio.com/2020/07/12/the-cage-a-visual-novel-by-martin-vaughn-james-1975/

Wonderful online archive UbuWeb, created in 1996 by conceptual artist, poet and theorist Kenneth Goldsmith (author of many books among which Duchamps is my lawyer), is a goldmine for avant-garde documents (experimental literature, film, and music). (...)

Some days ago, in one of our regular derives in this universe, we stumbled upon the work of painter and comic artist Martin Vaughn-James (1943-2009), to whose publications UbuWeb dedicated a run of online reeditions. (...)

The last of these four books, entitled The Cage, is probably the most critically acclaimed. Sporting short descriptive texts upon or below single-page illustrations or spread panels, the self-described “visual novel” is devoid of any human presence and stages an imaginary journey across empty rooms and post-apocalyptic scenarios infused with feelings of loneliness and decay.

Read more: http://socks-studio.com/2020/07/12/the-cage-a-visual-novel-by-martin-vaughn-james-1975/

Ryan Carl, Grid Forms Studies 02 (2020)

http://socks-studio.com/2020/04/18/ryan-carl-grid-forms-studies-02-2020/

After Circle Study 07, the second work by designer Ryan Carl that we feature here on Socks is a sequence of geometric operations on grid forms (superpositions, displacements, rotations, multiplications).

#Grid

Ryan Carl, Circle Study 07 (2020)

http://socks-studio.com/2020/04/15/ryan-carl-circle-study-07-2020/

The work of Ryan Carl is “rooted in radical simplicity”. A designer who studied religion and philosophy before opening his practice, Ryan Carl delves some of his time to “self-initiated art and design projects” based in “language and typography or simple geometric forms to explore concepts of identity and being, hope and togetherness”.

http://socks-studio.com/2020/04/15/ryan-carl-circle-study-07-2020/

The Architecture of the Workspace: Axonometric Drawings by Peter Judson

http://socks-studio.com/2020/04/10/the-architecture-of-the-workspace-axonometric-drawings-by-peter-judson/

Peter Judson is a British designer and illustrator. For his project “Hyundai card”, commissioned by design studio Made Thought, he developed a series of white axonometric drawings on black background, carefully describing portions of cities and workspaces all over the world. When the images are seen from far they resemble pure abstract compositions and only reveal their urban nature on a more attentive analysis.

Read more: http://socks-studio.com/2020/04/10/the-architecture-of-the-workspace-axonometric-drawings-by-peter-judson/

The Theatre as Machine: Joseph Furttenbach Stage Design

http://socks-studio.com/2020/03/08/the-theatre-as-machine-joseph-furttenbach-stage-design/

Joseph Furttenbach (1591 – 1667) was a German architect, engineer and architecture theorist who lived in Italy from 1610 to 1620. During his stay there, he completed an apprenticeship as a merchant and grew an interest in military architecture and in theatre and stage design. At the time, Italy was a laboratory for the development of early modern European theatre with a growing interest in optical devices, experimentation in new stage devices and technological inventions applied to theatrical architecture.

Read more: http://socks-studio.com/2020/03/08/the-theatre-as-machine-joseph-furttenbach-stage-design/

Axonometric Realism: “Hortus Conclusus” by Beate Gütschow (2019)

http://socks-studio.com/2020/02/23/axonometric-realism-hortus-conclusus-by-beate-gutschow-2019/

Beate Gütschow is a German contemporary artist who works primarily through photography. In her work, she analyses the complex and ever-changing relationships between perception, representation and reality.

For her series HC, Hortus Conclusus, she delved into the subject of “Enclosed gardens,” a recurring iconographic motif in Renaissance and Medieval paintings which would depict an idyllic scene contained in the space of a fenced or walled green space inaccessible to an exterior public.

Read more: http://socks-studio.com/2020/02/23/axonometric-realism-hortus-conclusus-by-beate-gutschow-2019/

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